Round Six: Dark and stormy site...

[maggiethecat]

Post 'em here...if they're bad to the bone!

[jhlurie]

"It was hot. So hot that the sweat ran off their bodies into the soup. The chef wasn't displeased, however. He liked it salty."

[pixelchef]

"She was the apple of my eye. A real peach."

[sparrowgrass]

He understood, to bottoms of his chef's clogs, as he watched from the doorway of the still, dark kitchen, that if he misinterpreted her reaction to the clam linguine, it would make all the difference in the world.

[Holly Moore]

This was not Chef Pierre’s first souffle. Nor was it his second, or his third. Not even his fourth souffle. Maybe his fifth souffle if one didn’t count the souffle he had helped his good friend Chef Jean-Claude prepare. But count it Chef Pierre did, declaring this souffle to be his sixth souffle, his finest souffle, a finer souffle than any chef in all of Paris had ever baked or ever would hope to bake. A wonderful, almost a magical souffle. The souffle by which all future souffles would forever be judged. And this, dear reader, is where our tale begins.

[MsRamsey]

As Mary riffled through her cavernous purse for an aspirin, she was reminded of Greg’s unreasonable demands, how he beseeched her to fish out the gross little white thing in the egg whites before making his fussy omelettes, and how she had sought to tantalize him with her baked goods, made impossible by his insistence on putting the softened butter back into cold storage, along with his heart.

[maggiethecat]

Bad, and hilarious, as these are (and they are!) we can still do worse!

[inventolux]

The cheese was old and moldy.

[jhlurie]

Bad, and hilarious, as these are (and they are!)  we can still do worse!

You want to dare me, eh?

--------------------------------------------------

It was a dark and stormy night; but nobody in the restaurant noticed--all they could see, all they could focus on, was the chef's knife sticking out of the chest of that very same chef. He'd stumbled into the dining room a moment before--lurching like a drunk man--and now lay dead at their feet.

"Check, please", I said, as the sound of thunder and a string of curses from the general direction of the kitchen added to the din.

I didn't really mean to rabbit. But, my friends, can you imagine my horror at being present at the site of a murder--me being on the lam and all. You pass a few bad checks its no big deal. But when you've got both the Mob AND the Feds on your tail, you don't want to be Johnny-on-the-Spot when Pierre gets a knife in his gut.

Edited June 17, 2003 by jhlurie (log)

[maggiethecat]

Bad, and hilarious, as these are (and they are!)  we can still do worse!

You want to dare me, eh?

Of course I do, jh! These could be so much worse. I dare you all.

And even though, technically, the entry is supposed to be the first sentence only...hell! Ramble on! Give me the first chapter if it feels right to you.

But please...No Good Writing!

[Pan]

"You smelly cheese! You stinky tofu! You thousand-year-old egg!" screamed the sous-chef as he chased after the sommelier with a sharpened spatula.

Hmmm...I don't think that's what you were looking for.

[Carlovski]

It was the best of chines, it was the worst of chines.

[sparrowgrass]

As Mary riffled through her cavernous purse for an aspirin, she was reminded of Greg’s unreasonable demands, how he beseeched her to fish out the gross little white thing in the egg whites before making his fussy omelettes, and how she had sought to tantalize him with her baked goods, made impossible by his insistence on putting the softened butter back into cold storage, along with his heart.

Did you know my ex-husband?

[Jason Perlow]

Bad, and hilarious, as these are (and they are!)  we can still do worse!

You want to dare me, eh?

--------------------------------------------------

It was a dark and stormy night; but nobody in the restaurant noticed--all they could see, all they could focus on, was the chef's knife sticking out of the chest of that very same chef. He'd stumbled into the dining room a moment before--lurching like a drunk man--and now lay dead at their feet.

"Check, please", I said, as the sound of thunder and a string of curses from the general direction of the kitchen added to the din.

I didn't really mean to rabbit. But, my friends, can you imagine my horror at being present at the site of a murder--me being on the lam and all. You pass a few bad checks its no big deal. But when you've got both the Mob AND the Feds on your tail, you don't want to be Johnny-on-the-Spot when Pierre gets a knife in his gut.

Dammit Jon, how many times do I have to tell you, no plagiarizing entire sections of Bobby Gold!

[srhcb]

"First, you take a leak."

