SPECIAL
COOKBOOK INSERT FOR The Basketcase,
1997
By Rob Northrup
You are cheap. You are lazy. You don't care. You are the future of America. Our parents and grandparents struggled to get this country where it is today! To make things easier for you. Well, it worked a little bit, but not entirely. You can't just sit on your ass all day and let robotic waiters from The Jetsons bring you food and drinks and change channels for you and scratch your ass. Sure, there's Caller ID and cybersex and a hundred times as many channels of the same bullshit as they've always had. But you can't count on living better than your parents, any more than you can count on getting by with only your Social Security after you retire.
So to have things easier now, you have to put forth the willpower to demand your easy lifestyle. In short, you have to ignore all that good stuff you could have if you really worked hard for it. We're not talking "better" lifestyle necessarily, just easier. Tied in with the ease of your way of life is your amount of leisure time. You want the shitty day-to-day time consuming events to take up less of your precious time. So you drive 25 over the limit to get to work. Cut out of work early if at all possible. Maybe even call in sick as often as possible. Shower two and three times a week at most. Avoid your time-consuming relatives. And when it comes to preparing your meals, that shit better be fast and easy. In fact, preparing your own meals would be out of the question if you could afford to eat out all the time. But the fast and easy lifestyle goes hand-in-hand with living cheaply, because you sure as hell don't make much money if your boss puts up with that kind of attitude from you.
Cheaper, Quicker, Easier. These are the three Universal Truths Buddha should have discovered. They are the Threefold Paths (quicker and easier than the Eightfold Paths) leading to a higher plane of existence. This manifesto will help you attain that blissful state of being known as Laze.
This cookbook should not be pulled out an hour before you're ready to eat, since taking time to plan goes completely against the spirit of the book. Watch TV, listen to the radio, poke your girlfriend, do whatever it is you do until the time you get hungry. At that moment, you may grab this book and start looking through your fridge and cupboards. Your blossoming hunger will motivate you to act fast.
A Test of Your Inherent Laze: If you have cupboards bursting full of soup and spaghetti-O's and Hamburger Helper, enough for you to make more than three of these recipes, then you may find it difficult to ever attain a true state of Laze. You clearly are too well stocked, have wasted too much time with planning, to instinctively understand the way of Laze. For our intended audience, those who have seen the way, you should barely be able to scrape together enough leftovers and odd cans from the back of your shelves to maybe make one of the recipes, and only that one if you use smashed-up chips in place of flour. So you make the only recipe you possibly can. If this describes you, then the way of Laze is obviously known to you already. You are too lazy to get groceries when you know you should, and the forces of Laze have rewarded you by giving you only one choice of recipe to follow. Already your life is made Cheaper, Quicker, Easier.
Any time spent thinking about what you should make or how to prepare it is time you could have better spent playing video games or poking your girlfriend! Or both at the same time! Using this cookbook will help you to waste less time. What the fuck are you still reading this introduction for?! Go fix yourself some Spam waffles and get back to that important Mary Tyler Moore rerun!! Further instruction would be a sinful waste of your time. If the Laze runs strong within you, then there is nothing more that you must be taught.
The rest of you, keep reading.
Since planning is sinful, you must solve all problems of food preparation through creativity. If you don't have the right ingredient, waste no time going to the store for more. Just throw in a substitute. If you don't have a stove and the recipe insists that this concoction cannot be microwaved (note that there is no such thing as a recipe that cannot be microwaved), then throw it in your toaster oven. Throw it in your two-slot toaster. Cook it on the heating element of your coffeemaker, for christsakes! Dishes all dirty? Grab a sturdy looking mug and nuke your giblets therein! If it blows up in the microwave, no big deal, you can pick out most of the ceramic shards. You just gotta chew slowly.
