Skip’s Famous Spaghetti

For six months, do not lift a finger to purchase, prepare, serve or clean up after any meals served in the supposedly communal house where you rent a room, whose residents have informally but solemnly agreed to contribute to meals on an equal basis.

After allowing this time to pass, announce with great pomp and ceremony that you’re going to make dinner for everyone and that you’re going to take care of everything, so everyone can just sit back and relax and get ready for the dinner of their life. Yes, you are going to make: Your Famous Spaghetti.

Instructions:

Order one housemate to set the table, another to chop an onion, another to seed and chop a green pepper, another to mince two cloves of garlic and another to get you a beer.

Now then.

Boil water in a medium-sized pan.
Put dry spaghetti in pan.
Realize that pan is too small.
Remove spaghetti.
Pour water into another pan, bring back to boil.
Put damp spaghetti in pan.
Realize that pan is too small.
Break spaghetti into thirds or fourths to fit into pan.
In a frying pan, saute onion, pepper and garlic in two tablespoons of butter for three minutes.
Add 1 lb ground beef and saute for three more minutes.
Pour 1 large can tomato sauce over vegetable-beef mixture and stir.
Bring sauce to a violent boil, allowing it to splash all the hell over the place.
Order housemate to clean up splashes every few minutes, because in order to make Your Famous Spaghetti you need “a nice clean kitchen.”
Do not turn down heat under sauce.
Order other housemate to make garlic bread.
And get you another beer while he’s at it.
Add salt, pepper and pinch of oregano to sauce.

Hint: While cooking, brag constantly about how great your spaghetti is and how crappy all meals made by your male housemates always are. (It is a little-known fact that if you steadfastly aggrandize yourself while belittling every other man who crosses your path, every woman in the entire world will eventually fall in love with you.)

Drain spaghetti in sink using regular table fork to hold it back as water pours out.
Allow most of spaghetti to fall into sink.
Order housemate to rinse pepper seeds, onion skins, coffee grounds and whatnot off spaghetti and place on serving platter.
Pour sauce over spaghetti.
Serve with canned “grated parmesan.”
Enhance meal with constant reminders of how good it is.
Order housemates to clear table and wash dishes.

After serving, do not lift a finger in the kitchen for six months, reminding everyone daily about how you “just made Your Famous Spaghetti.”

Pete’s E-Z-Pizza

Great for parties!
Line a large, flat, buttered baking tray with slices of white bread.
Hint: For an extra-fancy pizza, cut off the crusts!
Using a spatula, spread a thick layer of ketchup over bread.
Now add your favorite toppings: olives, sliced frankfurters, pickles, raisins, peanuts, etc.
Spray on generous layer of aerosol cheddar or Swiss cheese.
Bake in medium-hot oven for 15 minutes (optional).
Serve with plenty of beer, and…
Letare i buoni tempi rolare!

Tanya’s Chocolate Chip Cookies For You Guys

Before undertaking this recipe, conduct thorough census of housemates to make sure that everyone really likes chocolate chip cookies, because you “never eat them — they’re for you guys.”

Ingredients:
3 sticks butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 lb chocolate chips
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp shortening

Grease large baking sheet with shortening.
Preheat oven to 420 degrees.
Cream butter into sugar.
Taste.
Blend butter-sugar mixture, flour, slightly beaten eggs, vanilla extract, salt and chocolate chips in large bowl.
Taste.
Taste.
Form small uniform mounds of dough, depending on desired size of cookies, and arrange half of them on baking sheet.
Arrange other half in your mouth.
Place sheet on middle shelf of oven and bake for 15 min.
Allow cookies to cool for half an hour, the last 20 minutes of which take place in your stomach.

