So, what’s on the slab for tonight’s dinner, you ask? Well, lately the dinner manufacturing process has been receiving a variety of randomly created vegetables from the garden. Today’s beam-aboard material is lots of jalapeno peppers, and boy do I love the heat produced by these puppies! I dialed into my brain stem and that old reliable chili manifestation visualized itself for my tantalization. Hey, is that the buck-buck of helpless chicken patties? Yes! Victory is mine. Still have the pesto-goodness from the previous night to rely upon, and there’s that vegetable soup experiment K made as a secondary backup. I’m tellin’ ya, when you make your Cook Roll (and making your Garden Roll adds that bonus), everything comes up videos.

Of course, when I whiff that Roll, then its time to order up the community-pool wheel of taste. Mrm. Grease and processed material made by human misery or robot slavery. Yeah, the beat-down is part of the equation. Sometimes the land of android invasion requires you to rely on that rat-in-a-box, because you’re too tired from blasting away at the pincer-bots and gorgonoids to think about how you’ll plot coordinates for the refueling stop to restore your body’s health bar. Eesh! Thank goodness I put some experience points into getting Cook and Garden on my character sheet. It’s a sharing, cooperative work for K and I.

The battles against the potato beetles, the gnats dive-bombing my ocular mechanisms, the shaking of my fist at the cousin of the Caddyshack gopher as I find another tomato skin left right where I can find it at the dramatically appropriate time. The confrontation with the earth and her feral friends teaches wisdom, gets my head in the right place, and surprises me with the tasty manifestations of plant reproductive rackets. We take it back to the honeycomb hideout and it makes for a few more bonus points when the meal gets made. Making it yourself is one degree of better. Making it yourself with your own produce, well that rocks it to the crypt!