C H A P T E R 2 3
?Cooking is just love made edible.?
The next morning at around ten, a chef I'd asked for and I gathered in the kitchen to teach me to cook.
I knew how to cook and I actually did a good job at cooking but I wanted to learn something new. Something I could make use of in the café after I leave this place.
So I had asked Samara to get a hold of one of the chefs. I had decided to do this every alternate day and hoped I would be able to stick to cooking every alternate day.
"So, what do you want to cook, Ms. Jenson?" The chef asked, smiling politely at me.
"How about I get your name first?" I suggested, knowing only now that I didn't even know his name.
"I'm Keith Richards," he said, extending his hand towards me.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Juliet Jenson," I said, taking his hand in a firm handshake.
He looked a few years older than me, probably in mid twenties. He had light brown eyes and a dark complexion. He had black hair which ended just above his eyes. He also had a tattoo half hidden on the side of his neck.
"So what do you want to learn?" He asked.
"Um..." I thought about it for a moment, "...teach me the first thing you learned to cook."
"Okay," he said, glancing over at me amusedly. "Baltimore Coddies was the first thing I learned to cook."
"Baltimore Coddies," I repeated. "I never had it."
"Well, now you will." He said. "First we need to get all the ingredients," he said.
"Okay, tell me what we'll need and I'll get it."
Keith instructed me to get about a pound of soaked salt cod, potatoes, milk, onions which I diced myself, dried parsley, butter, eggs, Chesapeake Red Bay Seasoning and pepper.
As he taught me how to cook it, we talked a lot.
I learned that he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland where Coddies was a popular snack.
He told me that being a cook was his childhood dream and his mother would always teach him to cook something every Sunday afternoon.
Unfortunately, his mother passed away a few summers back and although he stopped cooking for a while because it made him remember his fun times with his mom, he retracted back into his heaven, the kitchen because he couldn't stay away from there for too long.
He also told me that he had participated in Masterchef America but didn't win the season. I was so surprised. I was learning how to cook Baltimore Coddies from a former Masterchef contestant!
"Why aren't you a chef in a top five star hotel?
" I asked, baffled that he chose to be the Jenson's personal cook rather than being a reputed chef in a hotel.
I mean sure it would be fun to cook everyday for rich billionaires but if I was in his place, I would've chosen to work in a five star hotel with a good pay.
"Well, I was actually working in a restaurant for some time two years back and it paid me decently but it wasn't enough.
I have a big family to look after. I have two brothers who are married and they live with us with their children.
They don't have jobs that pay them well and I have an unmarried sister who has two kids, twins both of them. We're all a twelve member family."
"Whoa. That's a big family."
"Yeah, so I had to look for somewhere else and one day the Jenson's had a dinner party at our restaurant and they loved the food so they asked me if I wanted to work for them. The pay was far better, so I took it."
"How much do you get paid?" I asked curiously.
"You shouldn't ask a man how much he's paid."
"Shut up and tell me."
He chuckled. "Well, I get paid seventy two thousand dollars per year," He said casually.
My mouth popped open. Seventy two thousand dollars per year?
"You get paid six thousand dollars per month?!" I vociferated, astounded at the fact.
"Yeah." He said.
"Wow."
I focused on the Coddies. I had mixed the ingredients and the flaked cods and was now trying to form golf sized balls and flatten it slightly and I was doing a bad job at it.
Every time I would take some of the mix and try to knead it, it would break off or I would flatten it to the point where it looked no where near like balls.
"Here, I'll show you how to do it," Keith said as I once again failed to make it ball sized.
He took a lump in his hand and started to roll it between his palms gently. He did that for some time and as soon as it got a decent ball sized shape, he pressed it softly. It turned out to be perfect and I pouted.
"How did you do that?"
"It's simple. Try it again the same way I did."
So I took a smaller lump this time to make it easy for me and started doing the way he had done it. It was the same thing I had done earlier and this time too, the ball broke off midway. Frustrated, I tried to amalgamate the two pieces but ended up squishing them with some of it flying in my face.
"I can't do this!" I finally declared pathetically, vexed about the situation. I looked over at Keith and realized that some of the mix had landed on his face when I had squished it. I laughed as he wiped it off.
"You can do this. Keep trying. It's really very easy," he encouraged.
I tried again, but after a few more attempts, I had given up completely.
"Oh my God, I can't cook at all. However the hell am I going to feed myself for the rest of my life!" I clamored histrionically.
Keith rolled his eyes. "Don't worry, I'll feed you. That's my job."
"For the rest of my life?"
"For as long as I can," he promised.
I smiled at him which he returned with a charismatic one of his own.
"What about this?" I asked, looking down at the mix with a distasteful scowl.
"I'll help you," he said and wrapped his arms around mine from the back. He held my hands and moved mine to gently malaxate it as it had somewhat hardened.
As he told me how to knead it into a perfect ball shaped form, we heard footsteps behind us and turned to look.
It was Ethan. He had walked in and towards the kitchen to get some orange juice from the fridge. When he finally noticed us, he raised an eyebrow and I realized just how a third person would view this in a totally wrong way.
"What's going on here?" He asked, unscrewing the cap of the bottle and taking a sip from it as he leaned against the fridge.
Keith's arms dropped from around mine and he cleared his throat. "Good afternoon, Mr. Evans. I was just teaching Ms. Jenson how to cook Baltimore Coddies."
"Good luck with that," he said, looking over at me.
"She's actually doing great," Keith vindicated.
"That should actually be on the news," he rejoindered.
"Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the news would be more interested in showing what happened during your meeting the day before yesterday. I mean wouldn't they want to know why it got cancelled?" I shot back at him.
His lips stretched upwards in a coprophagous grin. "Even better would be showing what had happened just yesterday in my room."
