Dear Jack,
The university shut down the frat house last year--a little matter of the drunken whore we were keeping on the third floor--so this year I'm going to be living off campus with some of the guys in an apartment, but we're going to have to share the cooking. I can't even boil water. We're starting next week. What am I going to do?

Frat chef

Dear Frat chef,

You guys should have kept a cooker, not a hooker. I hope that you have reformed and repented your evil ways.

The bad news is that no one is going to be able to teach you how to cook in the short time remaining. The good news is that you don't have to know how to cook to feed frat boys.

Here's what you should do: announce that you are the stew guy--stews are all you cook. Then, get two pressure cookers, a four-quart one and a six-quart one. You get one-third of a pound of boneless meat per person--beef, pork, chicken breasts, sometimes even sausages. Then you get one pound of root vegetables per person--onions, potatoes, carrots, yams, etc. Also get a stalk of celery. Now dice everything into three-quarter inch cubes. The meat goes into the smaller pot, the vegies into the larger one. Add the amount of water specified in the instruction manuals for the pressure cookers. Sprinkle a half a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper in each pot. Cook the meat three times as long as the vegetables, and follow the manual for the vegetable cooking times. Count backwards to determine the starting times for each pot, that way both will be ready at the same time. The secret is to not undercook the meat and not overcook the vegetables!

Dump everything into a big bowl and serve with French bread and a salad. (Get bagged mixed lettuces and add tomato wedges and sliced onions until you figure out how to build salads from scratch.) Once you get the hang of this kind of cooking, you can start playing with variations, say adding honey and mustard to ham cubes and chunks of pineapple to its accompanying vegetables. Eventually, you'll be able to foist broccoli on the frat boys.