The Recipe for:
MID ATLANTIC CHEESE SANDWICH / MID ATLANTIC OST SMORGÅS

PREPARATION TIME: 3 days

INGREDIENTS:
- 1 slice of bread
- 10grams butter / margarine
- 30grams of pre-sliced cheese
   [Expert Tip: if you prefer to slice the cheese yourself

   add another day to the preparation time]
- 1 well-equipped first aid kit
- 1 anger management training course
- 178 page accident insurance policy with lots of fine print
- white or black pepper to taste

SERVES: 1 person, you can increase the quantity to feed others but consider the survival of the fittest

METHOD
1 We recommend you complete your insurance application and anger management course before commencing the following steps. [Expert Tip: Pay particular attention to the clauses on remote medical evacuation of your insurance policy]

2 Position yourself in the approx centre of the Mid Atlantic in a boat approx 42 feet (16 metres) in length and ensure there is an unpredictable rockiness of at least 40° from side and 20° from front to back. Preheat the kitchen to 40° Celsius (Gas Mark 3) and 90% humidity. [Expert Tip: by altering your location you can create other favourite variations like Mid Pacific Cheese Open Sandwich]

3 Now, face the plate cupboard over the benchtop. Wedge your feet under the kitchen cabinets about 2 metres apart for the best stability. Then lean your bottom firmly against the sink behind you in the narrow galley kitchen. Use your left hand to grasp frantically for anything to help stabilise you during the particular sway of the boat at that precise moment. Adjust the position of this hand every 0.4 seconds to cope with the changing boat orientation. With your right hand reach across and open the plate cupboard. Start to take out a plastic plate. Stop in time to catch the plastic cups falling from the cupboard. Then resume, more quickly, to take the plate and place it on the benchtop. Catch the plastic cups as they fall again and thrust them into the cupboard while shutting the door on your fingers. Your plate will, like some magicians trick, have vanished from where you had placed it just moments before and have reappeared half a metre away. Hopefully as you lunge to reclaim it you can maintain your balance. [Expert Tip: Don't make the common mistake of expecting that if you grab the plate firmly enough this will help with your own stability.]

4 Reposition yourself in front of the bread cupboard over the benchtop and repeat the actions of step 3 in collecting a slice of bread.

5 You should now have bread and a plate sliding around on the benchtop which you need to keep under control with one hand. At this point you realise that the butter and cheese are in the fridge and the fridge is accessed by lifting the bench top. Reverse steps 3 and 4 so as to put away the bread and plate. [Expert Tip: You may want to consider starvation.]

6 Take the usual stance for working in the kitchen. Open the bench fridge/freeze chest hatch. Being a chest it is more challenging to have things fall out but don't put this to the test. However do not fear, the chest fridge/freezer has its own challenges. Goods are stacked on top of each other in the chest and whatever you want always manages to burrow its way to the bottom in an effort to escape being eaten - quite an understandable and common attitude of most things in my experience. Therefore you must remove about 20 items from the chest to find whatever you need cowering in one of the dark corners... In this case, this is where you will find the butter/margarine and the packet of pre-sliced cheese. What makes this step so interesting is what to do with the 20 items while you are chasing the butter and cheese. I recommend the sink. This however will require a variation of the standard kitchen stance. Place each foot against the cupboards on either side of the galley. You will not be able to place your feet 2 metres apart in this position so make sure you have a firm grasp on some thin air with your left hand as you transfer things with your right hand from the chest to the sink. You can now capture your exposed butter and cheese, and start to return the other items to the chest. No need to take any trouble about the order you return them to the chest as the next item you will look for will always be in the bottom left hand corner anyway. Finally close the chest hatch making sure the butter and cheese remain on the outside.

7 Repeat steps 3 & 4

8 You should now have a plate, a slice of bread, a tub of butter and a packet of sliced cheese on the bench and you are making frequent reference to your Anger Management manual. If you have played Wack-a-Mole or have made a living from the three cup and a pea trick you will now recognise the hand actions required to keep the four items together on the benchtop.

