by MJ Post
“And that means?”
“You never know what any day will bring. You know — one day you worry about me, and the next day brings what it brings.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Whatever, Toby. I meant it, okay?”
Shelley summoned them to begin their pantry shopping, told them to take their time because it was a high-interest match-up.
Kacie went first to the aisle with the Asian ingredients. Gochugaru, hot pepper flakes — there was only a low-grade brand, but she had no other options. Gochujang, red pepper paste — also a bad brand, but she was stuck with it. Sesame oil, dried anchovies, dried kelp.
“What are you making, Chef Lee?” from Shelley as she and Vince followed.
“Kimchi stew. We call it kimchi jigae.”
“You didn’t take any kimchi.”
“This pantry only has crap. I made some when I got here. I’ll go get it from upstairs.”
“What makes your kimchi better?”
“Fresh ingredients, no preservatives, my special spice blend, and the way I cut the veggies. Keep up.”
She zoomed to the vegetable bins. White onion, scallion, tofu steaks, daikon. Toby was there, being filmed by Ricky and Derrick, examining broccoli. She ignored him, took her loaded cart to the spice aisle. Sugar, sea salt. MSG? Sure, who cared what Buster thought? A few more condiments. No — forgot something. Back to vegetables. Brown potatoes.
“Do potatoes go in the stew?”
“No. They’re for a side.”
“You already made a potato side before.”
“That was a main dish. This will be a street food called tornado potatoes. Trust me.”
“Are you worried you could lose to Chef Brutus?”
“Yeah, he’s excellent. But I have a great plan, so we’ll see.”
“Will you still be friends after this?”
“Yeah. What are we, six?”
Kacie brought her cart to the holding area where a staffer would take it to Kitchen One. “Okay, I’m going upstairs for my kimchi.”
The elevators were slow, so she ran up in the stairwell to the common kitchen, got a stool and climbed and looked in the cabinet. Her kimchi jars weren’t there. She got down and started opening cabinets. Where the hell were they? Not there, not there — okay, good, she had found them. She took two jars, one for the stew, one for banchan. Back in Kitchen One, she was stopped at the entrance by Madame Queen.
“Did you ask my permission to use those jars, Chef Lee?”
“Yeah, I did, Madame. A week ago. You said, ‘We’ll see.’”
“Now, you must persuade me.”
“On-camera or off?”
“Off first. Then on.”
“Okay. A Korean cook who can’t make her own kimchi can’t use her full skills. Kimchi is a personal signature.”
“Hm. Not persuaded.”
“You’ll enjoy this a lot more than the store-bought shit in the pantry, and my queen should have food fit for her royal self.”
Madame Queen smiled. “There you go. Permission granted. We’ll repeat this discussion on-camera.”
“Madame — Chef Lestrade — do you really think it’s fair to use Toby’s feelings for me against him?”
“Leave that to me.”
“But it’s about him and me, and that could last after the show.”
“Do you wish it to?”
“Yeah, I do, but you shouldn’t be involved.”
“And yet I am. The boy’s parents are useless. He is better in my sphere than theirs.”
“Okay. I didn’t know that. So you think you’re looking out for him?”
Madame turned. “I am your queen. I am looking out for everyone.”
What had the paper been about?
Now the judge was on her phone. Feeling dismissed, Kacie took the kimchi to her station. Buster lumbered toward her.
“Let me taste that.”
“Piss off. You’ll just say you can copy it.”
“You saying I can’t?”
“Did you copy my udon yesterday? What did you feed Eloise?”
“She ate it up. It was better than yours.”
“Okay. Whatever. Hit the road.”
“And if I don’t?”
Kacie thought a moment. “I’ll tell Eloise you showed me your dick and it was the size of a cocktail weenie.”
Shelley called Kacie over and she and Madame Queen performed an on-camera reenactment of their conversation about the kimchi. Meanwhile, Toby laid out what looked like baking ingredients.
“Are you making a rattlesnake pie?” Kacie asked him.
“Chicken and dumplings — without the chicken. Snake’s not chicken, but I’ll make it work.”
