The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,34
a soul that was much older than his thirty-year-old face, and he had a knack for corralling the kitchen like a wise old sheepdog, nudging the young cooks along, smoothing tensions, making puns in Spanish to Elena to make her laugh, making filthy jokes to appeal to Ivan’s sick humor.
Last to arrive each day was always Ivan, who swaggered in around ten, drinking hot water with lemon and bringing with him a collection of CDs for the day. His taste ran to baroque classical and old Led Zeppelin.
Thus began the music wars. Juan liked ranchero music. Elena’s tastes ran to girl singers—Norah Jones, k.d. lang, some Lucinda Williams. The ski boys groaned over all of it, but she simply couldn’t stand the hip hop and hard-line rock they liked. Ivan took over the music realm, and Elena allowed it, mainly because they agreed that Bruce Springsteen and Mellencamp were gods.
Each day, Elena or Juan gave a lesson in some finer point of the staples they’d utilize—how to make beautiful tortillas, corn and white, and tie corn husks for tamales, and skin chiles without being blistered, and make a mole.
Finally, then, they would start cooking. Trying dishes, scribbling recipes, tasting them, serving them, making notes, trying them again. Over and over.
At lunch she took Alvin out for a walk, reveling in the light, thin air, the color of the sky. Afternoons she spent on administrative tasks—creating schedules, creating ordering lists, setting up the computer models that would streamline her life later.
In the evenings, exhausted and stiff, she sometimes had supper with Patrick, but mostly they were both so tired they went home—he to pore over restaurant supply catalogues and Internet sources, she to comb through cookbooks and food theory.
Rasputin was not thrilled about being demoted to sous chef, and Elena suspected he’d never been a joy for a woman in his kitchen—he was old-school, battle-minded and arrogant. In the small kitchen, she found herself sometimes deliberately crowded and bumped, but after a few days, when she didn’t respond to any of his intimidations, even he mellowed out—by all accounts he was lucky to have a job at all.
By the end of five weeks, they had most of a menu and most of a dining room. Patrick had assembled a staff for the front of the house, and Elena had been doing interviews for three days to round out the back—prep cooks and dishwashers and runners.
In the darkness of her condo, with faraway stars winking overhead, Elena’s body began to relax.
They were ready, at least for a series of tastings. They would prepare and serve the menu for three different groups. The first would be for the restaurant staff, the second for some of Julian’s business associates, and the third and final would be for a local group they would hustle up by any means necessary—relatives of the staff, local businesspeople, neighbors—to come and eat for free and help them test not only the food itself, but the training of the staff, front and back.
And that was a lot, Elena thought, drifting off. A lot.
In a rattletrap trailer without any heat, Ivan Santino cranked open the panels of the window and lit a joint. His hands shook slightly, the legacy of a heavy night of drinking and a nightmare. The nightmare was old, as faded in places as a movie that had run too many times, but there was still enough red evil in it to blister him into wakefulness. Some people took tranks and antidepressants and god knew what else, all neatly prescribed by doctors so everybody could get rich. He figured a little weed was better all around. Fast and efficient—even as he held the smoke in his lungs, the edge of terror bled away. Another hit, deep and thick into his lungs, and the slight trembling of his hands eased. It was good shit, from his buddy Billy Kite, a native like himself, who supplied half of Pitkin County with whatever it wanted—meth, pot, crack, pills—a luxurious business in a town with too much money and plenty of time to play. Billy drove a Lexus SUV.
Ivan took one last toke, very short, and pinched the end of the joint between his calloused forefinger and thumb to save for another time. Thoughtfully, he blew it out and sat admiring the meadow beyond the trailer, an open stretch of long, pale green grasses and tiny mountain daisies. On the horizon was a line of dark clouds edged by dawn. A weathery