Here's What's Cookin

[spatch]

According to Mom, who squirrelled this away in that photo album she made for me, I wrote this recipe when I was 5 or 6. Probably a little bit after the sympathy card/puppet show thing, as in this one I was able to make my letters nice and uniform and small.

MELTED CHEESE BALLS

1 teaspoon vanilla
3 slices cheese
1 stick of butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour

heat oven 350°
Bake so cheese melts.

Serves 4+1

I do not recommend you try this recipe at home. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never tried this recipe at home.

However, as a Lil' Chef, I was notorious for making devilled eggs with peanut butter instead of mayonnaise. I liked them so much that even when Mom made devilled eggs as part of dinner, she'd make sure to include two or three mit peanut butter just for me. You may laugh, or recoil in gastronomic fear, but I swear to you they tasted pretty good. Hell, I'd do it again right this instant if only I had some hard-boiled eggs, mustard, and peanut butter.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

That's brilliant. Were you a very theoretical thinker as a child? I have to wonder if you were trying to reverse-engineer something that you had eaten, like fried cheese nuggets or cheese-flavoured corn puffs.

It would also fit in very well at the Gallery of Regrettable Food.

[spatch]

I don't know if it was reverse-engineering or an example of how I could quickly understand the gist of things, but not why it was so. I tended to do that a lot.

Quick geek example: I learned the BASIC programming language when I was 7. My first program, written after a cursory (ha ha ha) look through the programming guide without reading anything else, went like this:

10 PRINT "HELLO I AM THE AMAZING COMPUTER"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "NOW IT IS TIME TO DO A MAGIC TRICK"
40 INPUT A$

I didn't understand what the INPUT A$ command did at the time (it prompts the user to enter something in) but since all the beginner's programs I saw usually had an INPUT command after a PRINT command, I dutifully followed suit. Sure, I quickly figured it out after running the program, but that memory has stayed with me.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah! There are people at work who do that. I learned so many procedures from people who had learned them from someone else, who had learned them from someone else. When I started asking why certain steps were done, nobody was quite sure. It's just the way it was always done, and it's always worked. I call it cargo-cult programming. :)

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

And in retrospect, your version was smarter than what we have here, because you were able to observe the effect and realise it wasn't what you wanted. Nobody does that around here unless it's really bad. ;)