Chapter 3
ROGAN
The farmers market sets up every Saturday in the park, a tidy grid of white canopy tents and folding tables where everything smells like dirt and optimism.
I arrive at dawn with Maya's borrowed truck, a portable gas burner strapped in the back, and a wild plan to announce the bistro's soft opening the only way I know how.
With food. Loud, unapologetic, impossible-to-ignore food.
I claim the last open spot at the end of the row, wedged between a soap vendor and a woman selling hand-knitted socks.
The setup takes twenty minutes. Folding table.
Butane burner. Cast iron skillet already blackened from a thousand other fires.
I unload my mise: chorizo, fresh eggs from the farm two miles out, cipollini onions I found at the co-op, smoked paprika, and a jar of fermented hot sauce I've been nursing since my last kitchen job.
The banner Maya helped me paint last night hangs crooked from the tent frame: The Rooted Bistro – Opening March 21.
I fire up the burner and let the skillet heat until the air above it shimmers.
First rule of farmers market cooking: make smoke. Lots of it.
I drop a knob of butter, wait for the sizzle, then add sliced chorizo. The fat renders fast, pooling red and glossy, and the smell hits like a punch. Paprika. Garlic. Pork fat caramelizing at the edges. I toss the pan, flip the sausage, let it char just enough to make people turn their heads.
An older man in overalls pauses mid-step, his nose lifting like a hunting dog's.
"What're you making?"
"Breakfast. Want some?"
I crack two eggs directly into the pan, let them ride the chorizo fat, spoon it over the tops until the whites set and the yolks stay molten. Plate it on a paper dish with a drizzle of hot sauce and a sprinkle of chive I snipped five minutes ago.
He takes a bite, chews slowly, his face doing that thing faces do when the salt and heat and richness all land at once.
"Good God."
"The bistro opens next week. Tell your friends."
He nods, takes another bite, wanders off in a daze.
I crack four more eggs.
By eight, there's a line. Not a long one, but enough that people start noticing. I plate fast, talk faster, flip eggs one-handed while explaining the menu, the sourcing, the fact that yes, the goat incident was real and no, I haven't made peace with that particular animal yet.
The soap vendor glances over, her expression caught between amusement and annoyance.
"You're making the rest of us look boring."
"Want some eggs?"
"I want you to turn down the smoke. My lavender soap smells like chorizo now."
I toss the pan, flip a sausage coin in a perfect arc. "That's just good marketing."
She laughs despite herself.
The woman selling socks is less charmed. She adjusts her display, shoots me a look that could wilt lettuce, and mutters something about "city boys and their theatrics."
I take it as a compliment.
A kid, maybe seven, with a backpack shaped like a frog, edges up to the table. His mom trails behind, distracted by a conversation about heirloom tomatoes.
"Are you the chef with the goat?" he asks, voice high and eager, bouncing slightly on his sneakers.
I lean down, resting my forearms on the folding table. "Depends. Which story did you hear?"
He grins, gap-toothed and delighted. "The one where it ate your apron."
"That's the one," I confirm, solemn as a confession. "Right off my waist. Didn't even ask permission."
His eyes go wide, round as the eggs sizzling behind me. "Did you fight it?"
I shake my head slowly, gravely. "Nope. I surrendered immediately. Goats don't negotiate, kid. They take what they want and they don't look back."
He giggles, and I plate him a small portion, eggs and a single piece of chorizo, no hot sauce. His mom looks over, startled, and I wave her off.
"On the house. Opening soon. Bring your appetite."
She smiles, hesitant but warming, and hands the kid a napkin.
I'm cracking another egg when I feel it. The shift in the air that means someone's watching, not browsing. I glance up.
Ivy Hale stands three feet from my table, clipboard in hand, braid over one shoulder, her expression hovering somewhere between curiosity and professional skepticism.
She looks like she's about to audit me.
"Morning," I say, keeping my voice light. "Here for the show or the food?"
"Neither. I'm here to ask where you sourced your eggs."
Of course she is.
I gesture to the carton beside the burner, the farm name stamped on the side in faded ink. "Hillcrest Farm. Two miles south. The chickens have names and a better retirement plan than I do."
She steps closer, checks the carton, makes a note on her clipboard.
"And the chorizo?"
