Motel Room Gourmet: Desperation in a Coffee Pot
As you know well by now, we hardly stick to just the gourmet food items here at Endless Simmer. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you just don’t have much to work with.
And this my friends, is what a hungry ML feeds her boyfriend while road tripping. After 13 hours of driving, we found ourselves in a seedy motel in a sketch Missouri town with no food. Well, besides a can of Quaker oats and some tuna noodle casserole that had been sitting in the car all day….
Josh wanted to eat the tuna noodle casserole that was…well, lets just say not good anymore. I didn’t want to risk the other driver having food poisoning, so I pulled out a classic motel room trick and made some coffee pot oatmeal.
Yeah yeah, I know Alton Brown did this on his show, but I’ve been doing cool weird shit like this since I was a freshman in college (who hasn’t?) However, instead of actually making the oatmeal IN the coffee pot (we wanted coffee in the morning, and I wasn’t cleaning that damn pot), we poured hot water and oatmeal into tupperware containers and just let it cook right there. We had stolen bananas from the previous night’s hotel, which made a perfect accompaniment to our…gruel. Cooking? Hardly. But it fit the bill.
I know I’m not the only one. What have you prepared and eaten out of desperation?
When I was studying abroad in Russia my roommate and I were so desperate for spaghetti with red sauce we made spaghetti directly in our electric kettle, drained it using panty hose, then tossed it with cold tinned tomatoes. It was actually pretty good.
Ramen noodles, cooked in a tin can over an open fire. If I’d only had some malt liquor, it would have been the ultimate hobo meal.
I’m the type of person who would rather skip a meal than MacGyver one up, but I was impressed by a comedian on The Splendid Table who concocted a nice dinner (including rolls made from scratch!) in his hotel room. You can listen to the interview and find the link to his video here: http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/listings/091003/