A Recipe for Disaster

You know how program changes were mad stressful this year? The Program Office had nearly all of the 21st-century technology at their disposal, and they still managed to mess up various schedules, potentially killing thousands of academic careers. That being said, if you were involved in this process, did you get hungry waiting for 90 minutes just to make a Talos request with a guidance counselor only to be denied within seconds of making the request? Or maybe you just wanted to have a quick little bite before you berated an administrator?

In any case, for (probably?) the first time in The Spectator’s history, we are proud to present the Program Office’s magnum opus: a finished product! The entirety of their manpower was spent grinding out this literal recipe for disaster, so we’re sure that this’ll be a hit.

Ingredients:

69 pounds of “chicken”

The first ingredient in our feast. Yeah, we know what you’re gonna say already. The good thing about using random meat is that it saves you so much time and guesswork! While your customers are starving in line for hours, waiting for their food to arrive, you can chill in the teacher’s lounge while snacking on some fresh Hudson River caviar and Joe’s Coffee. If your customers start complaining, open the fridge for two seconds and close it so it looks like you’re working.

Can’t tell if the meat’s still fresh? Who cares! Just cook it anyway and yeet yourself out of the building once the authorities start coming.

Don’t worry about the large amount of meat and other ingredients you’ll end up having to carry. It’ll be your last good, normal meal in a long time so you better stock yourself up so your parents don’t yell at you for being too skinny during dinner.

All the salt, thyme, basil, oregano, celery salt, black pepper, paprika, garlic salt, ground ginger, and white pepper in the kitchen

As the name implies, you’ll need 11 special herbs and spices™ to make this dish shine. One thing you can do is just stage a burglary on your own house! Who cares if you end up holding your family hostage so you can ransack the kitchen while they scream in confusion and possible agony? Grab any flavored thing you can and rub it in: salt packets, halal food, school lunch pretzels, etc. There’s no need to worry about running out. If you happen to run low on salt, don’t fret. You have the perfect salt mine right in front of you—your fellow students!

A bag of “breadcrumbs”

For this version of fried chicken, you won’t need to actually get this bread. Just ask the people coming out of the guidance office with their crumpled old schedules in hand if you can have them. If they got the change they wanted, score! Even if they didn’t, half the time they’ll be so frustrated by the administration that they’ll toss out their schedules in disgust anyway.

A quart of buttermilk

Usually the hardest ingredient to get for fried chicken. Don’t worry if there’s no buttermilk for sale at your local grocery store—all you need is a cafeteria fridge and a little chemistry. If you’re lucky, the fridge will already be stocked before you even check.

Five eggs

Also to fry stuff.

10 sticks of butter

To guarantee that you’ll get that GOODNESS known as a heart attack. If you pass out after eating this, tell your parents that it was the fault of “Talos’s incompetency” once you come to your senses.

Steps:

First, put all of your ingredients on the ground. It’s really easy: while you wait behind and (hopefully) in front of a bunch of other people, just casually put your food stuff on the ground to create a makeshift kitchen. Don’t worry if others stare at you in bewilderment—you are, after all, an artist! This’ll be radical new art, and you’ll certainly go down in history for being such a thinker.

Then, put the egg yolks into a bowl you just so happened to be carrying, along with some butter and whisk it. After that, add some buttermilk and butter and whisk it some more for that fried food goodness. Nothing says I want Dr. Steven O’Malley like making a fat-based solution for everyone to see!

After that, cut the chicken into pieces. We won’t really tell you how to cut it, as we don’t want to limit your creative freedom in cooking this dish. However, it’s gonna be much better if you cut your chicken just like how you’d cut Analog Electronics if you didn’t drop it—quickly and effortlessly.

Coat the chicken in that fat mixture and breadcrumbs. Standard fried chicken step here, and remember to season with some of the herbs and spices! This is super basic, like, more basic than transferring into Complex Calculus right after finishing Algebra II basic.

The penultimate step in creating this tasty morsel is to gather enough power to heat the chicken. As you will be walking 1,000,000 kilometers on Snake Way along with 3000 other kids to see a guidance counselor, there will not be a proper source of electricity. To get this dish to work, one must raise their hands into the air and shout, “People of Earth! Lend me your energy!” Then, just hope that everyone gives whatever is left in their mental fiber so you can throw the spirit bomb onto the questionably-edible piece of meat lying on the ground.

If that doesn’t work, channel your anger from not getting four free periods in a row and concentrate that energy to slap the chicken with 85,600 joules of caffeinated teen angst.

Lastly, season the fried layer! You’ve seasoned the meat, sure, but you should make it more enjoyable with exterior flavor. For that extra sharp kick, you can add some spices or grades from last year’s finals.

And that’s a wrap, folks, we just showed y’all how to save yourselves from starvation!