What’s for supper? Cap’n says it's glop!
By Burton W. Cole
I enjoy cooking. I’m good at baking, boiling or browning good eats.
But I came home from my last grocery shopping trip with a gallon of milk, one box of Golden Grahams and one box of Reese’s Puffs. And a tube of peel-and-eat cookie dough for dessert.
That’s the thing about being a widower in the kitchen — there’s no point cooking for one, not when you’ve got a buddy named Cap’n Crunch ready to sail on a sea of milk.
Occasionally, I’ll get ambitious and fry eggs. I prefer sunny side up — “dippy eggs,” Terry used to call them. But I don’t dip. I love letting that yellow juice flow all over the whites of their eggs. True, eating runny yolks with a fork gets tricky. On egg nights, my snow-white beard gets dyed yolk yellow, sometimes with spatterings of red salsa and orange cheese highlights, depending on how creative I’m feeling with the frying pan.
Rule No. 1 of Cooking Club: The messier something is to eat, the better it tastes.
Mostly these days, I’m back to cereal and milk, the nectar of Saturday mornings of my youth. Cue up Bugs Bunny on my DVD player and supper is served to perfection.
When she was alive, Terry insisted on doing the bulk of the cooking. She developed a nervous tic whenever I messed around in HER kitchen because she knew I didn’t particularly care for recipes.
Terry tried to stay out of sight in the living room, but the more the cupboard doors creaked, the more jar lids popped, the more the can opener ground, the more box tops and seasoning packets tore, the more agitated her nerves became.
I suppose it didn’t help matters when I hollered, “Where do we keep the centipede toes?” and “Do we have any more moose nostrils?” Cooking should be funny.
“The word is fun, not funny,” she’d snap. “And those cracks were NOT funny.”
My specialty is a dish I call glop. Whenever Terry came home late and left me to do the cooking, I’d scout around for whatever in the fridge or pantry looked like it might mix well with whatever else I rustled.
Step one, boil a pot of rice or noodles or other suitable base. Step two, brown crumbled burger or chicken chunks or such. Maybe a can of tuna fish. Who knows? Step three, scavenger hunt: Stir in whatever vegetables are on hand, canned or frozen (because fresh requires work, such as chopping or peeling); mix in some kind of sauce or soup or salsa; check the shelves and for anything else that looks good; sprinkle in random spices; and voila, you’ve got glop!
As long as I could cook glop without anyone watching, it garnered rave reviews between large and enthusiastic gulps. But if a spouse, kid, dog or random stranger saw me concocting glop, they pretended (I think) to be nauseated.
“What’s that thing called adobo you’re sprinkling in there? Isn’t adobo bricks? You’re lacing that, that, whatever it is, with powered bricks?”
“No, no, bricks are adobe.”
“Adobe? That’s computer software. You’re stirring pulverized thumb drives into that gunk? Or maybe powdered thumbs. Whatever it is, I ain’t eatin’ it.”
After Terry passed and I moved into my little apartment, I filled my new shelves with all the fixins for a half-dozen varieties of glop.
But with no one to aggravate with my culinary skills, there’s no point. Lucky Charms are suitable for supper. (OK, maybe there’s a point or two about nutritional value, but the Lucky Charms box says it’s gluten free with no saturated fats. It’s gotta be healthy, right?)
Sometimes, a worried church lady will bless me with a covered dish or invite me over for a meal with her family, and I’ll save the Honey Nut Cheerios for another day.
I’m certainly capable of cooking, but…
If you want to come over sometime, I can whip up another delicious round of glop. But if you drop by early to watch, I’m getting out the cereal bowls instead. My co-chef Tony the Tiger says that would be gr-r-reat!
Cole would write a cookbook, but who follows recipes? Seek seasoning advice from him at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.