These berries will kill you

A recent resolution of mine is to become bearded and fat. Having accomplished the former in a week, I set out to the grocery store last night with the goal of helping along the latter. Seeing as how I already had a bottle of wine and an Italian sausage at home, I chose a package of three cheese (three cheeses! Only in America!) tortellini and a jar of "cabernet marinara". That's right: I cook by opening packages. Have you seen my kitchen? Imagine a small closet and halve it. There's not room for fancy cookin'.

So I'm standing over the stove, cooking up the sausage, and as I sit there watching the raw animal flesh turn from gooey to golden brown, I think: Yeah, I'll need to make sure this gets cooked thorougly. And then I thought this: how did they figure out how much to cook it? How many people died after saying, "No, no...it's best to eat it raw" before they figured out how long you should cook sausage? And how did they even come up with the idea of making sausage in the first place?

I flashed back to an Australian TV show that I used to watch when I was in England called Bush Tucker Man. It was about a guy from the Australian commandos who knew everything there was to know about what was edible in the Australian outback. He could make crawfish trap out of twigs, he knew which trees had edible bark and which berries wouldn't kill you. And besides thinking he was a total badass, I wondering how many thousands of years it took for the original aboriginals to figure all that out, only to have some army recruit share the secrets with the world.

But here's a secret to share: my lazy-bachelor feast was mind-blowingly delicious, and I would just like to thank those people that got really sick before me so that I could make such a great feast. Thanks.