Sick Food

I have read several hubs that show how easy it can be to create gourmet food, quickly, easily and cheaply, in one's own home, using, say, only a small charlotte potato and half a slice of Spanish onion. I would now like to add my own tasty dish to the HubPages Restaurant menu.  I can guarantee that you will never have tasted anything like it in any of even the best eating establishments anywhere on the planet.  I am hopeful that someone high up in the culinary world will see this hub and offer me vast amounts of cash for the privilege of being able to serve my dish in their restaurant.

Of course, I cannot actually claim credit for the creation of this dish, as it is a family favourite first invented by my mother; yes, that's right, a dish that has been passed down from mother to daughter for one whole generation.  I am sure that my children will continue the tradition and pass the recipe on to my grandchildren - if spaghetti is still available in a tin, that is.

So, without further ado, I give to you, the Nardone-Rawlinson family favourite ... Sick Food.  It's food that you eat when you're sick, not food that will make you sick.

You will need:

medium-sized potatoes x 5 (more if you like alotta mash)

eggs x 6 (more, or less, depending on the size of your casserole dish; and free-range, naturally, make for a more pleasing colour of yoke)

tinned spaghetti x 2 (large tins, not those waste of time tiny ones)

cheese x 1/2 a block (125g roughly - again, more if you have a big casserole dish)

Method:

1. Hard boil the eggs - anything longer than five minutes should be plenty of time. I usually forget about them and they have a good twenty minutes on the boil. That's fine.
2. Peel and chop the potatoes into small chunks (I was going to say 'cubes', but that would involve some precision chopping, and would take far too much time), and boil until soft in a right big pan filled with loads of hot water.
3. Heat up the spaghetti, on a low flame, in a nice non-stick pan. Leave to simmer gently. I use a good non-stick pan because I usually forget about the spaghetti too, and early attempts to create this dish using inferior pans led to only half the quantity of spaghetti being usable.
4. Now the potatoes will be ready. Drain and place back in the pan. Add a nob of butter, and mash the potatoes until they're smooth and silky as a smooth and silky thing. This part of the process can take anything up to half an hour, especially if you have one of those sub-standard plastic mashers.
5. Shell and halve the eggs, and lay them yoke-side down in a large casserole dish. Make sure they're evenly spaced - you don't want to be fighting over them.
6. Preheat the oven now to gas mark 7 (220ºc, 425ºf). Recipes usually call for the oven to be turned on at the beginning of cooking - but I find that this wastes a good deal of gas.
7. Pour the spaghetti over the eggs, covering evenly.
8. Spoon the mash over the top of the spaghetti. Try to spread it evenly, although to be honest, if you get it into the dish without mixing it totally in with the spaghetti and making a foul looking mess, then you're doing very well indeed. But don't worry about it's appearance because that's what step 9 is for.
9. Now disguise the mess that you've made by covering it with the grated cheese.
10. Pop it all in the oven to get the cheese all melty and brownish. It's up to you how brown you allow the cheese to get. Personally I like it melty underneath, but with a nice crispiness on the top.

This dish will serve 4-6 people.  If you're very poorly, however, you might get about ten portions out of it; although, in that scenario, by the time you get near to the end of it, it might have started to go off.

If you do actually make this dish, then you probably are a little bit nutty.  Sometimes though, it's just what I fancy when I'm a bit under the weather.