food

Food is an issue when you're on your own for a month in a foreign city. After five days of eating PBJs and cereal, I had had enough. At about 8 pm, my roommate for the month, Haley, and I start complaining. By the time we get off work and get home, it is 6:30 or 7 and we are exhausted. There is nothing to do in the room cause we don't have movies or good books or food. or friends, for that matter. So....we go to Safeway. Great solution, huh. There Haley gets a Safeway card, like I got a few days ago. Now we feel like adults. At Safeway I see pasta on sale. Pasta....real food....my stomach, containing only a slice of bread with peanut butter, likes the idea of pasta. Haley and I decide to have Pasta Night. By the time we get back to the room it is pushing 9.

Pasta is cooking on the stove. Sauce is warming up in the microwave. Haley makes cheesebread, and we prepare to put it in the oven on the cookie tray I providentially decided to pack. Now. We have to light the oven. I, with all my overseas-ghetto-oven experience, start by lighting a match, turning the knob, and holding the match by the place that looks like it should light up. Nothing happens, and I quickly turn the knob back for fear of gassing us out. Haley calls her dad. We try several more combinations of knob-turning, match-lighting, peering into the dark and now somewhat gas-filled oven....no luck. I call my mom, who gives several insightful but ultimately fruitless suggestions. We ask our neighbor, an OSU student interning with Sen. Coburn, if he knows what to do. Surprise--he hasn't used his oven. Haley keeps talking with her dad. Finally the neighbor figures it out. You just turn the knob and it eventually heats up on its own. Brilliant. The cheese bread goes in.

Five minutes later, it comes out, slightly burned on top. The smoke alarm kicks into gear and starts wailing.

pasta: $.67
spaghetti sauce: $2
cheese bread ingredients: I dunno, some amt of money
seeing Haley standing on the table, waving a little dish rag below the smoke detector, to make it shut up: priceless

aah, the small things in life. We didn't have to evacuate the building, as Haley is a master smoke alarm deactivator. The pasta and bread was very good. But now it is nearly bedtime.