Every cookbook says that it’s different. One promises to have you eating healthy, another as your ancient ancestors did, a third to demystify foam. This cookbook isn’t like that.

This cookbook is an old friend who keeps crashing on your couch, promising they’ve got something lined up and are gonna get their shit together. This cookbook is all the recipes you already make, when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when the eldritch abomination you woke at the bottom of the ocean won’t go back to sleep. And hopefully, this cookbook gives you some new meal ideas. Even Sad Bastards have to eat.

We promise these recipes are:

• Simple. Like, add boiling water and eat simple. We don’t care if you can’t maintain focus. You are the target audience for this cookbook. There are options for Next Level cooking, going up to God-Tier difficulty for the best-worst days, but there’s also Peanut Butter on a Spoon for the worst- worst days.

• Ingredients which (mostly) don’t go bad. We see you. Maybe you’re too busy to keep up with the groceries, maybe you’re just too depressed. Treat yourself to a meal with fresh vegetables on grocery day! But people who shop mostly in the canned, dried, and frozen food aisles can go a lot longer between grocery runs.

• Cheap. The Boomers destroyed the economy. Sorry to any Boomers reading this. We don’t like that you did it either. #NotAllBoomers. But if you voted for Reagan, Mulroney, or Thatcher and you don’t regret it, this cookbook isn’t for you.

• Vegetarian or vegan. Because the two of us writing this cook- book are veg, and we can’t test recipes we won’t eat. Besides, the world is falling apart and the last thing you need is food poisoning.

Dany from
Sushi and Sea
Lions, take
note. Raw
chicken is not
good date
food.

Hey, Blythe
from Cascade,
stop letting
Jonah pull
this one.

THE SAD BASTARD COOKBOOK
- Tasty. Yes, you deserve good food. Don’t try to argue with us. We don’t
care what you think. You are worthy of love and worthy of eating food
that makes you happy.

How this cookbook will work:

- Meals typically have a core recipe and optional variations which you can
use to keep things interesting.
- Core ingredients will be listed at the top of each
recipe. Those are things you absolutely need to
cook each recipe. For example, it’s literally impos-
sible to make Bean Salad without beans.
- Meals where the core recipe is vegan are marked
with a }. Lots of these will have vegetarian options—you can add cheese
to almost anything and then it’s not vegan. A few of the core recipes are
vegetarian, not vegan. We’re sorry, but we couldn’t figure
out how to make The Humble Egg both vegan and low effort.
But vegans should still find plenty of tasty things in this
book.
- The order of the recipes
is intensely chaotic. We
tried so hard to impose a
structure, but it turns out
that’s even harder to do
in a cookbook than it is in
genre-bending fiction. Is
Peanut Butter on a Spoon an
appetizer, a main meal, or
a dessert? Are Peanut Butter
Balls a variation of Peanut
Butter on a Spoon , or are they
distinct enough to count as a different recipe? If you’ve got the e-version
of the book, we recommend you use the search function to find recipes
which use specific ingredients. If you only have the paper version, you
can get the e-version for free from our website http://www.nightbeatseu.ca.
Hey, did you know we have a website?

Well, you can add
cheese to literally
anything at all, but
it’s probably not good
on Chocolate Pudding.

We checked and Piers Morgan’s tears count as vegan.

• At the end of this book, we have listed our personal top picks for Core Ingredients to Keep in Your Kitchen. These are things that you can stock up on when you’re in decent enough shape to go grocery shopping. It’s not an exhaustive list—it’s just our ideas for what we keep around.

• We also list Shopping Lists to go with Weekly Menus. Making decisions is hard. We thought you might like it if we made some for you.

• Despite our deep and abiding love for food, our background is in fiction. Rachel’s published Cascade ( The Sleep of Reason Book 1 ), Zilla’s got Query published, and Marten’s written a queer steampunk novel you’re go- ing to adore. There are a lot more great novels, novellas, short stories, and games by other members of the Night Beats community, and we all shamelessly love pop culture. We couldn’t resist writing jokes in the margins of this cookbook. If you don’t find them funny or haven’t read the books, the recipes will work anyway.

• This book will tell you that you should eat, because eating is good, and you are good. There are very few other “shoulds” in this book. If you avoid carbs when you’re in the Big Sad, you should probably avoid cook- ing Pasta, Popcorn, and Rice All Together on Toast.* If, like us, the Big Sad means you shove as many carbs as physically possible into your mouth hole, then you’re eating, and eat- ing is, as we said earlier, good. This cookbook is a supportive friend, but you’re the one living your life.

• In a just society, everyone would be fed. That is, in our opin- ion, the bare minimum required to call yourself a civiliza- tion, so Tories, please take notes. Depending on where you live, you might be able to access some government sup- port, from SNAP to Universal Credit. Beyond this, there are mutual aid organizations, like Food Not Bombs, the Hare Krishnas, Sikh temples, and community gardens.

* We haven’t included this recipe in this
cookbook because it sounds terrible.
If you cook it and it’s great, please
write in and tell us at
nightbeatseu@gmail.com.

Maybe, like
Ash from
A+E, your
calories come
mostly from
orange Tic
Tacs.

THE SAD BASTARD COOKBOOK
It’s likely that somewhere near you, there is an organization that be-
lieves in feeding people not as charity, but as an act of solidarity. On your
bad days, this can keep you fed. On your better days, getting involved in
feeding each other is an act of political resistance against a culture hell-
bent on crushing you into an isolated, wibbling nub of a human.
- We wish we could come into all your homes and take care of
you. But that’s called “breaking and entering” and
apparently it’s illegal? This cookbook is the closest we
could come without “breaking the law” and “committing
crimes” and “getting the cops involved.”

A note on measurements. Which is to
say, note that we haven’t put down many
measurements. Most of these recipes are flexible
enough that you can just kind of wing it, or
use ingredients such as a potato that inherently
contain measurements, such as one (1) potato. We realize that
this system works well for our particular version of the Big Sad, but some
people require more structure. To people who share our version of the Big
Sad: if cheese makes you feel better, you should add more cheese. Think of
ingredients like household cats—if they’re helping, you can always add more.
To people who don’t: if measurements make you feel better, write in some
measurements. We’re not the boss of you.

.

Eddy, that
means you.

Unless they’re the fictional werewolf and vampire cops from Night Beats investigating the strength of their feelings, in which case we hope they get as involved as possible.