“Not Cajun flavored, right?”
“No, not Cajun. Hearty.”
“Umami?”
“You could say that.”
“I did say it. Now tell me.”
“Hearty Southern flavors aren’t umami exactly. It’s more about depth. One flavor yields to the next and the next. Savor the bite as it transforms on your palate.”
“Okay.”
“Sounds good?”
“Yeah, Toby, it sounds good. You should record that for a commercial or put it on your restaurant website. Okay, listen. That paper Nina gave you, I’m worried about it.”
“Don’t worry.” He turned away.
“Did you read it? What is it?”
“I didn’t, but when I do, you’ll be the first person I talk to if I need to talk.”
They were called to their marks. Shelley yelled some interlopers out of the room. Finally they started cooking.
Kacie grabbed two whole snakes. To her relief, they were butchered — the entrails and the spine were gone. She put on the anchovy stock to cook — daikon, scallion tops, kelp, the anchovies. Watched it while cutting up the first snake and removing small bones. Adjusted the temp on the stock, tasted it. It needed something. She added some kelp, took a look at Toby’s work. A stand mixer, some room-temp butter. Right, dumplings. Southern-style dumplings were all flour, no filling, in a white gravy. How would he build flavors into that? She chopped up the other snake, then started slicing the tofu steaks into narrower strips. The stock was done.
Toby stepped close to her station and leaned over the pot, took a deep whiff, and smiled.
Kacie didn’t want him there. “I have to strain it. Move.” She poured the mixture into a strainer, put the stock into a smaller pot. Toby approached again, this time with a spoonful of gravy. She tasted it. He’d started with a roux and flavored it with whatever he’d deglazed from his pan of rattlesnake. She tasted some vegetable stock in there.
“You need to balance out that broccoli flavor,” she told him.
“Thought so,” he answered.
“Okay, get out of here.” Kacie started a new and shallower pot on the burner. She smelled the two jars of kimchi, a baechu or cabbage variety and a chonggak or bachelor radish type, tasted a sample from each, selected the baechu for the recipe and emptied it into the pot. The chonggak kimchi would be her banchan for the dish. After it had heated up, she began to add rattlesnake to the mixture. She had cut up a lot more than she needed for this size pot, she realized; maybe she could grill some of the extra with salt and pepper for a crew snack. As she tasted the developing flavors, she realized the rattlesnake added a lot less to the stew than pork would have, and carefully measured some MSG for the pot, adding it incrementally to avoid overloading the dish with umami. Of course, Shelley was there the moment that happened, forcing her to defend her use of the ingredient for American audiences.
“Oh, come on,” she told the camera. “Chinese restaurant syndrome, right? That’s just caused by people pigging out. MSG doesn’t have anything in it that soy beans and seaweed don’t.”
“Did you learn to use MSG in culinary school?” Shelley asked.
“No, I learned from my mother when I was five, and I figured it out on my own from there. I don’t use it all the time, but this ra
ttlesnake’s too bland. Most of the umami’s coming from the anchovy stock, but I just need a little more, okay?”
Kacie had added the rattlesnake later than she would have added pork, since it was leaner and would cook faster. She sliced the scallions diagonally into the pot and let the mixture cook for a while. That gave her time to look over at Toby, who was deeply focused on a saucepan. He didn’t notice her staring at him. He looked alone. Some of her anger drained away. Cooking and competing were still her priority, but Toby looked abandoned; it was hard to see him that way. She wanted him to smile. She wouldn’t defeat herself if she took a little time to interact with him somehow.
The other chefs were watching in a cluster, just out of camera range. Only the large wheeled camera was in use; Ricky, with the handheld, must have been on break.
Toby wasn’t alert to anything but his food.
Kacie remembered what Eloise had done during their cook-off a few nights before. She looked around for a wooden spoon. She couldn’t find one. Okay, there was a work-around. She smiled at the camera, hoped it didn’t look fake, then walked toward Toby as quietly as she could, and smacked him on the butt full-force with her right hand.
Toby gave him a little jump and straightened.
“More to come, country boy,” she told him.
