Recipe

You may have heard of my friend L on several occasions in this blog. In fact, L is an excellent (though amateur) chef. Here is a story he told me recently:

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One day, L dinned alone at a newly opened Italian restaurant, and he ordered some spaghetti.

When the dish was served, my friend found that it was grossly over-cooked and exceedingly salty. In his own words, the whole thing was more a gastric diet for sodium replacement than pasta.

He summoned the manager of the bistro and demanded an explanation.

"Well, yes, that's not good ..." a man with a mask-face replied. My friend clearly noted that the two words so what were swallowed back into that man's throat.

"That's worse than no good; it's horrible! Any one who eats it all up would die of malignant hypertension the same night." My friend was slightly hot, "By the way, you should not be evasive with the quality of your food - I am a chef myself. I know how to prepare a dish of spaghetti !"

"Indeed ... In that case, in order to prevent further incidents, could you give me your protocol - recipe I mean - of preparing spaghetti so that we could follow in the future ?" The manager said.

My friend was taken aback. He had never thought of writing his own protocol of cooking spaghetti. After all, there are thousands of cookbooks on earth, and the only problem is you have to put up the effort to read before learning the technique.

There was a minute of silence before some light flash through his mind, "You do not sound like someone working in the service industry. Where are you from?"

"Oh, I was a consultant in a public hospital."