Eating Under The Influence The Whelk Way! Enjoyed yourself too much? Played all your Dory Previn albums? Hungry, but unable to get it together to order a pizza? Have a bunch of leftover scraps crowding up the cupboards? Let me help you.

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First, you're gonna need some spaghetti, a good chunk of cheddar cheese, and some flour and butter. Got that? Anything else, and I mean anything else, can go in.

Set your oven to 375. Start chopping your veggies. Chop things into amusing shapes while your BF (or BF equivalent) puts a huge pot of water on to boil.

Fry up some mushrooms and onion in garlic while humming to yourself. Get your or BF equivalent to scavenge the icebox for spare peas, day-old peppers, cooked chicken cutlets, broccoli heads, and anything else you can think of. Chop together while making serious ninja faces at the food. If it needs to be cooked, cook it in the same garlic-oil-and oh shit, I put in Ginger- mix you have out. Any uncooked meat needs to be cooked in this too. Surely you have some hamburger in the deep reaches of the freezer's gloom?


Water should be boiling by now, throw in the Spaghetti and let simmer.

Grease up a big Pyrex tray or bowl and dump all the random meat and veggies in. Stir with VIGOR. Is the spaghetti done? No? Well then open another bottle of wine while your BF shreds the cheese while you melt up like half stick of butter into the pan you cooked the mushrooms and onion in. Add the flour. Stir til brown. Then *slowly!* add in about a cup of milk, letting it evaporate and turn into a sauce. Mash up any lumps you find and keep stirring and slowly adding the milk under a low-med heat.

Congrats! You made a roux! Put on a good album, something from the 70s with a good baseline. Keep stirring that roux! add in the shredded cheese til it melts.

The pasta should be done by now, drain it and have your or BF equivalent mix it into the Pyrex tray. Have another glass of wine.

Add a lot of pepper to the cheese (you're still stirring, right?) and then salt and then some paprika and cayenne peeper and ..what the hell, onion powder. Add even more pepper. Keep tasting it while dancing along to the funk. (You really should have put on some funk music).

Keep tasting, when it's cheesy but pepper-y and slightly hot, dump that bad boy all over the pasta-veggie-meat-whatever mix. Mix it up like mad. You can put some Parmesan cheese on top, but we didn't have any, so I coated the top with Poppy seeds cause we have, what 3 bottles? Why did we have such a primal desire for Poppy Seeds? What could this mean? No matter. This is not the time for reflection. This is the time for ACTION.

Dump the whole mixture into the oven. Set the timer for an hour. Go play CIV 4 against your BF equivalent. Listen to Dusty In Memphis. Remember to pass.

After an hour, check the dish. It should be super crispy on top and gooey in the middle. It can take up to 2 hours, depending. Over-done is better than under, but don't let it burn.

Remove. Serve in pie wedges. You won't need much.

And now you have lunch tomorrow! Celebrate with another bottle of wine and an episode of the Simpsons.