We arrived back at the apartment and carried the groceries to the kitchen. I told Nate to go find something to watch on TV while I got everything organized. Before I started, I grabbed my frilly pink apron, put it over my head and tied it around my waist. Without it, I would've ended up having to change clothes later and with Nate in the building that didn't sound like a good idea.
Once I had the ingredients all grouped together for their dishes, I decided making the cupcakes first would be the best idea. I flipped the oven on to get it preheating. With just the two of us, I elected to make only a dozen, so I did the needed calculations to scale down the recipe.
I placed the necessary butter and sugar in the mixer and let it beat until they were nice and fluffy. A couple of cracked eggs were added to the mix along with a splash of vanilla and almond extracts. Finishing off by alternating the dry ingredients with some milk, the batter was ready.
I lined my cupcake tins with foil wrappers and filled the cups three-quarters of the way full. I placed them in the oven and set the timer for eighteen minutes. Remembering that I was making kabobs, I soaked some skewers in water so they wouldn't catch fire when I broiled them.
Once they were set, I turned my attention to whipping the two varieties of frosting. I ran a very tight kitchen, so moving from task to task was second nature to me.
"Hey, thought I should come in and make sure you didn't already have a stock pile of rat poison under the sink," Nate said, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.
"No rat poison, but I'm sure I could find something under there to add to your food if you're going to be lippy."
"Anything I can do to help?" he asked. "You're making enough to feed an army, surely there's a little something I can do."
"You're supposed to be finding something to watch on TV."
"That's what you told me to do, but you can't fault a guy for wanting to spend more time with you. I figure if you put me to work, it'd be less irritating than me just staring at you."
"Have you had a psych eval done recently? I'd highly suggest one when you get back to Chicago. If you're willing to work, I need these mushrooms brushed off with a towel. Then you can remove and discard their stems while I make the stuffing for them." I passed the mushrooms and a towel over.
"What do you want me to do with them when I'm done?"
"Just put them on that cookie sheet to your left, top down, so they're ready for me to fill."
"No problem," he said, going right to work.
I watched him for a few moments. For as large as his hands were, I was surprised how delicately he scrubbed the dirt away from the caps.
Before I started on the filling for the mushrooms, I went ahead and made the cocktail sauce, so the flavors had some time to blend together. In a bowl, I combined some ketchup, horseradish sauce, garlic powder, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. It didn't need anything more than a stir to be ready. That done, I placed it in the fridge and selected a medium sized glass bowl for the mushroom stuffing.
"How do you know how much to use?" Nate asked. "I've been sitting here watching you and you just pour things in; you look so natural in the kitchen."
"I've been cooking as long as I can remember, so I'm pretty good at measuring with my eyes."
"And just how far back do you remember?"
I didn't think my statement warranted that follow up question, since I'd meant it as a figure of speech. While I thought about it for a second, I put my stuffing ingredients into the bowl. A little mixing until smooth and it was ready for the mushrooms. Looking over, I saw Nate was on the last mushroom, so I waited while he finished up.
"If you really want to know, I guess I remember my first day of school, but not much prior to that."
The oven timer went off before he could comment, so I left him to finish his task. The cupcakes looked done, so I took a potholder and got them over to a cooling rack I had sitting on the counter. Knowing the rest of the food cooked at a higher temperature, I reset the oven accordingly.
"What do you need me to do next?" Nate asked, eager to be useful and evidently ready to move on from the talk about my memories.
I didn't recall the last time I had someone helping me in the kitchen. I couldn't actually think of a time when someone did. When I was a kid, I'd help my mom, but as an adult it had always been just me.
"Here take this onion," I said, giving him the onion and a chef's knife, "and slice about half of it into big size chunks for the kabobs and dice about a quarter of it for the egg rolls and nachos. When you're done with that, grab the peppers and get them ready for the kabobs."
As he started, I quickly filled all the little mushroom cups with their stuffing and set them aside to start on the nachos. I got a little saucepan out and put some ketchup, spicy mustard, brown sugar and a few choice spices in it, and stirred the concoction together while I turned the stove on to medium heat.
I took the precooked rotisserie chicken that we picked up and started shredding the meat. When I was down to the carcass, I washed my hands to get the greasy feeling off. Once the barbecue sauce was heated through and just starting to bubble, I added the chicken and stirred.
As soon as the chicken was all coated, I turned the stove off and grabbed some tortillas. I quickly cut them into eight pieces and placed them on a cookie sheet that had been greased with cooking spray. After I assembled the tasty treats, I put them off to the side with the mushrooms.
"I'm getting hungry. Can we just eat everything now?" Nate asked, eyeing the nachos.
"No, they aren't even cooked yet. You can help assemble the last two dishes though. We'll do the kabobs last because that involves touching raw meat." I put another cookie sheet in between us and set out the ingredients for the egg rolls. "For the egg rolls, we can each add what we want. Watch how I do my first one and then you can work on your own."
On an egg roll wrapper, I placed a little pizza sauce towards the part of the wrapper closest to me. I added half a mozzarella stick, a few black olive slices and some diced onion. Then I took my finger and dipped it in the bowl of water I had to the side and moistened the four edges of the wrapper. I rolled the bottom portion up a little to cover my filling and then folded in the sides before continuing to roll it up. At the top of the wrapper, I added just a little more water and sealed it tight.
