chips and rice with curry sauce and, on top, a potato fritter.
Add some pasta, and you'll approximate my college roommate's recipe for "starch in a bowl"
I saw one of my colleagues eating his lunch last year - a white roll filled with either pasta salad or macaroni cheese (can't remember which) and Monster Munch.
Our most useless flatmate as students was a chap called Nigel. Like all Nigels, any usefulness that he possessed was greatly obscured (mostly by marijuana smoke). Anyway, after two terms of him scrounging meals we'd had enough. To the kitchen, you wretch and COOK.
Now, we'd not set the bar high, haute cuisine in our humble student abode was 'cowboy', a concoction of baked beans with chunks of canned meat served with white bread slathered in stork marg; other times we'd go wild at the Diamond Frozen Food store, a testament to the fact that although the marvellous ingenuity of Clarence Birdseye enabled anything to be frozen, that didn't mean
everything should be frozen, but you've not lived until you've microwaved a frozen kebab (in a pita with cabbage and about to be magma-hot sauce).
Anyway, I digress. Nigel choosing wisely to avoid our collective simmering wrath was, at least, in the kitchen. Ah, finally, we thought, he's going to be useful. Many hours passed, stomachs rumbled and grumbled and finally, to a resounding chorus of borborygmi, dinner was served. And Nigel had outdone himself, truly he had. Our plates were piled high with steaming spaghetti. And rice. All over-cooked to point of blending into a pile of fuming starch. For sauce he'd tipped an entire bottle of ketchup over the top and tried it stir it in. Just in case that wasn't enough, our resident nurse commented that it 'looked like someone had menstruated over hot blancmange.' 'Not me', she helpfully added. It probably sounds better in French.
Also reminds me of the other year, at a meal in Malawi, and distracted by a conversation I absently held my plate towards the server. In the space of few moments of diverted attention I acquired two huge DD mounds of nshima, a epic mass of spaghetti writhing on top, a small dollop of something that might have been vaguely related to bolognese sauce, and half a chicken. My arm almost dislocated from the tremendous weight of stodge he'd loaded my plate with. I turned around to find a small local child looking up at me with a look that said
thanks for saving us some food, you shit.
