Some of us might be adjusting to quarantine life, but Robert Pattinson has apparently been on this wavelength all along. Speaking with GQ, the actor described his unstable sense of time—and his... interesting eating habits. “I’ll have oatmeal with, like, vanilla protein powder on it,” Pattinson said by way of example. “And I will barely even mix it up. It’s extraordinarily easy. Like, I eat out of cans and stuff. I’ll literally put Tabasco inside a tuna can and just eat it out of the can.”
“It is weird,” the actor concedes, “but my preferences are… just sort of eat like a wild animal. Like, out of a trash can.”
Pattinson’s status as the ur-mole person might start to explain the absolutely mind-bending pasta recipe he’s apparently honed—a culinary creation so strange and vile that writer Zach Baron couldn’t quite tell if he was serious. And that was before Pattinson blew up a microwave.
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The name Pattinson has bestowed on his little concoction is absolutely darling: Piccolini Cuscino, translation “Little Pillow.” The idea apparently came from Pattinson wondering how to turn pasta into a fast-food sensation—which quickly led to the question, “How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?”
The required ingredients and equipment for this recipe are as follows: One box of penne pasta—although Pattinson insists that the noodles that work best are the “the pasta that’s, like, a little, it’s like a blob, a sort of squiggly blob... It looks like a sort of messy…like, the hair bun on a girl.” Sure! Bread crumbs—or, this time around, cornflakes. (“That’s basically the same shit.”) Pre-sliced American cheese. Tomato sauce. Aluminum foil. A microwave. A cereal bowl. A giant novelty lighter. The top half of a sandwich bun. (I don’t know, I really don’t know.) And sugar. Lots of sugar.
Pattinson’s process is apparently as follows: Cover the pasta with water and microwave for eight minutes. Meanwhile, make a sort of bowl out of your aluminum foil and cover it with the bread crumbs (or crushed cornflakes), and then the sugar, and then the cheese, and then more sugar. (“I found after a lot of experimentation that you really need to congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese,” Pattinson told GQ. “It really needs a sugar crust.”) Then add the sauce, because why not. Then the pasta. Then top with more sugar. Then hollow out the top half of a bun and place it on top. Burn the top of the bun with the lighter.
While making this for GQ, Pattinson apparently initially forgot the cornflake bread crumbs and burned his hand on the pasta bowl. Then he set his own latex glove on fire. And then he wrapped the his creation in more foil and tried microwaving it—insisting that the microwave was actually an oven. “I actually knew how to do this before,” Pattinson told GQ. “I literally did this yesterday. And now it’s just impossible. It’s going to look like I can’t cook at all.” That’s when the microwave exploded.
Pattinson apparently presented this idea to an actual Los Angeles culinary magnate, who was shockingly not impressed. But for anyone wondering why on Earth Robert Pattinson is doing any of this, the actor did offer an answer that at least any enterprising millennial with 80 side hustles will likely understand: “I’m really trying to sell this company,” he said. “I’m doing this for my brand.”
