Can't Stand the Heat - Louisa Edwards [54]
Miranda followed his instructions to the letter, with that air of total concentration that just slayed Adam, and of course, the result was a perfect poached egg.
Adam shook his head as they watched the yolk ooze out silkily. When would he ever fucking learn to keep his mouth shut?
But when he saw the giddy happiness in Miranda’s face as she turned to him with a victorious “I did it!,” Adam couldn’t help but feel sort of pleased he’d made it happen. It took some of the sting out of the upcoming interrogation.
“Quid pro quo,” Miranda said warningly, after they’d both dutifully tasted and made appreciative noises.
“Okay, but I never thought liver would go particularly well with fava beans, personally. Chianti, maybe.”
“Ew,” she told him. “Also, don’t think you’re going to distract me with movie references. I’ve got an answer coming to me.”
“Fine.” He sighed. “Hit me.”
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting—some softball question about how he first got interested in cooking, maybe, or something incendiary about his previous bosses at other restaurants.
Instead, what she asked was: “What’s your all-time favorite dish, and why?”
Too intrigued by the question to protest that it was technically two, Adam pondered in silence for a minute, running through his own recipes, things he’d tried and been blown away by in high-end restaurants and roadside stands and pastry shops across the country.
“That’s hard,” he finally said. “Shit, you don’t go for the easy stuff, do you?”
“Never,” she replied.
“I didn’t go to culinary school,” he began, aware that he was answering the softball question she hadn’t asked, but the answer to her actual question would be in there somewhere. “When I graduated high school, I took an extended road trip. I had friends come along for parts of it, my parents would fly out and meet me in the places that interested them, but for long stretches, it was just me and the road. I didn’t have a car, so I took the bus everywhere, sometimes the train. Met lots of interesting people.”
“How far did you get?”
“Made it all the way to Seattle,” he said, still proud of it. “On the cheap, too. Whenever I ran out of money, I’d get a job washing dishes to save up enough for the next bus ticket. If there was a great restaurant in town, I’d either try to work there or use my earnings to cop a meal before I moved on. It was an awesome education. I saw people doing things with food that I’d never thought of or heard of—and I grew up in Manhattan with parents who liked to eat out.”
“What kinds of things?” Miranda asked, clearly willing to push the limit on her quid pro quo, if Adam was.
“Steamed crabs in Baltimore, pulled pork outside of Atlanta, tacos from the most amazing taqueria in Fayetteville, Texas. There was a guy in Cleveland doing things you wouldn’t believe to Great Lakes fish like perch and walleye—seriously haute cuisine stuff with what were basically considered trash fish. And in California . . . hot damn. I know what it was.”
“What?”
“The best thing,” he told her. “My favorite dish. I saved and saved to get to eat at Chez Panisse. I’d picked up Alice Waters’s book in my travels and I read that sucker cover to cover and back again, so she was on my list. I hit Berkeley in the summer, and I remember Black Mission figs were all over that menu. It was the season. I’d never really had anything but dried figs, and I didn’t like them. But when I tasted those roasted fresh figs, drizzled with wild honey and dotted with minuscule white smears of triple-cream goat cheese, I just about died.”
Adam closed his eyes, lost in the memory of that explosion of tastes and textures, all harmonizing together so simply and beautifully. When he met Miranda’s gaze again, she was watching him with a soft smile.
“Good, huh?” was all she said.