Roman Ramelet

My issues with cooking are laziness, impatience, a lack of ingredients, and an unwillingness to purchase said ingredients or measure anything at all. Knowing this only because of my gender, I was given "A Man, A Can, A Plan, A Second Helping" by a future Iron Chef who may or may not have been mocking me.

The cookbook has pictures of each ingredient with plus signs in crayon, and each recipe has at least one canned food. It's a little deceiving because underneath the "ingredient + ingredient + ingredient" it reads in smaller print "also, a bunch of other shit." Nevertheless, it's a fool-proof cookbook with thick cardboard pages you might find in a Dr. Seuss book. No pop-ups, unfortunately.

I chose to try the "Roman Ramelet" recipe first because I had almost every single ingredient already. Again, the laziness. It's essentially an egg pizza, with noodles, mushrooms and a shitload of cheese. Ingredients:

Six eggs - Check.
Sun-dried tomato bits - Disgusting. They're out.
4 oz. sliced mushrooms - Make that a handful.
Pizza sauce - Check.
Oriental top ramen - Racist. Replace with mongoloid top ramen.
1/2 cup shredded provolone - Swap for 4-cheese Italian and whatever else was in the fridge.
2 tbsp. grated Parmesan - Make that a lot of good, heavy shakes.
1/4 tsp. salt - A little.
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper - Some.

Prep - Take sweatshirt off to ensure full range of motion. Turn TV on to ensure complete concentration. Drink beer to calm nerves and attack meal with confidence.

A simple recipe can always be screwed up by me. First of all, I discovered that half the carton of eggs that I had bought previously were either cracked open or stuck in the carton. I was going to be one short, so I found one that was only stuck, cracked it while still in the carton and let it drip into the bowl. Pure genius. Problem number two came when I dumped half the noodles into the sink while straining them with a plate.

Basically, the noodles are added to everything else and put into a pan, which is cooked on the stove for five minutes and then in the oven for another three or four minutes. Pizza sauce goes on top.

The bad - I thought the pizza sauce took over a little bit, and I'd only use half the can next time. Could use some sausage in addition to the mushrooms. Not sure what the noodles added. My biggest problem is with these god damn serving sizes. I finished three-quarters of it in one sitting, but the book says it makes eight servings! Why are all cookbooks so conservative?! Why must they make me feel like a pig?! Eight servings - try two you son of a bitch book!

The good - I think I've memorized how to make this and now can play around with it a little bit. And overall, this thing tasted really damn good. The texture was perfect, the flavor was good, um, I still say it's impossible to add too much Parmesan to anything ... I can't describe food. It's impossible. It's a fucking egg pizza, what's not to like?