The Zezaurian Guide to Wild Cooking

In some kind of unconscious rebellion against food pornographers, eating dirt-filled slop on the cold ground, naked, covered in nettle stings and insect bites has become the latest way for Zezaurians to purify both their souls and their colons.

Instead of taking pictures of food as if planning to fornicate with it after the shoot, we have now fully embraced wild dining along with its numerous frustrations and challenges.

Yes,  sometimes after consuming one of our camp-stove creations you need to be de-wormed, but by eating our disgusting slop you’re making solid progress in removing all the smug posing that has become such a staple ingredient in contemporary cooking.

So get ready to singe your moustache hair and worsen your piles: here is the Zezaurian guide to cooking in the wild.

Your tongue is only a thermometer

Taste is ephemeral. Food spends literally seconds riding over the top of your tongue before spending the next five hours rotting in stomach acid.

In the wild you should only think of this muscular organ as a temperature gauge and try to get the food into your gut as quickly as possible. Do not talk. Do not breathe. Do not comment on the beautiful sunset. Test the slop’s temperature, and if it’s anything between ‘lukewarm’ and ‘manageably hot’, get it in your belly before something else eats it.

You may have made the food, but you’re not the only one in the wild that wants it. Insects, rats, badgers, boars. They all want your slop. Limit the chances they will take it from you by speed eating.

There’s a substitute for taste

Don’t fret about the beige homogenous gloop on your plate not tasting of anything – Zezaurian wild cooking substitutes flavour for quantity. It’s a fair trade-off and is central to our culinary philosophy.

Less taste, more slop. Balance is maintained, so quit fretting and shovel that crap down your throat before the doggers arrive.

Mind games

The standard issue Trangia stove that all Zezaurians should own, alongside their feelings of self-loathing and social anxiety, comes with two small bowls and a pan. Making anything more than regular slop on one of these things – say, spicy slop, miscellaneous gloop and swill, served together on one plate as a mezze – is actually like solving a brain teaser, not dissimilar to the riddle of taking a fox, a chicken and a sack of grain across a river only two at a time in a boat.

How do you half-cook the slop, keep it warm, half-cook the gloop, and keep them both warm, then boil the swill while re-heating the slop and then frying the rest of the gloop before reducing the swill and getting everything on the same plate at the same time at the same temperature? By sheer, uncontrollable panic. Burned hands and a toilet mouth is our strategy. Try it.

And please remember: temperature is everything here. It must be VERY hot. Do you have any idea how expensive it is getting de-wormed?

Washing up

The only other use for your tongue is to superficially clean all utensils, so get licking like Khia holds the whip.

Celebrate the ending

Defecating is, ordinarily, performed with very little ceremony or pomp. But why? The end is still a part of the meal as much as the start is. Have we been socially conditioned to distance conversation from this most essential of farewells?

Own it. Enjoy it. Smell it.

Instagram it, you fucking posers.