A Bloody Roach (LOH #207)

Good Morning Ladies and a happy new week to you all. I hope you all had a splendid weekend like I did, that is until the disaster that would happen in the kitchen and proceed to finish on my tongue.

I have been on medication for the past week due to malaria. Over here in Nigeria, it is a common thing to fall ill to malaria, and so you can say that as long as you receive treatment, there is nothing to worry about. You can even carry the symptoms for a long while and have no idea that you are ill until when your body can no longer fight it. That is what happened in my case.

Saturday afternoon, I was craving noodles to go with my medication. Funny how my appetite seemed to have been amplified by the sickness. Luckily for me, I had already bought some eggs from the day before and we had noodles thanks to Mom. However, they were Indomie noodles which I am not a fan. I prefer Cherie for their spicy soup flavour. But Indomie has a texture that is very nice and I had the idea to take the Indomie noodles and use Cherie spice on it to see how it’d turn out.

Getting the Cherie spice was no biggie as we still had some packets left from the carton we bought a month ago. So, I took a Cherie pack, bursted it open and took out the spice pack. Then proceeded to cook the Indomie noodles with it.

Well, if you think the disaster that happened was the turn out of the noodles, think again. It was not the perfect taste but it was just the right balance. Where things got messy was when I began to eat or let us say after I finished eating. Something was in my mouth and I thought it was an onion despite the razor-like feel of it. So I spat it out.

It was not a piece of onion! It was a bloody cockroach!

The shock paralyzed me. I sat there on my desk, looking at the insect in horror. My stomach churned so bad and my tongue burned with the knowledge of its skin. I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but just stare.

My brain kicked up and I wondered when and how that could have happened. We have an electric kettle that is always filled with hot/warm water which we use to rinse every utensil before we make use of them. That is exactly what I did. I rinsed the pot and the plate, and the spoon I used. I washed every ingredient that wasn’t the noodle spice, like carrot, onions, and fresh pepper. I began to wonder because my eyes were in the pot the entire time. Just how?

With shaky legs and laboured breaths, I made my way to the shop in our compound and bought a bottle of Amstel Malt. The last thing I needed was to empty the contents of my stomach when I had just taken my meds. So, I got the malt and a banana flavoured biscuit and wolfed it down. These contradicting flavours helped my tongue forget for a while what it felt like to have a cockroach in my mouth. My mom was totally horrified when I relayed it to her. We went through my cooking process again and came to a conclusion that the roach must have been from the noodle pack or it crawled into my plate while I was frying the egg. I am off it now, but I will stay off noodles for a while.