In Which There Is Self-Mortification via Custard
Last year, the third-year home economics class subjected the staff room to coffee jelly and confronted me with the horrible fact that there is, in fact, a java-related foodstuff that I find unpalatable (and this is coming from someone who has, on more than one occasion, eaten coffee grounds). This year's kids passed on the jelly and went directly to custard.
I'm tempted to put my microphone against my gut and let it offer a succinct review of their culinary efforts. I won't, but by God I'm tempted.
It says something about a class's collective cooking prowess when the teacher next to you, after a quick examination of the custard tray in the staff room, nudges you and whispers, "Dangerous." If this is followed by one of those delightful intervals in which everyone appears to focusing his or her strength of will to get someone else to step up and take one for the team, well, it's just not going to end well. Especially when you're not the one to realize that picking first means you can pick the cup with the smallest custard payload.
Surprisingly, the custard part was okay. Not great, mind, but not coffee jelly. The problem kicked in if you let your spoon delve all the way to the bottom, where, according to rumor, there was supposed to be caramel. What actually lurked there was the bastard child of super glue and rubber cement (OTP!), which caught my spoon like some kind of vile spoonpaper that Dish spent years lobbying to have banned.
Some things are unambiguously not caramel. This was one of them. Let me lay it out for you.
Imagine caramel. Now imagine it unsweetened and, impossibly, only partially caramelized. Now imagine if chimpanzees were pirates and spoke a giddy mixture of 19th century French argot and Cockney rhyming slang, and maybe there's a surly gorilla or something as the ship's cook, and the captain is a mentally unstable spider monkey named Escargone. I'm so pitching this to Animal Planet.
Anyway, the custard part lost some of its "okay" status once it had been dribbled with the dark underbelly of not-caramel. I pressed bravely onward, ate as much as was not irredeemable, and had a long, dark cup of coffee back at my desk.
Sometimes I wonder what horrible sins junior high school teachers are trying to atone for, and whether I can save up any extra penance against the day I finally crack Shouma and Tomohide's heads together.
I'm tempted to put my microphone against my gut and let it offer a succinct review of their culinary efforts. I won't, but by God I'm tempted.
It says something about a class's collective cooking prowess when the teacher next to you, after a quick examination of the custard tray in the staff room, nudges you and whispers, "Dangerous." If this is followed by one of those delightful intervals in which everyone appears to focusing his or her strength of will to get someone else to step up and take one for the team, well, it's just not going to end well. Especially when you're not the one to realize that picking first means you can pick the cup with the smallest custard payload.
Surprisingly, the custard part was okay. Not great, mind, but not coffee jelly. The problem kicked in if you let your spoon delve all the way to the bottom, where, according to rumor, there was supposed to be caramel. What actually lurked there was the bastard child of super glue and rubber cement (OTP!), which caught my spoon like some kind of vile spoonpaper that Dish spent years lobbying to have banned.
Some things are unambiguously not caramel. This was one of them. Let me lay it out for you.
Imagine caramel. Now imagine it unsweetened and, impossibly, only partially caramelized. Now imagine if chimpanzees were pirates and spoke a giddy mixture of 19th century French argot and Cockney rhyming slang, and maybe there's a surly gorilla or something as the ship's cook, and the captain is a mentally unstable spider monkey named Escargone. I'm so pitching this to Animal Planet.
Anyway, the custard part lost some of its "okay" status once it had been dribbled with the dark underbelly of not-caramel. I pressed bravely onward, ate as much as was not irredeemable, and had a long, dark cup of coffee back at my desk.
Sometimes I wonder what horrible sins junior high school teachers are trying to atone for, and whether I can save up any extra penance against the day I finally crack Shouma and Tomohide's heads together.