My cheeks reddened. "S-shut up."
"What happened, sweetheart? Don't you agree with me?" He asked.
"Get out."
"Okay," he obliged.
Once he was out of the kitchen I released a breath. Why did he have to bring that up?
Okay I was the one who brought that other incident up but he was the one who started it by commenting on my cooking skills. He didn't even know just how good of a cook I was, well at least in some certain recipes.
"What was that?" Keith asked.
I shook my head. "You wouldn't want to know. Let's get back to this, shall we?"
After an hour, we had finally managed to make some delicious Baltimore Coddies.
It was so amazing. I had made enough for everyone, of course with a lot of help from Keith.
He was actually so good and I was so glad that I had made a friend who was so different from certain pricks I regrettably knew.
He was very sweet and patient with my slow cooking, everything I needed in a good friend.
Everyone tasted the Coddies and complimented it. I even took them to the guards at the gates to let them taste it. Samara and the other maids seemed to love it and Olivia nearly gobbled up the whole thing and I had to stop her before she started eating the plate too.
"Wouldn't you give some to Mr. Ethan?" Keith asked as he eyed the leftovers.
"Sure," I happily obliged. "Samara!" I called out to her. "Take these leftovers for the dog to eat. I mean-I mean Mr. Ethan Evans."
I could see that Samara was trying to control her laughter and I chuckled as she took the plate from me to give it to the dog, I meant Ethan. Damn it, I always confused his name with words like dog, prick and whatnot.
"You don't seem to like him very much," Keith commented.
I fake gasped. "Oh my God, why would you think that? I'm absolutely in love with him!" I said, my voice laced with more sarcasm than I had ever used in my entire nineteen years of existence.
"Okay, scratch that. You utterly hate him," he tittered.
"That's more like it," I nodded. "And hey, I'm going to hound you everyday to teach me how to cook more delicious food."
"I don't mind."
Ethan, as I had expected, didn't say anything about the Coddies I had cooked. But his opinion about it didn't matter anyway so I didn't care about it.
The rest of the day was spent talking to Keith. I introduced him to Olivia and they hit it off instantly.
In the evening, we three along with Samara played table tennis. Keith and Samara were actually good at it.
Initially, they were hesitant to play but after a little persuasion, they finally agreed and we all had a blast.
It was a perfect day and I was so happy. Not even Ethan with his handsomely ugly face and sour comments could damper my mood. I couldn't remember the last time I was this happy.
The next day I was scouring for ideas. It took me the whole morning to come up with something, anything but I just didn't know what to do.
Keith and I had made yet another dish, that of consommé and it turned out to be amazing. I was really starting to like our time in the kitchen. I wouldn't have gotten a better chef than Keith to teach me.
But that was not what I was worried about. The thing that I had been itching to do since yesterday was to retaliate. I wanted revenge. Like I always did. And I wasn't stopping until he was.
I had been stressing myself over this thing ever since morning and still couldn't come up with a good plan. That was until I saw Ethan sprawled out on the couch in the living room.
I was so shocked to see him there. When he slept, he nowhere looked like the demon he actually was.
He looked innocent and slept like a baby.
He must be pretty tired all the time from the amount of work he did everyday.
I couldn't even imagine what it must be like to constantly keep working. I couldn't do that for the life of me.
But that didn't mean that I was going to let him off the hook. I wouldn't even if he was tired as hell. Not even if he looked harmless and adorable sleeping on the couch. No. I wouldn't let that affect me.
So I ran out to the pool where I saw a big inflatable pool a few days back.
I dragged it into the living room and right in front of the couch and put the hose into it.
It was pretty long and reached the pool easily.
I then connected the hose to a tap just outside the living room which was around the swimming pool.
I silently filled about half the pool with the water. Ethan was still sleeping soundly with his laptop on the tabletop just next to the couch.
After the pool was half filled with water, I grabbed Keith from the kitchen and lugged him into the living room all the while explaining the plan to him.
But he refused to do that with a "no thanks, I choose to live." I pleaded to him for quite some time before finally giving up and coming to the conclusion that he wasn't going to help me at all.
I huffed and ran to Olivia who initially was hesitant to do it but finally agreed.
So we both stood behind the couch, staring at Ethan and waiting for a perfect opportunity to attack. He was still in a deep sleep and looked like he wasn't going to wake up anytime soon.
"Okay, you grab that end and I'll grab this one and on the count of three, we push it forward and tilt it, got it?" I whispered so as to not wake him up.
No one was around and even Keith ran back to the kitchen to hide himself.
"One, two, three, go!" I whisper shouted and we pushed at the couch at the same time. It took a lot of effort but we finally managed to tilt it towards the water in the inflatable pool. We heard Ethan land into the water and so we pulled back the couch so that it wouldn't land over him.
He woke up with a start, splashing around in the water before he finally came back to his senses. He stopped and looked around until his eyes landed on us, busy chortling at him.
He groaned and growled before glaring at us as he tried to splash us with water, missing his mark each time.
He got up from the pool, his body completely drenched and pulled something out of his pockets. He slammed the thing onto a tabletop and it revealed to be his iPhone. My eyes widened.
"My third fucking iPhone in three weeks."
Without saying anything else, he stormed out of the living room.
"Oh my God, that was hilarious. The next best method to wake someone up," Olivia chuckled.
"You guys are so going to be dead," Keith stated, shaking his head. "What's going on between you and Evans?" He asked, looking at me.
"Long story," I replied.
"You do know, right that he wouldn't let you pass easy?"
"Of course I know. He will do something to me too and then I'll do something to him. It never stops."
"You guys are crazy."
"I'm not. He was the one who started it all," I defended. "Whatever, what's for lunch?"
Hey guys.