That done, I placed my pizza roll to the side of the cookie sheet and said, "See it's easy, now make your own."
So he did. We remained quiet as we each made about twelve of them and kept them to our side of the cookie sheet. I made mine all the same, but he seemed to like variety, putting different things in each. Since they were different. I arranged his facing up and down and mine left and right, so we knew who got to eat which ones.
The three cookie sheets could all go in and cook together at the current temperature, so I placed them in the oven. I put the pizza rolls and nachos on the top shelf and the mushrooms on the bottom and set the timer for twenty minutes.
That taken care of, we cleaned the area up a bit and set out the kabob ingredients. We had cherry tomatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, cubed steak chunks, cubed chicken and shrimp as ingredients to use. I brought over the skewers and the broiler pan.
We started making our skewers. His were primarily steak based with a couple shrimp ones thrown in. I stuck with chicken and shrimp, since I tended to stay away from red meat. I made a little aluminum foil box for my skewers to sit in.
"Ta da," I announced. Our timing was perfect because the timer was counting down the seconds for the other dishes. I retrieved them and set them on the counter while I turned the oven up to broil and adjusted the top rack to put it closer to the flames. Once it was good and hot, I put the kabobs in and spun around to start plating our bounty.
After arranging the hot dishes on platters, I grabbed the precooked shrimp we got and organized it in a circle on a platter around the cocktail sauce.
"Can you start taking these out to the coffee table, please?" I asked Nate. "The kabobs will be done in
a sec and I need to get some dipping sauces set up for them."
"Sure," he said, grabbing the mushrooms and the pizza rolls.
If my stalker had been watching, the domestic bliss that had been going on would've ended with me dead. There was an easiness I felt just hanging out with Nate. There wasn't a need for us to talk; he let me do my thing and he followed instructions like a champ.
The room seemed empty as he walked away, which was weird since he hadn't actually been in the kitchen with me, and he was only ten feet away. I was one messed up individual.
I got out two little containers. I put some steak sauce in one, and mixed together a quick honey mustard mixture for the other. I placed them on a platter. Then I removed the kabobs from the oven and put Nate's on one side of the sauces and mine on the other.
He came back for the shrimp and nachos and I smiled as he salivated over the food. I took off my apron and hung it in its spot on the wall, then carried the kabobs out to the living room. We still had fifteen minutes before the game started, so we watched the pregame report.
"Oh my." Nate moaned as he took a bite of a stuffed mushroom. "These are to die for. I could probably eat them all myself."
"They're good, but they're also pretty rich, so after a few you might change your story."
I picked up one of my pizza rolls and had my first bite. I was starving, so I really didn't care if I burnt my mouth. The string cheese was extra stringy and stretched out as I moved the roll away from my mouth. I loved a meal of appetizers, especially ones that were finger foods.
While we were snacking, the puck dropped and we immediately found ourselves yelling at the refs for blatant missed calls. I really liked our TV announcers; they were some of the fairest ones on the air.
At first intermission we were losing two-to-one. Things weren't going great, but there was still a lot of game to be played.
I ran to the kitchen and set up the frostings, knifes, toppings and the cupcakes as a little workstation for us. Since there was two of us, I didn't bother getting out my piping bags to make the cupcakes really fancy.
As we worked, I glanced at our progress. My cupcakes looked very professional, whereas Nate's tended to look like a five-year-old had done the decorating. His were overloaded with toppings and gave me a sugar rush just looking at them. As I sprinkled some gold nonpareils on one of my cupcakes, he leaned over and took a scoop of the cream cheese frosting and smeared it on my nose.
"What in the world do you think you're doing?" I screeched.
"Sorry, you were looking a little edible and I got confused on whether or not you were one of the cupcakes."
"Not an acceptable excuse," I replied as I put my knife in the frosting to get a large dollop and flung it at his face.
He smiled that wicked smile of his and took a handful of colored sugar and threw it back at me. We continued to throw toppings back and forth until the kitchen looked like a kindergarten class had recently been around. Thankfully, after the first exchange of frosting, we left that alone, so just washing our faces and shaking our shirts to try to dislodge topping bits was enough of a personal cleanup.
By the time we swept everything up, we'd missed the entire second period of the hockey game. We each had a cupcake when we made it back to sit on the couch to enjoy what was left of the game.
When all was said and done, New York won in a shootout, so I didn't have to sacrifice any more toppings to the hockey goddess.
"It's still early," I said as I stood up and stretched. "How about we try our sparkling juices and watch a movie. That should take us to your midnight curfew."
"Sounds good. I'll grab the juice, you get the glasses."
"Any preference on movie?" I asked after we made it back to the living room with our beverages. I had an extensive collection on display in the entertainment center. I didn't have a ton of room in my apartment, but DVDs were small, so I stockpiled them.
"No, it's your house so you can pick," he said, settling on the couch.
I decided on Bridesmaids. Nothing like a little romantic comedy to get my paybacks for the topping fight. Of course that backfired when I realized he was actually laughing and enjoying the movie. I needed to do a better job on plotting my revenge.
We did our sparkling juice test while the movie played, and argued over which one was really the best. I picked apple and he sided with the white grape. Neither of us was willing to change our opinions, so we opted to just agree that the red grape was the worst.
As the movie played, I started to get drowsy. The last thing I remembered before falling totally asleep was an actress driving down a highway with a van full of puppies.
CHAPTER 16
Everything is better with donuts