Small Plates by Katherine Hall Page

Author:Katherine Hall Page
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062310811
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

SLICED

What reality TV cooking shows fail to depict is the true hell of being in a greenroom with the other contestants. Sure, there are close-ups of knitted brows and piercing glances filled with pure or assumed malice. And the cameras zoom in on spats so staged that only the most gullible viewer could believe in them. Voices are raised. Words are bleeped. It’s Showtime! The reality is, in fact, very far from Reality.

Faith Fairchild was sitting in a greenroom now. It wasn’t network TV, not really TV at all, despite the high school kid walking around taping the night’s event for the local cable channel. The greenroom hell she was experiencing wasn’t one created by knives drawn or pots hurled and would have made for exceptionally bad ratings. No, the room was filled with a total lack of overt drama and a complete absence of conversation. The air was as dead as a doornail. The chefs sat mostly hunched over, eyes on their Crocs, avoiding any semblance of interest in one another. Mind-numbing boredom seized Faith, along with something akin to panic—had she only been sitting here for fifteen minutes? How long before they started?

There was no way the night was going to be a pleasant one. Faith looked up, knowing all too well what she would see. Three other chefs, professionals like herself, dressed in their work clothes—except for the toques the event planner had insisted upon. Faith never wore one and was pretty certain the others didn’t either. The others. She knew them all, disliked them—some intensely—and she suspected they her.

Faith had regretted saying yes to this fund-raiser almost from the start. Grave doubts had sprung up during the initial phone call from the planner hired by the organizers, but Faith’s best friend and neighbor Pix Miller was on the committee and had asked her to participate. Pix almost never asked her for favors, and when she did, Faith knew it was something near and dear to Pix’s heart. Not that raising money for breast cancer research wasn’t important to Faith, but the woman who had contacted her had been extremely obnoxious, abruptly ending the conversation with one of Faith’s least favorite kiss-offs: “Our people will get in touch with your people.”

“I don’t have ‘people.’ I am the people person,” Faith had said, immediately wishing she could take the words back. She’d sounded like a Dr Pepper commercial. “I mean, I handle my own publicity. If you send me all the information, I’ll post it on my company, Have Faith’s, Web site, our Facebook page, Twitter, and get a press release to the local paper.”

That had been four months ago. She needed to needlepoint a pillow—first learning how to—with OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR as she invariably accepted dates thinking they were distant and then suddenly, there they were on her doorstep. Tonight was a perfect example. She’d thought she had plenty of time to think about possible mystery ingredient combinations that might be thrown at her, maybe watch a few shows on the various food channels.

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