Kitchen Chaos (20 page)

Everyone laughs. The buzzer goes off. Our baguettes look professional—all of them. Chef passes around little dishes of butter, and we all devour our bread until we can't possibly swallow another bite—including Frankie and her mom, whose baguettes look (and sound) more like breadsticks, and my mother, who seems to have decided that she's a bread person, at least for today. I tear off a piece of our last loaf and offer it to Javier, who smiles and holds out his hand. When I give it to him, I'm pretty sure that at least one of my fingers touches one of his.

Tanya, our gym teacher, talks about karma. When she's not teaching middle school kids, she's a yoga instructor at one of those yoga studios in Manhattan that you read about celebrities going to. Tanya says she's a student of “Eastern philosophies,” and she told us karma is basically the law of cause and effect: If you put positive stuff out into the world, you're going to get positive stuff back. The same goes for the negative stuff. It's probably bad karma to say this,
but for the first time, I think I understand why my mom divorced my dad. Or at least I understand one of the reasons. Right now I sort of want to divorce him too.

Yesterday, before we all said good-bye and left cooking class for the last time, Frankie, Lillian, and I told Chef Antonio that we had finally decided what we were going to make for our Immigration Museum exhibit: bagels. We all love them, they're totally New York City and part of the whole melting-pot food tradition, and we have an amazing diorama to go along with them, thanks to Lillian's incredible art skills. We thought Chef would think it was a great idea too, but instead, he shook his head.

“With the right recipe, homemade bagels are delicious,
chicas
, but they're very difficult to make. And they take so long—there are so many steps. Just to start, the dough needs a lot of time to rise, even more than was needed for our baguettes. When did you say this school event is happening?”

“Monday night,” all three of us said at once. We've been working toward it for so long, we could probably all recite the date in our sleep.

Chef shook his head some more. Not a good sign. “
Ay
, no, no, no. Bagel dough needs to rise in the refrigerator overnight. You'd have to start right now. Then tomorrow you'd still need to let the dough sit at room temperature for an hour, shape the bagels, boil them, and
then
bake them. But then they would be stale, day-old bagels for your big party, and that won't be very tasty. I'm sorry,
hijas
, but I think it's time to come up with a Plan B, as Javi likes to say.”

Plan B? It took a month for us to agree on our Plan A! Frankie, Lillian, and I must have looked as depressed as I felt, because Chef Antonio suddenly went into crisis intervention mode.

“Chins up,
chicas
!” he practically commanded. “Bagels are bread, right? And we just had our bread class! You're all experts at the baguette
now, why don't you make a few of those for your presentation?”

Everyone in the class nodded their heads and said things like, “Great idea!” and “Problem solved!” Everyone except the three of us, that is.

“It has to be something that people think of as an ‘American' food,” Frankie said in a really flat voice. “Everybody knows baguettes are from France.”

Chef shrugged, ignoring her tone. “Okay, so no baguettes. But don't worry, I'm full of ideas. Isn't that right, Javier?”

Javier rolled his eyes.

Chef Antonio ignored him. “Let's see. . . . Naan is too Indian, ciabatta's too Italian. . . . Scones?”

Frankie shook her head. “Too English.”

“Es verdad,”
Chef said. “This is true. Well, then, how about rolls? You could do pumpernickel rolls, hamburger rolls, sourdough rolls—”

Lillian's head snapped up. She didn't look depressed anymore. “I love sourdough rolls!” she
squealed in a very un-Lillian-like way. “But sourdough is from San Francisco, right? Like me.”

Chef smiled and winked at Lillian. “Ah, well, this is the interesting thing about the history of a country of immigrants, right,
niña
? It's true that sourdough—like you—arrived in New York and the rest of America from San Francisco. But your family came to California from China, right?”

Lillian nodded.

“Well, sourdough wasn't born in this country either. It was brought to northern California by bakers from France. But the French did not invent sourdough any more than the San Franciscans did. People across Europe had been using a sourdough starter to make bread for many centuries. And—how do you like this,
amiga
?—even the Egyptians were making sourdough way back in 1500
B.C.
!”

“Wow,” Lillian said. “You really know a lot about food.” Even Dr. Wong looked impressed.

“That's because I always did my homework,”
Chef Antonio said, giving Javier's shoulder a squeeze. “If you do your homework, you'll know a lot about all sorts of things.”

Javier cupped his hands around his mouth. “Wikipedia,” he whispered, looking at us. We all laughed—except for Chef, who just looked confused.

“Anyway,” he said, “if you girls would like to make sourdough rolls, you have to use a special sourdough starter that takes about three days to mature.”

Lillian frowned. “There goes that idea.”

“And I just happen to have a jar of it in the refrigerator!”

“Really?” Lillian clapped her hands and practically jumped up and down. “Let's do it!” she squealed, and then looked at Frankie and me. “I mean, what do you guys think?”

“I think it's a great idea,” I said, looking at Frankie. “I'd rather do bagels, but it sounds like we really don't have time. And we want to have enough time to do a
great job. Okay with you, Franks?” I gave her my best puppy-dog eyes.

