The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,56
ambled in right behind Elena. They retreated to the locker room to put on their chef’s whites and clogs.
“The rules of this competition are simple,” Juan said. “You will each make three dishes—an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert. You need to make enough to serve twenty—all of us and the judges we have coming from other restaurants. We’ll vote and decide who is the winner.”
Ivan smiled, very slowly, and bowed toward Elena.
“Be ready to serve at eleven sharp, and you can use anything in the kitchen, but you also have to use these ingredients.” He smiled, Pancho Villa in his younger years, and gestured to the bags. “Boys, show them what they have to work with.”
“I’m ‘P’ for Peter, and I chose…” He paused for effect. “…pomegranates.”
Ivan laughed, low and happily. Elena nodded.
“Buckwheat honey,” said Brent.
“Huevos,” said Hector, grinning at the double entendre, a slang word for testicles, as he put two dozen eggs on the table. The others laughed.
“Rose petals,” said Roberto, revealing a bouquet of fresh pink roses, just barely opening. The room roared with approval. He blushed deep red, looking pleased.
“Corn,” said Cody, smirking.
“My man,” Ivan crowed.
Elena groaned. “I should have seen that coming.”
“Achiote,” said Alan, and Elena nodded, a dozen ideas arriving at once.
Juan went last. He grinned, his liquid black eyes twinkling, and brought out several bottles of tamarind-flavored Mexican soda. “Jarritos,” he said.
“That’s cheating,” Cody said. “That’s a brand name, not an ingredient.”
“So?” He shrugged.
“I’m cool with it,” Elena said. “Rasputin?”
“It’s all good.”
Juan looked at his watch. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Elena said.
“Ready,” Ivan agreed.
“Go!” He brought down his hand. Ivan raced for the walk-in. Elena went to the table and looked at the ingredients, letting her left brain go blank while the colors and scents and textures of the food mingled, swirled. She opened the honey and smelled an English summer afternoon. The buzz of bees, heavy and lazy and deep, the delicacy of rose petals and hearty shortbread and Earl Grey tea. She opened a bottle of Mexican soda and took a sip, delicately rolling it through her mouth like wine, picking up traces of mango and lime, which would pair with the pomegranate and—she narrowed her eyes—pork. Pork sausage? Yes, pork sausage grilled with onions and then stewed in the soda and pomegranates. Baked into a rustic crust, English-style. And shortbread cookies with candied rose petals and rose water. A very light appetizer, then. How to work in the corn?
Ugh. She’d think about it while she got the pie going.
At the back of the house in Espanola had been a one-car garage, converted in the late sixties to a poker room. A big round table sat in the middle of it, and cast-off kitchen chairs made of chrome and vinyl lined the sides. The smell of a million cigarettes and ten thousand cigars clung to the unfinished walls.
Serious poker was played in that room. With beer and tequila, Jack Daniels if somebody was feeling flush. Men played, not women. Never a woman, though sometimes there were women sitting on the sidelines, dressed up for the evening, cleavage showing, eyes lined thickly in black.
But as with everything, Isobel had been driven to be as good as a boy, and she wanted to learn to play poker like the men. She badgered Edwin to teach them. On long summer afternoons, they learned to play, finding relief in the thick shade cast by an ancient cottonwood whose leaves clattered softly overhead in the odd breeze. The Rio Grande lazed by, coppery and clear.
Isobel was too impatient to be a good poker player, in the end, but Elena, who had spent so much time observing the behavior of others, keeping track of what a roomful of possibly dangerous strangers might be thinking, proved to be very, very good. Edwin took such pride in her that he let her tag along to his games sometimes, and even play with the guys once in a while.
Of all the things she’d learned, those poker games had been the training that stood by her best as she struggled to survive as a woman in kitchens. Poker had lent her steely nerves and an ability to bluff, and an ability to hold her liquor. Tonight, in the kitchen, she played her ace. She slid her pies in the oven and glanced toward Ivan’s side of the kitchen. He was dancing to his own music, chopping and bouncing and humming under his breath. As he felt her gaze, he looked up and winked.