My Elementary Writing students were working with forms of organization, and we touched upon the structures of lists. Lists of items in which order doesn’t matter — say, ingredients in a recipe, where we just list with commas and an “and” before the last item, and sequence lists, where we outline a series of steps in a procedure, starting each new step with a word indicative of the new step: “First”, “Second”, “Third”, “Next”, “Then”, “After that,” and “Finally” (plus variations).

So I had this bolt of inspiration and asked students to submit recipes to me. The recipes would consist of two lists: a list of ingredients, meaning a list of comma-separated items, with an between the penultimate and ultimate items of the list; and a sequence list outlining how to prepare the food.

I’ve already whinged earlier today about plagiarists who copied their recipes from a Korean website in English (1, 2), but I thought I would share with you the most unusual recipe in the lot:

Peanut Butter and Potato Sandwich

Now, I’ve seen some scary things done to sandwiches here in Korea, but this, this blew me away. It’s mashed potato mixed with peanut butter, which is spread onto a piece of very lightly toasted bread. Put another piece of bread on the other side, enclosing the mashy mess, and fry it till it’s golden brown.

I wonder if this girl actually eats this. I’m a little scared to find out.