Holly’s Holy Health Roll

Ingredients:
No beef (mad cow disease)
No chicken (cruel)
No lamb (cute)
No pork (gross)
No fish (pollution)
No seafood (hepatitis)
No eggs (salmonella)
No corn or soybeans (GMOs)
No onions or garlic (halitosis)
No legumes (flatulence)
No oil (fattening)
No sugar (fattening)
No dairy (fattening)
No salt (not sure why)

Chop other ingredients finely and mix in large bowl.
Complain loudly and at length about how nobody ever eats anything healthy around this stupid place.
Blend mixture well and bind with 3 tbsp flour.
Chain-smoke throughout this process, alternating tobacco with marijuana as desired.
A little ash in mixture is OK.
In fact good.
Probably.
Complain loudly and at length about quality of cooking utensils around this stupid place.
Shape mixture into a cylinder, place on no-stick lousy baking tin and place on middle shelf of piece-of-crap oven.
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, or five cigarettes.
During baking, complain loudly and at length about dimness of worthless lightbulb in piece-of-crap oven, your goddamn backache, how you can’t shake this freakin’ cold and how that jerk Steve never calls you any more.
(It is a little-known fact that any problem will eventually solve itself somehow if you can just manage to complain about it enough.)
Remove roll from oven.
Cut into slices and serve, carping stentoriously and incessantly about people who eat “carrion,” “bait” and “roadkill.”

Hint: This dish seems to come out better if you maintain a grim, determined look on your face at all times. Not just while preparing it — at all times.

Josh’s Thanksgiving turkey

Do not consult housemates.
Invite every single person you know to your house for Thanksgiving dinner.
Late in afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, go to only open convenience store and buy cheapest frozen turkey they have left, regardless of its weight or expected number of guests.
Thaw turkey by placing it on back seat of car for drive home.
Place turkey in large, deep roasting pan.
Stare at turkey for 30 minutes or until house is full of guests.
Call mother.
Follow mother’s instructions, more or less, to stuff, truss and roast turkey, basting regularly.

To baste:
Remove turkey from oven using worn, thin dishrag as a potholder, ignoring thick, heatproof oven mitts hanging on wall next to oven.
Sustain first-degree burns to fingers while placing pan on stovetop.
Baste turkey with teaspoon and return it to oven.
Repeat without variation every fifteen minutes throughout cooking process.
Towards midnight, give up on deciding whether turkey is done or not.

To carve:
Hack at turkey with a succession of random knives of varying lengths and degrees of sharpness until it looks as though it has been run over with a lawn mower.
Serve to anyone still present and conscious.

Frank’s “Tumor or Trichinosis” lemon pork chops

Ingredients:
8 pork chops
1 qt tequila
4 tbsp butter
6 oz Triple Sec
2 lemons
6 limes
Salt
Dash of bitters
Salt

Slice through rim of fat around pork chops in several places so they will not curl up while cooking.
Juice limes.
Pound pork chops with meat hammer to tenderize them.
Mix tequila, lime juice, Triple Sec and bitters in large pitcher and top off with crushed ice.
Arrange pork chops in large buttered baking pan.
Add salt to rim of glass and have a margarita to check proportions.
Adjust proportions.
Cut one lemon into thin slices so you have one slice for each pork chop.
Have margarita to recheck proportions.
Juice other lemon.
Have margarita and then serve margaritas to guests.
And self.
Preheat oven to any setting between 280 degrees and “Clean.”
Drink remaining margaritas straight from pitcher.
Find pork chops.
Slosh with lemon juice.
Sprinkle with herbs and spices chosen and dosed at random.
Drop handful of lemon slices on top of pork chops and toss pan in oven.
Stand at sink for 15 to 55 minutes, swaying slowly left to right.
Place burning hot pan containing way undercooked or way overcooked pork chops directly on wooden table.
Leave table and allow guests to serve selves.
Stagger around backyard hurling for five hours, or until guests are gone.

Karen’s “Tex-Schmex” fajitas

Grill thin slices of chicken breast, strip sirloin and chorizo.
Get timing just right so that meat is tender and juicy.
Season with improvised mixture of spices that brings out full flavor so that eating this dish is like tasting in color after a lifetime of tasting in black and white.
Garnish with finely shredded romaine lettuce, chopped jalapeno peppers, grated sharp Monterey Jack cheese, dollops of sour cream and imported hot sauce (optional).
Serve with soft, fragrant steamed flour tortillas.

Serving suggestion: Prepare this dish and a seemingly unending stream of equally delectable recipes for housemates several nights a week, remaining at all times witty, intelligent, cheerful and charming, with strong undercurrent of smoldering sexiness, until all men in house are so in love with you they have blind staggers. Repeat for six months while remaining single. Then meet homeless, out-of-work rock drummer at supermarket and leave town with him next day. Never be heard from again.