There are certain guidelines to improvising which may help those who struggle desperately to attain a state of Laze. Rice and noodles and ramen and potatoes and bread are all carbohydrates, so use them interchangably. Experiment with every kind of meat you can stand in every inappropriate dish. Stir fried lunchmeat, hot dog omelets, giblets and chicken hearts in your spaghetti, the possibilities are endless. As a general rule, if you don't want to buy ten pound family packs of wings and backs to get your chicken cheap, try those packages of hearts, livers, giblets and necks. Cheaper than food!
Run out of cheese slices to cover your pizza? Try cheese whiz. Try Nacho Cheese chip dip. Also good for basting chicken and tossing into stir fry when you have nothing better to add flavor. If you have a small amount of a required ingredient but need a filler, throw in some beans or any kind of bland carbohydrate, or perhaps a few fruits that were expiring in the back of your fridge. Plum pork sounds freaky, but you'll find it on plenty of fuckin high class menus.
Set no limits to what kind of ridiculous garbage you will use in any given recipe. If it doesn't cause allergic hives on you in its raw state, toss it in the pot. As Clint Eastwood said in Heartbreak Ridge, you must, "Adapt! Improvise! Overcome!" But then he also said, "More than two shakes constitutes pleasure," to the troops standing at the urinals. I'm not sure how that applies to this situation, but I've always wanted to work that line into a cookbook.
The topic of Bunny food has been the subject of much controversy among Lazers1. Fundamentalist Lazers question whether vegetarianism is sinful. To be political, to avoid meat when it may be more easily available than veggies, to bitch at others because they're killing Bambi and eating Elsie, all of these are potential wastes of time. How could a person be faithful to the Way of Laze and also to the Way of the Bunny? But the veg-heads argue that broccoli and spuds can be cheaper than meat, can usually be eaten raw instead of cooked (obvious time-saver), and since it may be more healthy to avoid red meats and fatty dairy products, veg-heads live longer and enjoy more leisure time in which to watch TV and poke their girlfriends many years longer.
Therefore, as a service to our loyal Lazer vegetarians, we offer these helpful hints: Use peas in place of meat. For every recipe in here.
That's it. What, you want more? Think of something yourself, I got shit to do!
Save all packets from fast food. Ketchup, mustard, barbecue, honey, tabs of butter, horseradish, salad dressing, anything. Even if you don't like the shit, you can dilute it, mix it in with enough other shit so you won't notice. Remember that ketchup plus horsey sauce equals cocktail sauce. (Right, like you could afford shrimp!) Need something a little zestier? Pour in pickle juice, olive juice, alcohol! Don't be afraid to use fruits, if only for a different taste. You know those fucked up cans of sliced peaches in heavy syrup at the dustiest, most remote corner of your cupboard, the cans that the Goodwill people refused to take because they already got eight tons of slice peaches in heavy syrup? Stir fry the fuckers. Good stuff. And don't gimme any whining about how it's weird to combine salami and peaches, or how these are the kinds of ingredients used to conjure Nyarlathotep and the other seventeen Elder Gods. Some microcephallic bastard put pineapple on ham and it worked. Some equal culinary genius mixed ketchup, sugar and vinegar to form sweet and sour sauce, and you'd eat that if you had to. (I still think that shit is sick, but there's a billion suckers around the world willing to pay big bucks for it, even though they know they'll be hungry again an hour later.)
Ultra Cheap/Extra Time & Effort: dried beans. Turnips, because nobody else eats them. Aluminum foil instead of cookie sheets of broiler pans. Also, see how much action you can get out of your toaster or the hot plate on your coffeemaker. Strategies for plan-ahead cheapskates: $25 toaster ovens. Dandelion greens. Naturally occuring plants and fungii. Smashed pork rinds or chips in place of flour. The recipe won't turn out how it's supposed to, but it'll taste eight times better!
HYPE FOR THIS BOOK: "If the procedure for making Hamburger Helper seems too elaborate, you need this book!!"
Footnote 1. Followers of the Way of Laze refer to themselves as "Lazers." Outsiders refer to them as "bums," or "slobs," or "street people," or "that cheap-ass, good for nuthin, got-damn son-in-law of yours."
Proceed to the Recipes.