Toby gave her an awkward grin. “Well, I figure that made my day.”
Kacie returned to her station to applause from cast and crew. She vaguely heard a sound-byte, Eloise referring to sportsmanship, as she peeled potatoes. Once the potatoes were done, it was time to finish the stew with the hot spices. First, she added the gochugaru carefully, tasting as she went. The cheap brand lacked the proper heat. Same for the gochujang. No, it was too hot, it had to be moderated. When she was satisfied with the flavor profile, she turned off the heat, transferred the stew to its serving tureen, and layered the tofu slices across the top. The tureen went on a bamboo tray next to multiple dishes of the radish banchan. Now it was time for the potatoes. It had taken hours of practice to get the spiral cut just right, but once she had mastered that bit of prep, her tornado potatoes — a Korean style of curly fries -- had been just as much a hit at Townsend Harris volleyball games as they were at Seoul street pushcarts. They’d be a winner here as well. Toby was done and watched as Kacie stood over the fryer making a whole tray of skewers for the entire crew.
It was late, and everyone gobbled the potatoes. Kacie sampled Toby’s dish. He’d created amazing notes of butter and cinnamon in the gravy, coaxed a fork-split tenderness from the snake meat, and given the dumplings a dual texture, slick on the outside and heavy and dry within. The side dish was broccoli prepared sous vide, with melted pimento cheese sauce. Kacie didn’t enjoy her first taste of pimento cheese, but she praised the rest. “It’s really good, but it would be better with chicken. The snake is seasoned pretty well, though.”
“It’s more like tilapia, I think. It responds to garlic and ginger and pepper.” Toby walked her over to her own station and tried some stew left over in the pot. “Oh, lordy. That is heavenly. You made the kimchi yourself, right?”
Kacie nodded.
“You’ll teach me, after we get out of here?”
Kacie nodded again.
The other chefs joined them, exploring their stations. Then Shelley, done with setups for the official tasting, arrived as well. “You two just made our promotional video for Restaurant Week. I decided. Feeling okay?”
“I always feel good when my dish comes out right,” Toby said.
Eventually Madame Queen returned from a phone conversation in the hallway, quickly polished off her portion of tornado potatoes, and delivered her first on-camera speech.
“Today has been a day of painful lessons. Yes, your queen has learned, to her pain, that she is not rid of her ex-husband. Chef Brutus and Chef Camacho have learned the penalty for failing to keep it real. Chef Lee has learned that innocent souls are often caught in a crossfire. And everyone except Chefs Brutus and Lee have learned from tonight’s cook-off how dangerous their opponents truly are. Our winner, Chef Chen, has the day off from competition here, but she won’t be idle. Instead, she will be a guest on another program tomorrow, Sichuan With Style — perhaps some of you watch it? She will appear on-camera as a helper to Hammer Chef Sichuan, Teng Xiulan. Now, I am hungry.”
She stepped over to the two serving trays and waved her hand upward to transmit the aromas to her nose, although neither dish was piping hot anymore.
“Winner for plating, Chef Lee. Tremendous visual appeal.”
She tasted the dumplings, the gravy, the rattlesnake, the broccoli and sauce from Toby’s dish. Then, switching to chopsticks and to a plastic Asian-style soup spoon, she tasted the tofu, snake, vegetables, and broth from the kimchi stew.
“Use of the protein goes to Chef Brutus for larger, more flavorful portions of rattlesnake. Clearly your prior experience with this meat assisted you tonight. Overall dish quality… Let me think. For creativity, I shall select as the winner … Chef Lee. Chef Brutus, your dish was very well seasoned, as always, and in fact it is faultless, except, perhaps, for the melted pimento. However, it is less ambitious. Strike two. Good night.”
The chefs began to discuss the outcome. Shelley and Ricky went to the lounge with Toby. Kacie listened blankly to congratulations, felt Eloise’s arm around her shoulders, ignored what the blond said. Her head spun. She’d beaten Toby, not an easy thing to do, considering he had already triumphed in two cook-offs, even against the highly favored Chef Hamilton. He had known in advance that she had been cooking to win, and he’d been okay with it — but would he still feel the same about her?
