Friday! and I am quite ready for the weekend. It was a bit of a long week for me. But we are on the last prompt of the week so lets make these fifteen minutes count. Timers set and off we go.
I like the idea of this character. No clue what the story is, but I feel like I could really do something with the character.
Friday, September 25th: The cheese melted.
The cheese melted. She added another handful of cubed cheese to the pot. She watched the cubes dissolve, loosing their edges. She then stirred. She had already taken the pot off the heat and it was just the residual heat in the creamy sauce that was causing the cheese cubes to dissolved into a delicious cheesy sauce.
She loved making the cheese sauce. It was one of her duties as a child. Mac and cheese was always a welcome addition at their table but she proved to be allergic to something they put in the processed versions. She couldn’t eat the frozen ones or the powdered mixes without breaking out in hives.
For a time mac and cheese was off the meal plan for the family. Her brothers had not been happy. Her mother’s cooking skills involved adding water and using the microwave. Which was a step above her father’s culinary skills. He never managed to add the right amount of water no matter what the package said. He also tended to burn things in the microwave and just ordered take out when he was faced with meal options. The take out was always pepperoni pizza because he wasn’t inclined to listen to debates and he didn’t like anything other than peperoni on his pizza. When he ordered you could eat the slice with peperoni or take it off and just have the cheese pizza.
After several dirty looks from her brothers regarding the lack of mac and cheese, she learned to make it on her own. She learned how to melt the butter and then add the flour to make a roux and cook off the raw taste of the flour. She then added the milk and cream and learned how to watch for it to simmer so she would know when to take it off the heat to add the cheese without having a dairy overflow.
To her surprise she found she liked the process. She even liked determining the details. She liked choosing the cheeses, how much salt to add and when to add each thing. She also liked adjusting the flavors, although adjusting when she still lived at home was not encouraged. Once she could make the basic mac and cheese she could occasionally play with the shape of the pasta used for the mac and cheese but even then there was a limited variety they were willing to accept. It ranged from small elbow macaroni to tiny shells of pasta. Even the smaller bowtie pasta was considered too much of a deviation.
Once she had the recipe down, she looked up other things to try, an entire world opening up for her. It was not a world the rest of the family intended to visit. Once she moved out she began experimenting. After a life time of limited flavors she was up to try just about anything. She had a loaded spice rack and an array of potted herbs on nearly every windowsill in her apartment. She was lucky that she was in the corner apartment with southern exposure. Once she had the small pot of herbs it kept growing as long as she limited her cuttings. The small bundles of herbs she could pick up at the store were too expensive to pick up often. Today however was not the day for exotic. Today was a comfort food day. She would add peas to the mac and cheese, a blasphemy as far as her brothers were concerned, but over all it would be the same recipe. The day had just been so strange, she felt as though she needed the anchoring in something familiar.
