The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,74
One of the seeds popped out and hit my glasses. I squealed in surprise, then smacked the fruit down onto the counter. “This was supposed to be fun. All I wanted to do was invite a few women over for a nice, simple dinner party, see if I could help them make friends, find a connection. Buy some bread, make a green salad, roast a chicken, and boom! Dinner is served.
“But nooo. Calvin said that wasn’t festive enough. ‘Bake some homemade breadsticks,’ he says. ‘Roast some butternut squash and fennel for the salad. Throw in some pomegranate seeds for color and a citrus vinaigrette for flavor. And why not duck à l’orange?’ he says. ‘If you’re going to the trouble to roast a chicken, you might as well make a duck. It’s not that much more complicated,’ he says.”
“Is it?”
“I bought a five-pound duck. So far, I think it’s given off six pounds of grease.”
Just then, as if to underscore my point, the smoke alarm emitted an unrelenting, ear-piercing screech. Pris sprang into action, snatching a dish towel from the counter and flapping it through the air like a flag of surrender, trying to clear the smoke. At the same time, I shoved my hand into a mitt and opened the door to the oven, releasing a choking cloud of greasy, duck-scented smoke. Pris gave up flapping the towel and ran to the back door, opening and closing it over and over. I took the bird out of the oven, eyes watering from the sting of smoke, ears ringing from the wail of the alarm, and plopped the roasting pan onto the counter before taking up Pris’s abandoned dish towel and flapping it as hard and fast as I could. When the air finally cleared and the alarm ceased squealing, I inspected the duck.
“Uh . . . is the skin supposed to be that black?” Pris asked.
“What do you think?”
I stabbed a meat thermometer into the fleshy part of the bird with enough force to kill it a second time, then tilted my head backward and shouted at the ceiling in a voice I hoped was loud enough to be heard in Manhattan. “Calvin, I hope your next cake falls flat! I hope your meringue separates and your pie crusts have soggy bottoms!”
“Maybe you can salvage it,” Pris said hopefully. “What if you took the skin off and sliced the meat from the bones?”
I removed the thermometer and looked at the gauge. “One hundred and thirty degrees. How can a bird that has been in the oven that long and has skin the color of coal be almost raw inside? How?”
Pris stood by, waiting patiently while I piled more curses on Calvin’s head. “Really,” she said when I finished. “What are you going to serve for dinner?”
“Well, not this. We’d all end up in the hospital with ptomaine.” I picked up the roasting pan, carried it across the kitchen, and tipped the contents unceremoniously into the trash can.
“You still got the salad though, right? That looks really good.” Pris peered into the big bowl of greens topped with a mixture of roasted butternut squash, fennel, and candied pecans. I wasn’t sure if it looked “really good” or not; maybe it would after I tossed in the pomegranate arils. But at least it was edible, which was more than you could say for the rest of the meal. “What about the breadsticks?” Pris asked. “Did you make those yet?”
“Just the dough,” I said, pointing to a counter covered with an avalanche of flour and a beachfront of broken eggshells, where the mound of uncooked dough sat resting under a tea towel.
“Okay, so you’ve got bread and salad. That’s a start,” Pris said in a deliberately encouraging tone. “What can we serve for the main course?”
“No clue. But I know for sure what the appetizer will be.”
I opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a bottle of chilled pinot grigio.
“THIS IS AMAZING,” Caroline declared, chewing and talking at the same time.
Felicia bit into her last slice and declared it delicious. “I never thought about putting bacon and egg on a pizza before.”
“Can I have the recipe?” Polly asked, taking a bite and stretching out her slice so the glob of smoked gouda became a cheesy string.
“You’ll have to ask the chef,” I said, tipping my wineglass toward Pris. “My only contribution was a kitchen that looks like a combat zone and an emotional meltdown.”