Cooking for oneself is an important skill that every lonely boy must master. Living alone doesn't mean you can't eat good food. Actually, it does. Because there's no sense in spending the time to make good food when it's just yourself. But you don't have to eat all fast food all the time. You need to develop the skill of cooking slop. Yes, slop. The delicious, yet kind of disgusting, easy-to-make meal that will feed you for days and that gives you the warm sensation of having prepared a nice bowl full of slop for dinner. Today, let's make pasta slop. Specifically, some sloppy ziti.

When we make some sloppy ziti, we're going to have to adapt the recipe, which is usually used for family meals, and adapt it for the purposes of a pathetic, lonely, middle-aged man eating slop alone in his kitchen. The first adaptation we have to make is with the pasta itself. Most recipes say to use ziti. But you don't have to use ziti. You have to use the pasta that comes in a tall box, not a long box. So no spaghetti, no fettuccine, but as long as it comes in a tall box, whether it's the little tubes, the little spirals, the little bow ties, it doesn't really matter. It'll all work.

Second, you're going to see recipes talk about how to make the sauce and how long to simmer it and what spices to use. You don't need that for slop. Buy a jar of Newman's Own marinara sauce. It's the one with the handsome man's face on it. Get one of those and you're good to go.

Next you're going to see a recipe that's going to talk about all sorts of different cheeses. You need shredded cheese, you need shredded Parmesan, you need grated Asiago, you need Pecorino Romano. No. You need one 16 ounce little ball of the sliced mozzarella that's sometimes on sale at Publix for half price. And you need a bag of Italian blend cheese The regular size bag, not the big one. And then you'll need some spices. I use black pepper and red pepper flakes. Those are your ingredients.

So here's how we make this slop. First cook the pasta: boil the water, put the pasta in it, cook it, stir it exactly once. Then just leave it until your timer goes off. Drain the pasta. Put the pasta in a big bowl. At this point, turn on the oven: 400 degrees.

While the pasta sits in the big bowl, dump the whole jar of pasta sauce on it. Stir. Take half of the sliced mozzarella and just tear it up in little chunks and toss it in the bowl. Stir. Take half the bag of cheese, dump it in the bowl. Stir. Add some pepper and red pepper flakes, however much you'd like. Stir. Then take your jar, spray bottle of pan, spray up the nine by 11 pan, which is the big one. It's the big rectangular one that you might use for brownies. Today we're gonna use it for pasta slop. Spray it up with a little pan. Dump the pasta in it.

Now it’s time to make the top of the slop. Take the rest of the sliced mozzarella and layer it on top. It's not gonna cover all the pasta. So you take the extra last half of the bag of cheese, and you fill in all the gaps. No pasta left uncovered. Everything should be covered in cheese. That's how you get it good and sloppy. And you're not going to use that cheese for anything else, so just use the whole damn bag. By this time hopefully your oven has warmed up. Open up the oven, toss the ziti in, 30 minutes.

While it's baking, clean up your mess and put on some music. Maybe Andrew Bird or War on Drugs.

When it's done, let it cool a bit before plating. No sides needed – you've got cheese, pasta, and a hydro flask with a popsicle-flavored liquid IV. That's all a man needs.

Leftover hack: Cold pasta slop is delicious. Eat it straight out of the pan. Why waste time heating it up?

And that's it. Simple little thing. Takes about 20 minutes of prep. Not even. Most of the time is spent waiting for the water to boil. And the rest of the time you're just whistling along with Andrew Bird. And you end up with a nice big tray of sloppy ziti.

Time to nom that slop up.