9 Now things become a little difficult. The butter knife is in a drawer in the dining table about a metre and a half from the kitchen galley. This requires careful analysis and planning. You should allow 6 hours to do this and a further 20 seconds to execute the task excluding time for dealing with injuries. The analysis involves studying the rocking of the boat to identify patterns that you can develop detailed plans around - at what point in the rhythm of repeated patterns will you set off from the security of galley in an attempt to reach the butter knife drawer? Where will you place your feet during the mission? What is there to help stabilise you along the way and is the air viscous enough to cling to? This of course is all nonsense as there is no pattern or rhythm to the rockiness except that when you think things are at the most rockiness you will be mistaken. Nevertheless this is not an entirely fruitless exercise as the evidence of this analysis and planning will be very useful when you are questioned at the hospital by your insurance company.
Some of you might be asking why we didn't get out the butter knife before the ingredients were placed on the bench but I for one am not prepared to go against thousands of years of cultural norms.
So once you have utter confidence in the futility of your plan you can commence its execution. Speed is important. A joint study by MIT, Dapto Primary School Year 2 French Class and the Kungsbacka Junior Lucia Girls Choir recently concluded that going slowly and cautiously had no statically noticeable bearing on the success of the mission or a reduction to the amount, or severity, of injuries. Further, the study found that the faster this action was performed the greater the odds are that the items you leave behind on the bench top will still be somewhere in the kitchen. [Expert Tip: a plastic (reusable of course) butter knife will reduce the risk of serious injury during your return to the galley.]

10 In the unlikely event you come back from the above mission and your injuries are not substantial enough to prevent you from continuing we can now start to assemble the open sandwich. Place the bread on the plate. Fetch the tub of butter from the bathroom floor and spread a thin layer on the bread. Pull the packet of cheese slices from the gap beside the stove and add a slice of the cheese. [Expert Tip: Avoid having the cheese, or anything for that matter fall down the gap at the back of the oven as this will require the boat to be placed in dry dock for two weeks while the boat is being disassembled.] It is recommended at this point that you place the remaining butter/margarine and packet cheese slices into the rubbish/trash bin so as to avoid that whole rigmarole of having to lift the benchtop to put them back. This I admit is a short term strategy but at the time you will not care.

11 Add white or black pepper to taste.

12 You now have your Mid Atlantic Cheese Open Sandwich and a range of injuries from life threatening to bruising to 30% of your body. After all that effort you deserve to sit down somewhere calm and comfortable and enjoy your sandwich. You may well deserve this but that doesn't mean that you will get it unfortunately.

Up on deck it is 10 degrees Celsius cooler and much less humid so it would seem to be the obvious place to head.... Except for the little matter of a 2 metre ladder to negotiate. You may have heard it said that ladders are one of the highest causes of serious injury. The peeps that say that obviously aren't referring to a ladder on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic during 4 metre swells. This is not classed as dangerous but as suicidal so check your insurance policy to make sure you are covered. If not just slide down onto the kitchen floor and eat your delightful sandwich there. If you're covered, proceed...

You will need all three arms free to accomplish this task so we recommend that the first thing you do is to reach up and place the plate with the sandwich on the upper deck. Make sure the boat is swaying more wildly and unpredictably than usual so that when you have the plate over your head the cheese sandwich will slide off the plate, separate into all of its component parts, and each component, including the pepper, ends up on different steps of the ladder after sliding across your face and arms. Take time to marvel at how much surface area 10 grams of butter can cover.... your face and arms as well as several steps on the ladder. Now collect all the pieces. [Expert Tip: use the cheese to wipe up the pepper] and put them together on the plate without regard as to their order or appearance. Throw the plate and what we now still loosely refer to as a sandwich onto the deck together with your Anger Management Manual.

Hopefully on about the third attempt you will succeed in climbing the buttery ladder with your buttery hands. Assuming you have not obtained any further internal injuries you can now relax in the fresh air and savour your Mid Atlantic Cheese Open Sandwich hoping you get through it before being struck in the face by a Flying Fish.