Well, if he didn’t, he didn’t. He’d created the problem.
Her dish had been better.
Kacie wanted to be with Toby, didn’t want to lose him. He was a great chef, she knew that, born to it like her, with natural gifts and a passion for the work. They were equals. But if he hated her for beating him, what then?
She was twenty-four and she knew better. He was also twenty-four; he should also know better. Shouldn’t he?
She went to her station and gobbled a portion of her stew. It was brilliant, but the rattlesnake meat was underwhelming. She tried Toby’s food again. His recipe had been boring, but he’d given the snake flesh a stunning delicacy. If the judge had based the result on the ingredient instead of upon the overall dish, she would surely have lost.
They came and took her to the lounge. No sign of Toby. She sat in the usual interview seat opposite the director.
Kacie: “What did Toby say?”
Shelley: “Nothing bad.”
“Kacie: “Can you play it back for me?”
Ricky: “Yuh. Hang on.”
Toby (recorded): “I’d prefer a win myself, but if it’s anyone but me, then I want Chef Lee to win. I really admire her drive.”
Shelley (recorded): “Did you think she had the better dish?”
Toby (recorded): “Well, I had a rough day, so maybe so. I trust Madame’s judgment. But against anyone but Chef Lee, my dish would have won tonight.”
Shelley (recorded): “Does this affect your relationship with Chef Lee?”
Toby (recorded): “Not at all. I messed up this morning. Madame thought I had it coming, so her decision doesn’t surprise me.”
Shelley (recorded): “You went from no strikes to two in one day. Are you in trouble?”
Toby (recorded): “Probably, but I can still win, any time till I get strike three.”
Ricky turned off the playback.
Shelley (live): “He’s a gentleman.”
Kacie: “Do you think he’s mad at me?”
Shelley: “Mostly at himself, I think. Nice move slapping his ass, right?”
Kacie: “Well, it’s good for the show. You ever get your ass slapped, Ricky?”
Ricky: “Yuh. Bondage club in Allentown my friend took me to. Cost twenty dollars, came with a free saketini.”
Shelley: “Okay, let’s get down to
it. Why do you think you won?”
Kacie: “I think my dish was more ambitious and more elaborate. Kimchi jigae is practically the national dish of South Korea. I’ve made it so often, I know how to get the seasoning right and how to match sides with it.”
Shelley: “Tornado potatoes aren’t really banchan, though.”
Kacie: “Yeah, they aren’t, but I wanted to make something extra for everyone.”
Ricky: “They were yummy.”
Shelley: “How will this win affect your relationship with Chef Brutus?”
Kacie: “He knows I can’t take it easy. I always try to be the best. He’s the same. I hope he likes that about me and nothing changes. I do hate seeing him get strikes, because he’s just excellent.”
MADAME QUEEN’S CHEF SHOWDOWN
DAY 7
Winner: Maryann
Strike Two: Toby, Maryann
Strike One: Buster, Eloise, Kacie, Louie, Vegas
No strikes yet: Alia
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Take the bite”
Kacie retreated to the common-room. Everyone was being interviewed, since there was extra time that night, so she was alone with the TV. She watched a news show without awareness. Where was Toby?
Eloise and Alia came up in the elevator and sat with her, one on each side. The two effectively neutralized each other. Eloise couldn’t play mind games with Alia there; Alia couldn’t say anything personal with Eloise there.
They sat a long time, all gathering strength for later efforts. Vegas came up alone and went into the dorms. Louie arrived and sat with Alia, holding her hand with a serious expression. Buster brought an open bottle of wine and poured for everyone, double for himself.
“Where’d you get that?” Louie asked.
“Left over from another show. They put two downstairs in the Kitchen One fridge.”
Kacie took a glass. Beating Toby didn’t feel like a triumph. She wanted to see him. She was mad about his blunder earlier but felt worse that it had hit him so hard. Now she herself was safe, but he was at risk of elimination if he had a bad day.
But Madame Queen had implied she was looking out for him in the place of his parents. What had put that in her head?