I know I've got two incomplete fics I could be working on, but when the plot bunnies attack, what are you going to do? They're too damn cute to ignore. And so is the Eleventh Doctor!
Yes, the title is from an episode of The Twilight Zone. Does it have anything to do with that episode? Sorta, kinda.
The Doctor surprised Amy and Rory by dropping an enormous old book down on the table hard enough to rattle their plates and spill Rory's tea. The tea trickled towards the book, and the Doctor snatched it back before it could get wet. He made absolutely no effort to wipe up the mess he'd made—he just clutched the tome to his chest—so Amy eventually rose from her seat, grabbed a napkin, and cleaned the table. Once it was dry, the Doctor deposited the book in its original spot. Breakfast trembled again.
"We are trying to eat, Doctor," Amy said, purposely ignoring the book. She knew the Doctor was excited over it—he was practically dancing—but she had no plans to indulge him until she and Rory were finished.
"Why would you want to eat that?" the Doctor asked.
"Hey, I'll have you know I cooked that and it's good!" Rory said.
The Doctor lifted Rory's plate from the table and stepped back when Rory made a grab for it. He brought the laden plate up to his face and sniffed at it. Rory glared with disgust. He no longer wanted his breakfast.
"Eggs, bacon, toast, boring. Boring, boring, boring."
Amy shoved as much food as humanly possible into her mouth. She wasn't going to let the Doctor defile her food, too.
"I've got something infinitely better. Right here, contained in this book, are the absolute best recipes in the galaxy. Guaranteed or my money back. Though the publisher hasn't existed in ninety years, so I suppose they'd have trouble keeping that promise, wouldn't they?"
When neither Rory nor Amy clamored for more details, the Doctor traded Rory's plate for the book. The Time Lord flipped it open to a random page, read the list of ingredients to himself, and made a face that suggested the book was not living up to its reputation.
"Right, forgot Plasmavores contributed to this edition. We can get rid of these pages." The Doctor proceeded to rip half a dozen pages from the book. Amy grabbed one of the discarded pages, noted the recipe called for two pints of blood—from whatever species the cook favored—and found her appetite had deserted her.
"Here's something much better. No, make that a little better. Ew, never mind! We won't be needing these pages either." Two more pages floated to the table. Amy saw this recipe called for a cat, whole and with the fur removed, and two finely diced cabbages. Her stomach twisted.
Rory noticed the distress his wife was under, and took it upon himself to see what was so horrible about the recipes. He made it through the first page of Plasmavore dishes before he was overwhelmed. This was what Rory always imagined Hannibal Lecter's cookbook would be like, only much worse, and with a wider range of species on the menu.
"The boiled flank of a Judoon? Why and how would anyone eat that? It would be like chewing on an old boot." More pages were tossed haphazardly onto the table. One drifted onto the floor, where Amy kicked it out of sight.
"We don't want to eat anything ever again! Please, just put the book away!" Rory moaned.
"There are good recipes in here. I just have to find them. Where's that one for Mimas waffles? They're like Earth waffles, but greyer."
"No one is interested in Mimas waffles," Amy said. "Or anything else from that book."
The Doctor continued flipping through pages as though he hadn't heard either Amy's or Rory's kvetching. He hadn't seen this book in forty years, and his memory was a little fuzzy on the contents. He distinctly remembered eating and thoroughly enjoying many delicacies, but he couldn't remember where, among the thousands of pages, the human-friendly recipes resided.
"Can you digest cotton, or is that something bad for you?" the Doctor asked.
"It's something we wear," Amy replied, exasperated.
"I know that! But can you eat it, as well?"
"No," Rory replied. "Trust me, I'm a nurse."
"Then this recipe is also rubbish." More than twenty pages now littered the area. Some of them had fallen on the cooling remains of the Ponds' forgotten breakfast.
Going page by page was getting him nowhere, except into the recipes submitted by aliens who could, judging from their idea of a smoothie, filter-feed minerals from sand. Humans couldn't do that, and neither could Time Lords. The Doctor didn't intend to get any pet hermit crabs or clams, so the filter-feeding recipes were taking up unnecessary space. They, too, were torn from the book.
Now flipping to random pages, the Doctor found a cocktail made entirely of noble gases—equal parts neon and helium, a swirl of argon, and for the adventurous, a cubic centimeter of xenon—a salad containing leafy greens high in arsenic, and the single most horrifying, diabolical hotdog the universe had ever known. If regular hotdogs were the Cybermen of food, this hotdog was the Dalek Emperor.
"There probably isn't even anything edible for people in there," Amy said. "It's time to put that book back where you found it."
"But then you'll never taste the chocolate of Dulceta Major! Mind you, if all we've got is Earth cocoa beans, it won't be as good, but I might have some…"
At that point, though the Doctor continued on, Amy muted him. One word, and one word alone, had affixed itself in her mind. Chocolate.
"Gimme that book." Amy pulled the cookbook from the surprised Doctor's hands and began madly tearing through the pages. Many of the recipes came with illustrations, and anything that didn't resemble a mouth-watering chunk of chocolate was disregarded.
Moving at a speed that reduced the passing recipes to blurs, Amy managed to cover nearly a hundred pages before she found something she couldn't resist. It wasn't chocolate, but it was nearly as good. Ice cream!
"I want this," Amy said, tapping the picture. In it, a family of blue, gaseous creatures were shoveling ice cream into what Amy assumed was their mouths. It was a bit hard to tell, as the aliens had no teeth, lips, or other discernable oral features. Either way, they had ice cream and she wanted some, as well.