"Martin's butcher shop. He makes it in-house. Uses heritage-breed pork from a farm in the next county. Want his number?"
"I have it."
"Then you already know it's good."
She taps her pen against the clipboard, her gaze flicking to the skillet, the line of people, the banner. "You're making quite a spectacle."
"That's kind of the point."
"The point of a farmers market is to support local agriculture, not to perform."
I flip an egg, catch it neatly, plate it with a flourish. "Who says I'm not doing both?"
The couple at the front of the line chuckles. Ivy's mouth tightens, but I catch the faintest twitch at the corner, like she's fighting a smile and losing.
"Your burner's too close to the tent frame," she says, her tone crisp. "If the wind shifts, you'll set the banner on fire."
"Noted."
I nudge the burner back an inch with my boot, never taking my eyes off the skillet.
"And you're supposed to have a ServSafe certificate displayed," she continues, pen poised over her clipboard like she's about to write me up for some health code violation.
I reach into my apron pocket—the one not stuffed with recipe scraps and a half-crushed sprig of rosemary—and pull out the laminated card, holding it up between two fingers like a backstage pass.
She blinks, her pen freezing mid-air. "Oh."
"Anything else, Inspector?" I tuck the card back into my pocket, flipping another egg with more flair than strictly necessary.
"This isn't an inspection," she says, but her voice has lost some of its edge, gone a little flatter, like she's trying to convince herself as much as me.
"Could've fooled me." I plate the next order with a practiced flourish, sliding it across the makeshift counter to a kid who's been waiting with the kind of patience that deserves extra chorizo.
She adjusts her grip on the clipboard, her knuckles pale. "I'm just making sure you understand the standards here."
"I understand them fine. I also understand that nobody's going to care about my ServSafe card if the food's terrible." I ladle hot sauce onto a fresh plate, hand it to the next customer. "So how about you try some and tell me if I'm meeting your standards."
I plate a portion before she can refuse. Eggs, chorizo, a careful drizzle of fermented hot sauce, chives scattered on top like punctuation.
She stares at it like I've handed her a live grenade.
"I already ate," she says, her voice clipped, professional, the kind of deflection she's probably used a thousand times to politely sidestep things she doesn't want to engage with.
"Then eat again," I counter, keeping my tone light but insistent, nudging the plate a half-inch closer to her across the worn wooden surface of the table.
"I don't—" she starts, but I cut her off before she can finish the protest, because I know exactly where this is going and I'm not letting her off the hook that easily.
"You came here to judge my sourcing," I say, meeting her eyes directly, my voice steady and reasonable despite the challenge underneath.
"You can't do that without tasting the result.
That's the whole point, isn't it? You want to know if I'm doing right by the ingredients, well, here they are.
Cooked. Seasoned. Ready to prove themselves. "
Her jaw works, and for a second I think she's going to walk away. But she takes the plate, balances it on top of the clipboard, and picks up the fork.
The first bite is cautious. Small. Clinical.
I watch her face. The way her eyes close for half a second. The way her shoulders drop just a fraction. The way she chews slowly, deliberately, like she's cataloging every flavor.
When she opens her eyes, they're sharper.
"The paprika's Spanish," she says finally, her voice careful, factual, like she's delivering a laboratory result rather than making conversation.
"Yeah," I reply, not bothering to soften it with an apology or justification. It is what it is.
"Not local," she continues, her pen already moving to annotate something in that infernal clipboard of hers, and I can practically hear the little checkbox being mentally ticked off in her assessment of me.
"Pine Hollow doesn't grow paprika. I checked.
" I keep my voice mild, informative, because I actually did the work.
I spent an evening going through supplier lists and talking to farmers, trying to find a source that would satisfy both my standards and whatever rubric she's operating under. "Trust me, I looked."
"You could source from a regional spice co-op," she counters immediately, the suggestion already loaded and ready like she'd been waiting for this exact opening, probably had it written down somewhere in her notes as a contingency plan.
"I could," I acknowledge, giving her that much ground before I dig in.
"Or I could use the best paprika I can find and make sure everything else is as local as possible.
Balance, right?" I cross my arms, lean back against the market table, feel the wood press into my spine.
"I'm not trying to be a purist, Ivy. I'm trying to make food people actually want to eat.
Food that tastes good, not just food that checks boxes. "