To supplement my nickel an hour writing fortune, I stock the dairy case and frozen food section at Free Food For Fat ^%#@! twice, or even thrice, weekly. Between the 6th and the 16th those who choose not to work for a living, as well as working folks who have bought some dope fiend’s baby’s EBT food allotment for 50 cents on the dollar, flood into grocery stores to purchase animal flesh, sugar, sodium and bleached flour in all of their mind boggling configurations; such as Sunny Delight, an artificial juice made of water, hexametaphosphate, high fructose corn syrup and flavored with ‘ester of wood resin,’ which sells for more than the actual orange juice in the case next to it.

Obesity is on the rise and business is booming. So, when I finally worked my way out from under that truck load of kidney stone precursors and trudged home, I lacked the energy for intensive food preparation. Yet I wished to eat like a king, or the kind of king with his crown on his teeth and his pants down around his knees who normally revels in such fare…

I grabbed the $1 4.3 ounce Nissan Souper Meal, a collection of sixty ingredients including six types of sodium. That 4.3 ounces might not sound like much but it is dry weight. The cup holds a quart of water. Arriving home with my soup, soup pot, and soup bowl, all in one neat package with a picture of the stalwart cow that was horribly butchered to give up her powdered sinews to provide this primate with 14% of his USRDA of protein, I took stock of possible additional ingredients much like the old time soldier with the soup stone recruiting dining partners, resulting in the following process:

1. Crush the dry noodles lest they wiggle from your mouth and snake into your keyboard while you are proof reading what that failed boxer wrote yesterday.

2. Break open the packet of dehydrated vegetables and spread them around, with no great hope that the corn will fail to pass completely through you unchanged.

3. Do not neglect to spread the packet of desiccated beast essence and sodium compounds.

4. Dip into your coat pocket and dig out that old 50-cent fire cracker bar sausage you forgot to eat on Christmas Eve when Betty showed up with the hot wings. Slice it just so. For some extra tang pour the vinegar/red #4 dye solution in.

5. Those six packets of ketchup that your roommate left on the coffee table last week after he wolfed down his sub can turn this into a proper minestrone.

6. Two cloves of garlic, sliced fresh, should go on top as they tend to sink.

7. A handful of those wasabi peas will go a long way toward clearing those traumatized nasal passages, if you, like me, had your nose smashed in two days ago.

8. A teaspoon of madras curry powder or sliced ginger.

9. A squirt of hot sauce

10. Fill the cardboard bucket to the rim with 24 ounces of water and nuke it until it smells like day old fried rice. My little apartment food nuker takes 8 minutes, which is the frozen vegetable setting twice.

I have found this recipe quite tasty. However, eating it every day will probably turn you into something resembling the corn in the packet as one bowl has 112% of your daily sodium. I like this in the summer mostly, after I have perspired a great deal

Pre-date Warning: Dudes coming out of prison call this ‘hook up’ and are in the habit of adding tuna fish. Look, unless you want your room to smell like a West Virginia whore house in August, I suggest adding no tuna, especially if you have finally talked the barmaid into delivering your six pack.

Bottoms up.