"Well done, Pond! I definitely remember eating this." The Doctor read through the ingredient checklist and preparation guide. With a few minor alterations, such as substituting the species that produced the milk, the Doctor was sure he could provide the Ponds with something much tastier than Rory's burnt toast.
Once he had the ingredients memorized, the Doctor set off to raid the TARDIS' well-stocked refrigerator and cupboards. Since his current regeneration had odd tastes—and liked to perform ungodly experiments with food that made fish fingers and custard almost boring by comparison—there was an amazing array of edibles stored around the TARDIS. The only problem was finding the few things he really needed among the stockpiles he'd amassed. Locating a small bag of frozen strawberries wasn't difficult in an ordinary freezer, but when the freezer was bigger on the inside and packed with alien plants as well as Earthly ones, those strawberries suddenly had an excellent hiding spot.
Amy and Rory, having nothing better to do until their ice cream was ready, threw caution to the wind and returned to the cookbook. They huddled together and gingerly began turning pages, afraid they'd come to another recipe that required blood or skinned pets. Or something worse.
After managing a whole section of recipes submitted by some species that had a name humans simply weren't meant to pronounce, the Ponds began to relax. Even if they couldn't eat any of the bizarre foods, at least they wouldn't suffer nightmares from them, either. Pink algae might not have been palatable, but at least it wasn't sentient or cuddly and adorable. Amy and Rory had no issue with pond-scum casserole existing, so long as the Doctor didn't try to feed it to them.
"I wonder if Earthlings contributed to this book," Rory said.
"Be a shame if we didn't. I mean, how could the rest of the galaxy ever survive without fish and chips? They'd have to eat 'triple-jellied Selonian knuckles' instead." Among parts of the body Amy never wished to eat, knuckles, especially jellied knuckles, were towards the top of the list.
"It would be easy to find if this book had any sort of organization. But there isn't any! There's no cohesion at all, at least not that I can see."
"Then we'll have to keep looking."
So they did just that. With Amy at the helm, the Ponds searched for Earth's little culinary contribution to the rest of the Milky Way.
Meanwhile, the Doctor discovered what happened when a container of cream was left under the kitchen sink of a living spaceship for an indeterminate amount of time. It mutated. And became conscious. And bloodthirsty. And beating it with a mop was only marginally effective.
The heavy, wet slapping sounds coming from the next room would have alarmed most people, but Amy and Rory were used to odd noises. They continued perusing the Doctor's galactic cookbook and ignored the squelching.
The Doctor threw down his goo-splatter mop and wildly scanned the kitchen for something that could inflict more blunt-force trauma. He spotted a large pot sitting not far away. While the psychotic puddle on the floor reconstituted itself, the Doctor reached for the pot. He began beating the evil cream with the pot until all movement ceased. Then he mopped up the stinking, slimy mess and washed it all down the drain. Problem solved.
And another problem created. He couldn't make strawberry ice cream without cream, and he'd just murdered the cream and disposed of the evidence. Since he couldn't deliver homemade ice cream, he'd have to cheat. Luckily, he was almost as fond of ice cream as Amy was, and had hidden a large quantity of it beneath bags of frozen peas and beans. The Ponds would never know the difference.
The Doctor was in the middle of filling his own dish—he'd allotted more strawberry ice cream to himself than to either Amy or Rory—when a sudden scream made him drop the spoon. The scream, though high and feminine, had almost certainly come from Rory. The Doctor sprung into action, hefted his mop into the attack position, and ran to see if the cream had returned from the grave.
As soon as he burst into the room, ready for heroics, the Doctor found a horrified Rory pointing an accusatory finger at him. The Doctor felt like he'd just wandered onto a crime scene and had been fingered as the murderer.
"What the hell kind of a cookbook is this?" Rory demanded. The Doctor noted said cookbook had been thrown across the room.
"A galactic one?" the Doctor said hesitantly.
"We're in it!" Amy said.
"Earthlings? 'Course you are. You'd be surprised how many civilizations love your lutefisk." The Doctor couldn't understand why that bothered Amy and Rory. Didn't they want their planet's food shared with the rest of the galaxy?
"I don't mean our food, Doctor. I mean us. People. Humans."
"I don't understand…"
"There's a recipe in there about stewing and eating people!" Amy screamed.
"There is?" the Doctor asked.
"Yes!" Amy and Rory replied simultaneously.
"Oh."
"Get rid of it, now! Throw it out the airlock, burn it, just get rid of it!" Amy commanded.
"Can I have my ice cream first?"
"No!"
Chastised and afraid of Amy's wrath, the Doctor grabbed his cookbook and hurried from the room. He hastened to the TARDIS control room and paused there. Amy wanted him to chuck the book into the cold void of space. Considering she'd just learned how to turn herself into a tasty family meal, the Doctor supposed it was only right he obey. It was a shame to lose all the recipes that didn't require human flesh, but sacrifices had to be made. He opened the TARDIS doors, drew back his arm, and pitched the book out. It slowly floated away. The Doctor closed the doors and returned to the kitchen to file his report.
"It's gone, Ponds," the Doctor announced.
Amy and Rory were still very cross, but they did accept the Doctor's apology gift of ice cream. As they dug into the bowls set before them, the Doctor wondered if the Ponds would be more appreciative of his galactic guide to alcoholic beverages.
The End!
Lutefisk, for anyone lucky enough not to know, is fish made with lye. Yep, lye.