SS visited this weekend, and, hoping to counteract the heaping amounts of awfulness we ingested at IHOP (or, I-Poh those of us who may be dyslexic), we went to the grocery story Sunday night to stock up on semi- to mostly healthy things to make for dinner. We settled on the ingredients for some grilled chicken wraps and I decided that I wanted to try to recreate the roasted grapes I had at Lesley’s house a couple of months ago.
I can’t cook, but I sure as hell can smother things in oil and sprinkle salt on them. So I figured it would be an easy enough contribution to the menu.
And look how pretty:
Except, when I went to put the pan into the oven, I realized that the pre-heating it should have been doing while I was preparing the grapes, uh, hadn’t been done. And also, was that the smell of gas?
So it turns out the pilot light was out, and there I was with a pan of slimy, salty grapes and no idea how to relight the pilot light (I have seen my building manager do it before, and it involves a complicated series of Catholic prayers and handstands). So we tried putting a grape on the grill to see how it would act. It tasted like chicken and didn’t achieve the consistency that oven roasting would have. Our Hail Mary? The microwave.
Three guesses how that turned out.
We ate our wraps and watched a couple of movies — Dead Birds and Battle Royale. Dead Birds had some pretty creepy moments, many of which made us spew synchronized profanity. I’m not sure I could explain the story to anyone, though. Civil War. Bank robbers. Racism. Demons. Demons with bad teeth. Furniture upside down, tied to the ceiling, which freaked us out.
And Battle Royale is a great flick, which I saw for the first time back in college. I love how the preposterousness of the storyline (the Japanese government is so annoyed with uppity children that it kidnaps several of them and dumps them on an abandoned island and makes them play a game in which only one of them is allowed out alive, or else they’ll all be killed) is completely ignored and everyone’s like, “Got that? Good! Now get to killing!”
It’s beautiful in its simplicity, really.
This just may be a sign that you aren’t meant to cook. Glad you didn’t gas yourself. That would not have been cool.
Seriously. Although for a split second, there was something unmistakably and hilariously Plathian about me kneeling there with my head in the oven…
Good times, good times.
D’oh! You beat me to the Plath reference. Glad you guys didn’t blow yourselves up, ya crazy kids.
Sounds like you had a fabulous time!
Battle Royale is a great film! The “training video” when the kids are first awakened is hilarious in a typically Japanese way. Did you know there’s a sequel?
S and T, fabulous time indeed.
Mike, I had heard that but I think I also heard that it wasn’t very good. Would you recommend it? And the training film is really brilliantly funny.
You heard right about BR2, from what I know. It’s a more serious “kids revolt against the adults” movie and even less believable than the first, if that’s possible.