Page 66 of Cakes for the Grump
“So?”
Instead of returning the lighter, Luke goes around and turns on the stove. The bitch lighter is compliant under his magic touch and lights embarrassingly quickly.
“You? You can’t cook.”
He does a lazy 360-degree turn, his gaze lingering on the sloppiest sections of my workplace, particularly a milk spill that slowly drips over the ledge of a counter.
“This is only because I am not well!”
“And that’s exactly why you need supervision. Or an assistant,” he amends quickly, apparently catching enough of the gathering storm on my face to backtrack. “This competition is clearly important to you. And it’s not like you are cheating since my culinary skills effectively don’t exist, so really all I’ll be is an extra pair of hands. Come on now. Don’t roll your eyes when you can live out your wildest dream and boss me around. We both know I deserve it.”
“But why would you help me?”
A stunning display of generosity without any strings attached is not Luke Abbot.So what does he get this time?
“Isn’t it obvious, Rita? In your current condition, you are a liability. I’m making sure you survive this without burning my place down.” He winks. “And maybe you’ll think I’m a good person.”
There it is again. That disappointing feeling. Why does it keep coming up around him, more and more?
Agoodperson. He is alluding to our bargain. The conference. Mr. Duncan’s advice was to bring me along to convince the white whale. Luke’s behavior makes sense with that in mind. If I let him help, he can hold it over me as another bargaining chip when the time comes. Not that he isn’t already racking up enough emotional manipulation points by rescuing me from?—
The situation he’s contributed to. Me not having a place to stay. Though, how does one complain when given the most luxurious room to stay in? It’s harder, that’s for sure. How evil of him. The man with a sinfully attractive face and an even more appealing body is playing me like a fiddle.
My brain hurts thinking about those consequences, and in the end, it’s a nasty, spoiled smell wafting through the air that makes the decision for me. I run to take out the herbed egg from the oven.
The top has blackened. It’s unsalvageable.
Luke wisely says nothing as I morosely dispose of the mess in the bin. And he remains strategically silent as I gather my notes into a pile and bring them over to him so he can see the diagrams I’ve made. “The brief is to make a dish featuring eggs as the protein. It has to be both innovative and practical.”
“That’s a contradiction.”
I secretly agree, but don’t say so.
“Well, the whole purpose of a meal kit is that the food has to be engaging enough for a person to want to cook, but it also can’t be too intimidating. The customer needs to believe they too can learn new techniques and pull off cuisines they haven’t tried before, which is why I have to stand out with something they probably haven’t cooked before to win. My first thought was to use the egg itself in an unusual way. For example, instead of a breakfast burrito that uses a tortilla shell, I could use the egg as the outer vessel and roll it up with spicy sausage, cheese, and fresh avocado salsa on the inside.”
“That’s an omelet.”
“No. It’s atwiston a breakfast burrito.”
“Also known as an omelet.”
“In case you are wondering,” I say through gritted teeth, “your contribution as an assistant so far leaves much to be desired.”
“A crushing blow to my manhood. So you’ve moved on from the idea of doing an omelet parading around as a breakfast burrito?—”
“Only because I realized that getting a layer of egg to be uniformly round and in the perfect thickness to be rolled is deceivingly hard to do. Not everyone can do that. And one of the chief characteristics of an excellent meal kit is that results need to be achievableeachandeverytime. So I had to ask myself, what other meal can a customer recreate perfectly and consistently in a fixed and reasonable time? For that is important too. No one wants to spend hours on a meal kit. Results have to be achievable within thirty to forty minutes at the most.”
“You’ve given this a decent amount of thought,” says Luke with not a small amount of surprise.
“Of course, I have. After my experimentations with breakfast burritos led me to disappointing results, I moved on to reimagining a Shakshuka.”
I describe the poached egg dish in rushed detail, running down the ingredient list of tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, and its commonly used spices of cumin, paprika, and cayenne pepper.
I tell Luke how the dish comes with controversy, as there are competing claims of origin ranging from Algeria to Morocco to Yemen and more. I also briefly mention how some cooks add sheep milk cheese, harissa, or preserved lemon to give a variation in taste and flavor. And that if the eggs are scrambled instead of poached, the dish becomes more like a Turkish Menemen.
“So you’re making a Shak-shik?”
“Shakshuka. And I was,” I say, grabbing my bowl of green goop and placing it under Luke’s nose. “The plan was to make it green as my own unique twist on the traditional red one, but then I was faced with a brand new set of problems.”
