The thing you forget, when you’ve been out of school for a while, is how annoying exams can be: it’s not even that you don’t know the material or that it’s so difficult, it’s just that they sneak up on you. And you worry about little things. Especially on take-homes, which seem like they ought to be easiest: even if the text sucks and you’ve skipped all semester so don’t have notes, Professor Google is available to rescue you. But the catch is (if you’re a bit OCD like me), that you spend a million years making sure every answer is perfect.
What’s this got to do with food, you ask? Well, studying brains need fuel, of course! And what with time constraints and general student poverty, studying brains need a certain kind of food: fast, cheap, and (preferably) healthy!
While working on a particularly unsavory take-home midterm (not a hard one at all – so easy and pointless, in fact, that it took Herculean effort to muster the will to do it), I decided I needed a slightly tastier lunch than the habitual bowl of Cheerios. I had a craving for my Haitian-not-grandmother’s red beans and rice, but she lives in DC and my time was short; real cooking was out of the question.
Surveying my kitchen for a suitable substitute, I found the following:
Leftover saffron rice;
Half of a Vidalia onion;
A can of red kidney beans (unsweetened);
Olive oil;
Hot sauce (I used Walkerswood Jonkanoo – another might be better for the less masochistic chef) ;
Garlic salt;
Turmeric.
And, of course, the lazy chef’s ultimate hero: a microwave.
I took a bunch of the rice, added about half the can of beans, and nuked that in a bowl for 2 minutes to get everything nice and warm (not very hot, though that’s up to you). Then, I chopped onion until I had about 2 handfuls worth. I added that, a couple tablespoons of olive oil, and a tablespoon or so of hot sauce to the rice and bean bowl.
I stirred, added garlic salt and black pepper till it seemed right, a bit of turmeric, and ate it.
I was soon much happier, and managed to finish that evil bloody midterm.