Frankie looked from me to Lillian and back again. “Fine,” she said, shrugging. “Whatever.”

Lillian started in on the clapping again. I've definitely never seen her so excited. Who knew sourdough rolls could make someone so happy? She must really be homesick.

“Perfecto!”
Chef exclaimed. “And since the starter is already in the refrigerator, why don't you make the rolls right here in the studio tomorrow? I come here many Sundays anyway to do some prep work for my show, so it's no
problema
.”

And so that's where we're heading now, as soon as Frankie gets here to pick me up. Lillian's mom offered to give us both a ride, but Frankie made up some excuse about errands she had to do on the way and how she needed me to help her. After six weeks of working on the project together, I really don't know what she has against Lillian, but apparently, she still
can't get over it. She's in a better mood about one thing: Her dad stayed up all night before he left to make some amazing Italian food. So she knows she's bringing something impressive—and edible!—to the potluck.

This morning started out great. I was looking forward to making the very last (and most fun) part of our project and getting to spend even more time with Chef Antonio, who seems more like a really cool . . . I don't know . . . uncle to me now than a cute celebrity on TV. My mom seemed happy too—she was making poached eggs and asparagus for breakfast, to go with what was left of our baguettes—and even Cole was acting about as adorable as a two-year-old can with yogurt in his hair and banana all over his face.

And then my dad called.

He was supposed to be getting on a plane this morning and landing in New York before dark. Mom even invited him to have dinner with all of us at the apartment, instead of Dad taking Cole and me out somewhere. She even went grocery shopping on the
way home from class yesterday. (I think she wants to show him that in spite of everything, she's back to her old self in the kitchen again—at least when she has time to go to the store.) But my dad wasn't calling from the plane. He wasn't even at the airport.

“I'm really sorry, pumpkin,” he told me. “I had to cancel my trip. A big meeting was just scheduled out here for tomorrow, and it's just too important for me to miss.”

More important than my big social studies project, apparently. And more important than me.

“You understand, don't you, Lize?”

“Sure,” I told him. And like I said, for the first time since he moved away, I guess I do.

“I'll make it up to you, I promise. When you come out here, you can make some of your new recipes for me. That'll be fun, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Loads.

It's almost time for the Immigration Museum—finally. I'm so nervous about tonight, I can hardly focus. Mr. Mac gave us one last period to work on our projects, but Liza, Lillian, and I are already finished, so we offered to help other groups. Or Liza and Lillian did—I'm not that generous, except when Mr. Mac asked me to move chairs and supplies around. That I did happily.

The final bell just rang, and all of the seventh
graders are setting up in the social studies corridor, with several rooms devoted to all our projects and the hallway between them taken over for the potluck. Liza, Lillian, and I already dragged a table to the prime corner spot we'd staked out in one of the rooms, so we've done all we can do for now. All of our work is ready to go at my house, just a few blocks from school. No way we're leaving it here, unattended, before the event starts. Who knows what damage could be done?

Liza, Lillian, and I walk out together. There's time to go home, change if we want (I thought we should wear costumes from the immigrant groups whose foods we're highlighting, but Liza and Lillian voted me down), pick up our parents, and meet back here at six thirty.

Then we're going to rock the house.

Liza blows those little hairs out of her eyes and reviews the plan again. “Okay. If all goes well, my mom should already be home whipping up her pecan pie. She promised to leave early to make it fresh. Lillian,
all you have to do is get here, and I'm sure your mom has made some kind of amazing Chinese feast, right? And, Franks, you're going to bring the dioramas
and
the sourdough rolls—you sure you can handle all that by yourself?”

I nod. I like a girl who wants to synchronize watches and confirm battle plans.

“Yep,” I assure her. “All the pieces are just where we left them yesterday. Boxed up under the stairs. And I put that giant bakery box full of our rolls in a place where no one's going to bother them and Rocco can't reach them, even if he tries: the oven. Perfect, right? My dad's away, so no one's going to use it, and they won't get smashed or eaten, either. I made a huge, impossible-to-miss sign and taped it to the oven door: ‘Keep Out on Pain of Death.' Even The Goons won't miss that. All I have to do is defrost the homemade gnocchi that Dad made before he left, pack up the granny cart with the stuff, and wheel it all over here.”

We've come to the block where Liza goes one way to get the bus, Lillian goes another way to hop on the train, and I walk one last block home. If it were just Liza and me, we would do this goofy fist-bump-handshake routine that we made up in third grade. It ends with a musical
“holla,”
and we always do it for luck. But there's no way we're teaching it to Lillian, so we just sort of stand around awkwardly for a minute and then wave good-bye.

“See you back at school!” I shout. And they both give me a thumbs-up as they walk away—almost in unison, so I decide their double thumbs-up means good luck.

I'm contemplating what to wear tonight as I push open the front door. We have gazillions of Italia T-shirts around the house in every color and size. I could wear one of those with my denim skirt, tights, and boots. Or would Liza and Lillian say that was violating the no-costumes rule?