The Ambien Cookbook

Below is an article my sister and I read that got us laughing so hard tears were running down our cheeks. I should probably disclose here that I did take Ambien for close to four years. I never got up and ate, but I did have some serious amnesia issues (mostly with books I would be reading before I fell asleep) and I have a few odd vague memories of weird things I did if I didn't go right to bed after taking the Ambien ~ something involving a hose in the front yard comes to mind...

The New Yorker Magazine

THE AMBIEN COOKBOOK
by PAUL SIMMS
Issue of 2006-07-31
Posted 2006-07-24

The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug’s users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.
—The Times.



Sorpresa con Queso
Ingredients:
7 bags Cheetos-brand cheese snacks
17 to 19 glasses tap water
5 mg. Ambien

Place Cheetos bags in cupboard.

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

Wait 2-3 hours, then sleepwalk to kitchen, tear cupboard doors off hinges in search of Cheetos.

Find Cheetos, eat contents of all 7 bags.

Fall back asleep on kitchen floor.

When awakened by early-morning sunlight, get up and say, “What the—?”

Wipe orange Cheetos dust from fingers, face, and hair.

Drink 17 to 19 glasses of water from kitchen tap.

Return to bed.



Icebox Mélange
Ingredients:
Entire contents of refrigerator
1 Diet Snapple
5 mg. Ambien

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

Wait 2-3 hours, then sleepwalk to kitchen.

Devour everything in refrigerator (including all fancy mustards and jellies, iffy takeout leftovers, and plastic dial from thermostat).

Belch loud enough to wake wife or girlfriend. When she enters kitchen, bellow, “Can’t you see I’m working here?”

Fall asleep on kitchen floor.

After 4-5 more hours, wake up on subway, fully dressed from the waist up, drinking a Diet Snapple.



Licorice Surprise
Ingredients:
1 black extension cord
1 wall outlet
5 mg. Ambien

Plug extension cord into wall socket near bed.

Plug other end of extension cord into clock radio on nightstand.

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

Sleep 3-4 hours.

Roll out of bed, wake up on floor.

See extension cord, think, What a big delicious licorice rope that is!

Chew on essentially flavorless cord until you get to the metallic center, where the surprise is.



Tummy Cake
Ingredients:
5 eggs
2 cups flour
1 cup Crisco
1/2 cup milk
5 mg. Ambien

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

Wake up in kitchen, mixing eggs, flour, Crisco, and milk in—for some reason—a mop bucket.

Let batter settle.

Go to living room, turn on TV, search channels for a show that explains the second part of how to make a cake.

Curse the designer of your TV remote for making a device that has the buttons on the wrong side—all facing the floor, where you can’t see them.

Remember batter.

Retrieve bucket from kitchen, drink entire contents in 3-5 gulps.

Remember that the batter was supposed to be cooked.

Draw hot bath, immerse yourself in it, knead bloated stomach in effort to facilitate cooking process.

When mouth fills with now cooled bathwater, wake up and return to bed.

Lie back on pillow, watch cartoon bluebirds orbiting your head.

Grab one cartoon bluebird in midair and devour it raw, feathers and all.

Wake up at 7 A.M., with wife or girlfriend demanding to know what the F happened in the kitchen last night.

While trying to answer, burp up a single cartoon-bluebird feather. Cover mouth guiltily, even though she seems not to have noticed the feather.

When she slams the bedroom door and goes to work, pick cartoon-bluebird feather out of the air and swallow it.

Fall asleep for 36 more hours, interrupted only by periodic—and somehow epic-seeming—trips to the bathroom.



Nhi Ho Trang Phu
Ingredients:
1 package beef jerky
1 quart mango-flavored Gatorade
1 saucepan potable water
Salt to taste
5 mg. Ambien

Lay out beef jerky and Gatorade on nightstand, in anticipation of somnambulistic snack attack.

Take Ambien, fall asleep.

After 2-3 hours, awaken half-submerged in a rice paddy in the jungle lowlands just north of the Mekong Delta.

Back “in country.” You know you’re going to Heaven, ’cause you’ve spent your time in Hell. But here you are once again—back in the Shit.

Stay still, stay quiet—as quiet as a mouse. You are asleep, but all of your senses are alert.

Spot V.C. sapper no more than one foot away, playing possum in spider hole beneath duvet-cover camouflage.

Silently stalk stationary V.C.; two can play this game, no?

When you gain tactical advantage, corner V.C. and remove ear(s).

Go to kitchen, put ear(s) into pot of water on stove, tie on souvenir lobster bib from Cape Cod trip last summer, sit down at kitchen table with knife in one hand and fork in the other, saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” over and over—until water boils, or you wake up in police custody despite now earless wife or girlfriend’s protestations of your innocence as delivered to police detective in emergency room, where she now is (whichever comes first).