A lot of scavenging occurs in the kitchen I share with D and M, my lovely drunken flatmates. As we sort of all buy our own food, but sort of all share it as well, the exact contents of our fridge at any given moment are impossible to predict. There are unexpected fallows, when something that you had planned on eating at a later date gets consumed while you are innocently at work or school. There are moments of psychic and synchronized bounty when all three of us buy butter, or milk, or kumquats and can then wade in our excesses for days to come. There are times when we seem to have nothing except jam and one thousand tubes of tomato paste and there are moments when it looks like we have pillaged every shop in the neighbourhood and managed to just about fit it all in. 
This shambolic system also produces unexpected food gifts to improve your cooking.
Sunday morning I really wanted to make brunch. I had a clutch of roasted fingerling potatoes sitting in the fridge and figured they could do with some frying. So I chopped half a large onion and got those bits slowly cooking in a pan. Then the potatoes were sliced and added into the mix. This is where I started to steal things: the onions and potatoes were seasoned with some of D's cajun spice (a mystery mixture he is very fond of - with good reason. I would guess cayenne pepper and thyme make appearances) and a bit of our endless tomato paste. A hunk of chorizo that I think belonged to M was diced as was some of D's roast chicken. Finally, the last of a red pepper was put out of its languishing misery and thrown in as well. Oh, and since I roasted the potato with unpeeled cloves of garlic, some of those were added, too. These spuds were served with scrambled eggs with spring onion and the few slices of toast that I didn't manage to burn (yes the complexities of UK grills are still beyond me. yes, maybe the door of the grill should have been open. yes, you know everything.) The moral of the story is that a meal that would have been fine (fried garlicky potatoes with eggs and toast) was made even better by the things I stole, especially the meat things. Except that as I fed the meal to D and his lady, it doesn't really count as stealing at all and my parents can relax in the knowledge that they didn't raise a douchebag.
After breakfast, a small amount of the potatoes were left over, and I snuck them to the back of the fridge and prayed to the Fridge God that they would still be there a couple of days later when I was feeling like a snack. Sometimes if you pray really hard, your prayers are answered. Even prayers about leftover potatoes. The Fridge God can be benevolent. But what to have with this carb-on-carb snack? Well, someone has a couple of tubs of garlic mayo in our fridge. I don't know who - I'm guessing M - but it looked like the perfect foil for the spuds. So I stole some, smeared it on the oatcake and then topped it with the potatoes. J had one too, but he put sriracha on his because he is a manly man. And once again, the moral of our story taught us that something that would have been fine got a whole lot better through stealing.
(Although J and I tried to photograph this oatcake nesting in his hand, ready to be consumed, the pictures looked crappy. After all, we only have four art degrees between us. Instead it got snapped on a member of M's new tea set. Doesn't it look cute? Haven't you always wanted a tea set like that?)
your use of initials seriously makes the whole thing way more erotic and mysterious. you know, like, "the story of (O)atcakes". in all seriousness, this was my fave so far. i loved it.
Posted by: daccia | December 03, 2007 at 12:39 AM