On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams

Author:Sheila Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345484376
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

* * *

When the gods want to punish us, they send every darned thing at once.

The day after I stayed up nearly all night to study for my first Food Sanitation and Safety test, Broderick Tilson Hayward-Smith showed up on the doorstep of Millie’s place—four weeks early. Geoff Black managed to get me some advance notice—a few hours. Nice of him. Not only had I had a test that morning, but I’d also had a cooking project in Basic Baking class—our team assignment was honey-wheat bread. There were two of us: the redheaded kid, Marc, and me. The loaves looked like works of art when they came out of the oven: lightly golden brown on top, softly browned on the sides. They smelled like angels had baked them. Even Chef was forced to admit they looked and smelled perfect. We were so proud, until Marc tried to cut a slice. The loaf was doughy in the middle, wet, drippy, and gooey-looking. The baking angels had either forgotten to convert the formula correctly or they’d set the oven temperature wrong. Either way, our team got an “E” for effort and an “F” for the rest.

But even that was better than “the great salami disaster” of Basic Cooking One class the day before. Each team was assigned a salami or sausage to make—from seasoning, grinding, chopping, and mixing to squeezing, er, pushing, um, forcing the meat through the sausage grinder into the casings. Chef demonstrated a few times with Karen Chin’s perfectly seasoned-blended-mixed andouille sausage then turned the grinder over to the students. Karen volunteered to go first. Of course. And her links came out ready to be photographed for a magazine layout. Chef oohed and aahed over them. The rest of us wanted to put Karen, instead of the sausage, through the grinder. When it was my turn, Marc and I flipped a coin to see who was going to do the grinding and who was going to handle the sausage casings. We both lost.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one but an old-time commercial-grade iron sausage grinder looks like something left over from the Inquisition. I’d just finished reading a romance set during that period—those folks had no sense of humor at all. The grinder’s big, it has a huge, cranklike handle, and it looks scary. It’s as if some efficiency expert found a stash of these damn things in somebody’s basement and said, “Don’t throw them out! Use them to make sausage!”

So one of you cranks and one of you fills the casings. You have to make sure that you keep the casings good and snug around the meat mixture. If you’re cranking, you have to make sure that you don’t crank too slowly. And you have to make sure that you don’t crank too fast.

“Faster,” Marc said. His brow was scrunched up and his eyes were fixed on the tube where the meat was coming into the sausage casing. He looked like a ballplayer waiting on the next pitch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.