If Insomnia Was a Casserole.

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Full mind, empty stomach, and the AC's too high. Cue insomnia.

My little bouts of insomnia have never been predictable, but I like to pretend they are. Usually I require a good 9 hours of knocked-out sleep to function like a below-average human being, but sometimes (like now) my brain shouts, "Go swab decks, you lackey! No rest for you!"
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Tonight is a momentous night. I've changed my coping-mechanism. Instead of wallowing in my own sleepy frustration for three hours or more, I allowed myself a 45-minute test run. When those 45 minutes passed and I remained nowhere near the Sandman's residence, I leaped into action.

I flipped on the light (burned my eyes), made a large mug of malted milk (drool), turned on some Natasha Bedingfield  (her clean songs), and cooked up a 10-minute tuna casserole (my new favorite, quickest, and cleanest meal).
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In my past insomnia hours, I used to think, "What if I just got up and did something productive instead of trying to sleep and failing?"

Tonight is the night. It's a quarter past 1am and I plan to write like an inspired madwoman until my eyelids mutiny.

Cheers, mate.

Desperate Cooking

When approaching finals week, a student is faced with an unpleasant adjustment of eating habits. This means inhaling a bowl of cereal (whether fresh or left over from last night's studying) without allowing it to pass over the taste buds (takes too much time) in order to make it to class. After class is finished, homework screams bloody murder and you suddenly remember that paper that was due yesterday. Lunch is nothing more than a luxury forgotten around 3pm. Once home, dinner looms. Do you have time to pre-heat the stove and throw in a pot-pie? Or do you settle for cereal again?


Being a graduate student myself with my own kitchen, I've resisted some of these forced adjustments, but only to an extent. Tonight I find myself working on my take-home final that is due tomorrow (I thought I had an extra week. Lucky me). I realize it's 6pm and I'm trying to remember if I had lunch...or breakfast. Dirty dishes on my homework desk tell me "yes".

I open the fridge. Nothing looks appealing. I open the cupboard. Tomato sauce and some cream of chicken soup. Hm...what if I just made a casserole of sorts? That's usually just eggs, milk, and some sort of meat, right? And it's always good over rice.

Rice.

I fling open the cupboard above the stove. There's about a tablespoon of rice in a rolled up bag. That'll do. No where's the pot? Dirty? Hm.....I'll just mix the rice with the casserole and hope it cooks. I scoop the rice into a glass loaf-pan. Eggs come next. I only have one egg left in the carton and it expired exactly one month ago. Crack. Smells fine, so it joins the rice.




Chicken? I don't have time to cook it. Instead, I pull out a can of tuna--it's pretty much the same, right? Add a dash of milk (aka. whatever's left in the carton), a handful of grated cheese, and stir. Shouldn't there be vegetables? I pull out the half-used carton of mushrooms. They are black and squishy. Okay, no vegetables. The oven is preheated, I toss in half a can of cream-of-chicken and shove it in the oven.

Once it is done, it looks a bit like a loaf of tuna-bread with bits of uncooked rice in it. I scoop half onto my plate with the plastic, I-may-snap-in-half-any-day serving spoon. I try a cheesy forkful. It's absolutely scrumptrulescent (a college word for "exactly what my stomach didn't realize it needed").

Who would have thought?

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