Page 38 of A Recipe for Love
‘From Hugh’s garden, those little ones.’
‘Hugh at the shop?’
Flinty nodded.
‘Have you known them a long time?’
‘A wee while.’ Flinty laughed. ‘Hugh’s my brother.’
Bella was still working out the interrelationships of the village. ‘And he’s married to Anna?’
‘Aye.’
Bella tried to make those details stick in her head. ‘Well his tomatoes look wonderful.’
‘Used to grow our own here. The laird, the old laird, had green fingers.’
‘Well so does Adam.’ Her brain served up a flash of the orange grove in Malaga, how at peace he’d been among the trees and flowers, and how certain that their place was together.
‘I was forever scrubbing soil from under that one’s nails.’
Bella surveyed the rest of the pantry. At the very edge of the middle shelf was the carrier Flinty had brought back from the village shop a day earlier. Bread, potatoes, onions, and more fresh veg. Bella could picture Flinty staring into the pantry with the same trepidation she was feeling and just giving up and buying her own stuff and keeping it separate.
It wasn’t going to be a fancy lunch, but it would be good honest cooking. She grabbed the tomatoes and a small onion from Flinty’s bag. Some fresh herbs would be good, but she could make do. Bella carried her haul through to the kitchen and added mushrooms, bacon and cheese from the fridge to her pile.
She sliced two rashers of bacon into thin strips quickly and professionally. Knife skills were a point of pride for any professional cook and hers had been honed by years and years of vegetable prep in her first kitchen on the lowest rung of the ladder. Her boss had been insistent that anyone who even aspired to call themselves a chef ought to be able to prepare a perfect omelette, and equally insistent that the definition of ‘perfect’ was individual and specific. Some people swore by egg whites alone. Bella had quickly concluded that those people were idiots without the palate or discernment to appreciate the warm inviting colour the yolk brought to the finished dish, or, more importantly, the rich, more luxurious flavour. Bella tried, at her grandma’s instigation, to approach everyone she met with an open mind and no judgement. People who preferred egg white omelettes tested that ethos close to its limit.
Bella cracked her eggs into a small bowl and added salt and a twist of black pepper before she beat them together.
Aaaa-choo!
The noise behind her made Bella start. ‘Bless you!’ she laughed.
‘What?’
She turned towards Flinty. ‘Bless you. Because you sneezed.’
Her companion looked utterly blank for a moment and then nodded. ‘Right. Yes. Of course I did. You’re using black pepper aren’t you?’
‘Oh sorry. Are you allergic or something?’
Flinty shook her head. ‘No. No. You carry on.’
Bella tossed her bacon into the pan where it sizzled satisfyingly, and left it to crisp up while she chopped her onion and mushrooms. There were a thousand and one techniques for chopping onions without weeping. None of them worked. The only thing for it was to power through. Bella zoned out from everything else around her, absorbed by the rhythm of her knife against the board.
‘You’re good with that knife.’
‘Thank you.’
Bella checked on her bacon, and turned back to her board. The long chef’s knife she’d been using to chop the mushrooms wasn’t lying on the board. She looked back behind her. Had she taken it with her when she’d checked on the pan? Of course not. She knew better than to wander around a kitchen with a blade in her hand.
‘What are you looking for?’ Flinty asked.
‘My knife.’ Bella tapped her board. ‘It was right here.’
Flinty looked around and pointed to the worktop at the far side of the kitchen. ‘That knife?’
And there it was, several feet away. When had she been over there? ‘Did you…?’
