Tuesday, September 23, 2008

SAY IT WITH TOAST
The Eggs, Bread, Noodles & Chesse Cookbook
Steve Ngapo - Hodder Moa - $19.99

This is a cookbook containing 32 recipes using only four ingredients.

When the author boasted to his friends that as a poor student living on a few dollars a day, which he achieved by making at least 32 recipes using only eggs, bread, two minute noodles and cheese, they didn't believe him . So he set to and put this book together to prove his case.
I'm sure this book is going to find its way into many student flats around the country.
Steve Ngapo is a very funny man. When his publishers asked him for bio information this is what he provided:

Steven Ngapo is a twenty nine year old website developer of Maori and Dutch decent who grew up in beautiful Whakatane.

As a kid his hobbies were watching pro wrestling and cartoons, playing videogames and making up stories. Twenty years later nothing has changed.

Steve has come third in both a national percussion competition and the New Plymouth race day “fashion in the field” competition. He occasionally plays drums for a local barvarian band and used to be in a rock band who had songs about Optimus Prime and Marshall from Shortland Street.

Eight years ago Steve had a bet with a friend to see who could go the longest without eating anything from McDonalds. The prize for the person who could hold out the longest was a can of coke. Steve hasn't seen his friend in seven years but is still maintaining his side of the wager.
Steve has never seen Titanic, Rocky, Die Hard, Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Arc; but has seen Vanilla Ice's movie Cool as Ice over fifty times.

Steve's turn offs are people who stop in the middle of car parks waiting for an opening and Unnecessary Capitalisation Of Words.

Steve's theory that you can cook a large amount of recipes using only eggs, bread, instant noodles and cheese began when he moved out of home and had to cook for himself. It started off as four or five recipes and ballooned from there. The idea of writing them all down was in the back of his mind for a few years before he actually started putting pen to paper.

At about fifteen recipes in, it started to get really hard to come up with new ones. At twenty five recipes it became nearly impossible. The book slowly progressed over the years until he got interviewed about it for a newspaper article on bachelor cuisine, after the interview he started to take it seriously and a year later it was finished.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is this the start of an uprising against the fine food nazi's such as Ramsey and Oliver. I hope so; perhaps the next hit will be the simple cooking show without the need for any fancy pants ingredients that you can only buy from a hermit on the eastern slopes of the Garapatuan Mountains of Mongolia

Anonymous said...

What a great concept! I know several students who would love this book, and no doubt it would also come in handy for those busy weekends when cooking is not on the agenda. It sounds like the budget version of the Aussie girls' cookbook, '4 ingredients' (http://www.4ingredients.com.au/), although they allow themselves more variety in the four involved.