SB (With apology, and declaration of utmost respect, to Julia)

[Andy Lynes]

The night was dark. Black. Empty. Yet filled with a forbidding foreboding. Nothing stirred. Except the wooden spoon in the gravy, which stirred ceaselessly, preventing lumps from forming and sticking to the bottom of the pan like barnacles to the hull of a ship, ruining the sauce in the same way that the barnacles in fact would, should they have ever get near a gravy pan. She stared at her own reflection on the surface of that dark, black liquid (stirring, always stirring) and wondered if he would come home safe this time, out of the dark, black, empty night, into her arms. Would he ever taste her perfectly lump free gravy again?

[reverendtmac]

Like a durian fart in an ashtray, the stench of the bar slapped you as you walked in the door. Ma always said never to walk into places that had chewable smells...'course, judging by the trajectory of my life, listening to Ma never was too high on my things-to-do list. What was high on the list currently: drag my clothes into the woods and have them shot.

"Double scotch, neat," I said to the bartender, settling onto the one stool that wasn't hooker-glazed or christened with diced carrots and stomach acid. He fished out a sickly green bottle with a faded label and free-poured a shot and a half into a crusty glass, plunking it into a drool puddle in front of me. I stared at it, then up at the scar wormed through the bartender's unibrow, then back down at it.

"Problem?" he growled, the one light in the place hitting his working eye and glinting back at me.

"Maybe," I said, picking the glass up and sniffing at it; the nose was mostly paint thinner, with a lingering note of pit bull sweat. Still couldn't overpower the room. "Don't know that I could drink this without seeing the bathtub it was brewed in," I said, setting it back down. "Oh, and the stuff on the glass...that yours or your boyfriend's?"

Ma also taught me to watch my mouth, but me, Ma, listening...yeah, we've been over that. Maybe if I listened better, I'd be seeing the business end of a shotgun a whole lot less...

[kitwilliams]

I recently found out that I am related to the infamous Edward Bulwer-Lytton of whom you all are making fun -- and it is such fun! Although I'm with Maggie: come on -- you all can do much worse! But I think I understand. It is easy to write something that just isn't very good. But to write something that is memorably abominable is really hard!

[hsm]

WHACK. Her knife chopped down hard and the crab claw didn't stand a chance. She stared at the white flaky meat now laying atop a splattering of hard shell and as the aroma of the sea wafted up to her nostrils, her thoughts turned to him. Leave me for some 20-something starving starlet, will you, my foodie-trendy-follower-of-the-moment Hollywood producer-husband? Well, I'm going to make you the meal of your about-to-be-shortened life.

(Abominable or just plain crappy? )

[maggiethecat]

It is easy to write something that just isn't very good.  But to write something that is memorably abominable is really hard!

Well, yes and no, if you've seen my sample entry.

Kit, how really cool! I hope your esteemed relative will understand. And I'd just bet he'd love to see if his writing talent has been passed down through the generations.

[vengroff]

Call me sous chef.

[jhlurie]

Dammit Jon, how many times do I have to tell you, no plagiarizing entire sections of Bobby Gold!

Tough, seeing as how I haven't read that book yet. But I'm sure, like me, Tony had his tongue firmly in his cheek. Cliche can be your friend with the right attitude, not your enemy.

But please...No Good Writing!

Of course this is a problem I hadn't forseen. Sometimes you can go so far around the bend with irony that it becomes good instead of merely trite.

Edited June 17, 2003 by jhlurie (log)

[MatthewB]

As the sun faded beyond the horizon, he realized that this night would be the darkest night of his soul. "Chef" had realized, despite what his staff called him during service, that he was only a cook.

[jackal10]

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, a perpetual moonless night in the smart room, designer starless and bible-black, the empty tables now silent and the hunched, waiters and '-and- bussers limping down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, sauceboat-bobbing pass. The windows are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as the plongeur there in the muffled middle by the Profi foam pump and the staff time clock, the stoves in mourning, the prep stations in widows' weeds. And all the critics of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

[JAZ]

As dawn approached, the blackness of the night was breached by a lightish purple glow at the horizon, something like the color of blueberry ice cream, but darker -- blueberry gelato, perhaps; after several minutes, while the entire sky grew marginally less inky, the glow changed to more of a reddish orange, reminiscent of the chili oil often served with potstickers at mediocre Chinese restaurants, yet it wasn't until much later, when the sun peeked over the hills in the distance and began to shine with the intense yellow glare of ballpark mustard that Daphne pulled her lips from Theo's and whispered breathlessly, "But you can't leave Margot until you've coaxed from her the secret of her aebelskivers provencal."