Morning all. I hope you are having a fantastic morning. We have reached the end of March. Normally I say things about the month flying by but this month seemed to have dragged on for me. I think it might have felt that way because we had at least three of the four seasons all crammed into one month. Even though it will probably get progressively hotter from here on into summer (and I will probably complain about the heat at some point) I am just ready to have the weather commit to a single season. And as I live in an area where the summer is strong enough to clobber all other seasons I know it will just be heat and humidity until fall and winter combine to break summer’s hold. Also I get migraines when the pressure drops or rises too fast and the constant changes meant that most of the month my head felt like it was going to explode. Happy to leave that behind. But we have the last prompt of March so let’s line it up and see what becomes of it. Timers se for fifteen and off we go.
I like the set up of this. Someone deciding they can use another person but not actually understanding what they are asking. It can lead not only to family drama but a clash of egos and familial guilt. It is kind of a meaty set up. I’d need to think through the particulars but it could be fun to play with.
Tuesday, March 31st: I stared at the recipe.
I stared at the recipe. It was in fact, one of several I had to line up in order for the upcoming dinner. I was used to cooking for the house. I had even made several fancier dishes. I graduated culinary school if not at the very top of my class than that was only because the two rockstar students of the class were impossible to beat.
Plus the competition between the two of them was fierce and no one wanted to be seen as competition. To be seen as competition was to make both of them enemies and it was safer in the pack not drawing their attention. But I was in the top tier of the pack.
This was something else entirely. I looked at the recipe again. I could do it, I could create all of the recipes but it would take time. I looked around the kitchen. It was set up well, I had to admit that. The problem was there was no one but me in it. These were the sort of recipes that generally required a brigade to pull off.
Marcus had been thrilled to see me when I arrived home. I was staying for the summer. My plan involved working at one of the local restaurants until I decided where I wanted to be. I also thought I should be home for a bit. I had been away a while and the messages I was getting seemed to grow stranger. There were gaps and slight worries that peppered any messages I received from home in the past few months.
The gist of them seemed to be that I shouldn’t concern myself as there was nothing I could do from far away. It made me think there was some problem I didn’t know about. I had contacted one of the restaurants run by an old friend of the family. A place was held for me but it was a tentative agreement. The owner, Steve thought I should talk to my family before committing.
It added worry to my concern.
Then Marcus informed me they bought an Inn with a restaurant attached. Not a bed and breakfast but a full-scale restaurant. And it seemed I had come home just in time to help out with the launch of the restaurant. Marcus claimed that the person they hired was delayed. He then informed me the menu was set and all I had to do was follow the recipes. He then handed me the recipes and the menu and dropped me off in the kitchen.
The nicely appointed and completely devoid of food kitchen.
Marcus used words like fresh and cooked to order somehow believing that both of those meant there was no prep work involved. That the kitchen was silent until the order came in and then raw ingredients were fetched from the fridge and turned into the dish.
None of the recipes he handed me worked like that. There were sauces that needed to simmer, meats that needed to braise and a host of other issues. ‘Not the least is the menu itself.’
It was all over the place. There were dishes from nearly every continent. There were old school dishes that I doubted many people would order as well as more modern ones that would require specialty equipment to pull off.
‘Unless he had tanks of liquid nitrogen stashed in the back that I don’t know about.’ In addition, the type of food varied from fine dining to fast food. It was in short an ill conceived mess.
Ten til Midnight 