Cooking in the Apocalypse

It’s difficult to come home, scrape the dripping eyeball off of your shoes and head into the kitchen to make dinner. For the first couple weeks in the apocalypse, I completely lost my appetite. I lost a lot of weight, and I had cereal for almost every meal. It was a safe food along with fruit and vegetables. Meat seemed really distasteful. As time went on, all of the fresh food was gone, and I couldn’t be as picky. I didn’t think I’d ever eat so much Chef Boyardee in my life. One of the best rules Rok and I have come up with is don’t eat anywhere that you’re likely to see human brains. Which basically means we eat inside our house away from the laundry room and the windows. Also we use a lot of soap to wash our hands before cooking. Rok has made a few “Get back in the kitchen” jokes. So he’s had some practice cooking for himself. I had honestly never cooked very much before the apocalypse. I ate a lot of precooked things and microwave food. More cereal. I miss cereal. Eating it dry just isn’t the same. I have a lot of the soy milk that doesn’t expire, but I miss having cereal with Cow’s milk like three times a day. Anyway, Rok and I cook lots of canned stuff, and we have actually found ways to get creative with it. Those instant mashed potatoes have been a Godsend. We’ve put pretty much every type of Campbell’s chunky soup over them like in the commercials. Some of them were better than others. We eat a lot of frozen stuff, and we’ve made a lot of apocalypse bread too. The other day though we had a really great discovery. We were going through a house, and they had a victory garden in their backyard. Most everything was gone, but there was enough left for the victory chickens living in his yard. There’s nine of them, and they’re all really skinny. Rok emptied out the cooler we keep in the van and put a couple of them in. I found some large storage boxes in the house we were salvaging in. It was a hellish ride home, and there’s chicken poop in the back of the van, but we have nine relatively healthy chickens. I’m crossing my fingers for eggs. Rok and I let the chickens run around outside. We put up boards around the fence outside to make sure nobody gets over. We’re starting to build a chicken coop which means a trip to home depot. I really don’t like home depot. The last time I was there I saw a zombie that someone had taken a nail gun to; he had a line of screws up one side of his face. But the thought of fresh eggs is too delicious to be ignored. I keep thinking of all the different things we could make with them. Eggs over easy, scrambled, poached. The quality of the food we make could go up. I’ve never missed eggs so much before. I could kiss all those chickens in the back yard on their scrawny little beaks.

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