One great commonality among nearly every Peace Corps Volunteer’s experience is the daunting and often downright dangerous task of preparing three meals a day without the aid of microwaves, mothers or McDonald’s. For those of us fresh off cafeteria meal-plans and Wal-Mart brand frozen dinners, a diverse and healthy diet just isn’t in the cards.
In college my idea of a home-cooked meal was a frozen chicken breast turned from solid to succulent on a George Foreman Grill, a steam-in-the-microwave bag of broccoli and a Coors Light, chilled from scratch. These days I am lucky if my three daily meals turn out to be three different foods. I have little doubt that my efforts to teach myself to cook would be endearing and frankly adorable were anyone around to witness these daily debacles, help me laugh them off and promptly take me out to dinner. As it stands I frequently end up eating unrecognizable blobs of things which were supposed to have been quite different and very, well, recognizable blobs of things. And no one laughs.
I do continue to work on it and in that vein have just bought a big bag of fresh garlic cloves and stashed it in my refrigerator, the only place truly safe from ants. I hear garlic is good for the immune system, and I don’t want my ants to be any harder to kill. Now everything in my fridge, including cereal and peanut butter, tastes just a little bit like garlic. I don’t mind - just owning real garlic makes me feel like I can actually cook. I like this feeling because it helps to combat all the things that make me feel like I can’t cook, like when I try to cook.
The latest addition to my growing culinary repertoire is “Fancy Garlic Bread.” It is important to note that my dishes are always easier to name than to prepare and often easier to prepare than to eat. For this dish you just mash up some garlic, mash up some butter, mash the two together and mash it on some bread. As this recipe requires only three ingredients and a spoon, there is little room for error or injury, exactly the kind of recipe I prefer. Yesterday I had this dish for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For dinner, to spice things up a bit, I dipped the bread in a can of spaghetti sauce. This is not a joke.
Other menu items include “Fancy Grapefruit Squares,” which is a grapefruit cut into square-shaped pieces (that is where things get “fancy”) and “Fancy Ketcharoni and Cheese,” which is regular macaroni and cheese plus ketchup (the ketchup, as you may have guessed, is what lends the dish its “fanciness.”) I had formerly been referring to these foods as “Special Garlic Bread,” “Special Grapefruit Squares” and “Special Ketcharoni and Cheese,” but due to strict Peace Corps anti-drug policies I decided to make a few modifications to avoid confusion and/or being sent back to the U.S.
