Your Soufflé Must Die: Sweet Granadilla, #1

Chapter 1

Sam stared at the screen in disbelief. She couldn't hear a sound, and someone had sucked all the air out of the room while simultaneously replacing it with ice.

YOUR SOUFFLE MUST DIE, DEC 3 LOL.

Someone, some horrible internet troll, had left a comment on her latest post on her website, FoodSlutOnline.com. Horrible internet trolls had happened to her before, but she'd always had Harry to deal with them.

But her problems were no longer Harry's problems, and she had no intention of calling him to ask what to do about a rude comment on her website.

Someone was making death threats on her cooking. And LOL. Honestly. It wasn't funny.

She wished the comment would just go away, then suddenly realized that it could, if she wanted it to. Her mouse pointer hovered over the Trash button for a second. What if she needed it later? What if the troll sent another comment, just like it? What if they murdered her soufflé and she needed evidence for the police?

Okay. Time to stop going off the deep end, Sam. That's exactly the kind of comment from you that would start a fight with Harry. Keep thinking things like that, and you’re going to prove him right: You’re a spaz. Six months without him, and your bank accounts are going to be a shambles, your site will close down, and your new catering business will fail!

Sam sighed, leaned back in her computer chair, and rubbed her eyes. Clearly, this was not a night to be alone. She turned off her computer monitor and the banker’s lamp over Granny’s roll-top desk, then padded downstairs in her sweatpants to call Kaley.

The house phone was downstairs on the far side of the kitchen, where she could pretend she couldn’t hear it ringing if she didn’t feel like answering. She picked up the handset, dialed Kaley’s number from memory, and waited. First ring, second ring…

Kaley’s mom answered. Hello? Lugano residence. Marilyn speaking.

Hi, Marilyn, Sam said, dancing from foot to foot on the cold tile. Is Kaley home? She felt like she was twelve again, instead of thirty-three.

She is, dear. Would you like to speak to her?

If you please. Sam giggled as Marilyn dropped the phone on the counter and yelled her daughter’s name at the top of her voice.

Kaley shouted back, Got it! and picked up the upstairs phone. Sam never called Kaley on her cell phone at home. The sheer drama and politics of family members answering each others’ calls was just too funny.

Yeah? she said.

Aren’t you going to ask who it is?

I already know who it is, Kaley said. What do you want?

If you ask your mom if you can have a sleepover at my house, do you think she’ll be mad?

Kaley snorted like a pig over the phone. God, you’re such a twit.

Sam laughed. I promise I won’t get you drunk and fat.

Kaley blew air across the phone, and it hissed in Sam’s ear. Nervous about tomorrow?

No, I mean yes, some douchebag left a comment on Food Slut threatening my soufflés tomorrow.

How did they know that?

What?

That the soufflé class was tomorrow? You didn’t announce the date change.

Oh, that’s true. I just sent out an email to the class. Sam paced back and forth through the kitchen, running one hand across her countertops and her new marble slab for chocolate and a butcher’s block in the center island. Hm…I don’t know.

Did you ask Harry about it?

When you get divorced, that means that the other person doesn’t want you to come running to them with all your problems anymore, Kaley.

Yeah, but death threats on your desserts.

Sam wanted to laugh it off, but she couldn’t. "So come over? We can watch something out of Jack Malpeque’s oeuvre and try out the winter aphrodisiac nibbles for next month’s class."

Kaley squealed. The truffles came in?

No, sorry. We’re just going to have to use the frozen truffles.

When are they coming in?

Monday. Supposedly. Three days away; an eternity, as far as she was concerned. I’ll throw in some chai vodka.

Deal. The phone beeped off, and Sam went back upstairs, turned on her monitor, and looked at the comment again.

She had no idea how to tell who it was from. She pasted the email address into a search engine; all that came back was that the address belonged to a remailer, which was (she looked it up) a service that took off your real address and replaced it with another one. It sounded like something that even Harry would have trouble with. Weird. One, why bother making empty threats on her soufflés? Two, why bother going through all the secrecy? Usually trolls didn’t bother hiding their identity too hard. They usually just wanted to yell at her for trying to make cooking funny and sexy instead of too complex and boring to bother with.

She usually got comments that boiled down to What’s the point of making delicious food if it isn’t hard? And Why do you have to make so many jokes about sex? Which always struck her as pretty stupid.

She turned off the monitor again, went into the back pantry and started pulling down ingredients. Raw avocado-chocolate pudding: avocados, cocoa powder, agave, sea salt, vanilla…Figs and chorizo: dried figs, Spanish sausage, pimentón, cinnamon, Manzanilla sherry, olive oil…Truffled ravioli: fontina, dried truffles, honey, pears, and walnuts… She stopped. She couldn’t remember what the last dish was.

Ah. Shrimp bisque. Harry’s favorite.

When the doorbell rang, she dumped everything on the counter, sniffed back tears, and opened the door for Kaley.

Cutting onions? Kaley asked.

She shook her head. Shrimp bisque.

Kaley dumped her bag on the floor and hugged her, then stepped in out of the cold. Poor thing. You should take it off the menu.

No…it’s perfect, she hiccupped. I can’t tell you the number of times he dragged me to bed after I made him shrimp bisque. It works. I have to move on.

Kaley shook her head at her. Now you know why I never married.

You just haven’t met the right man yet.

Kaley rolled her eyes. I have met the right man. He’s just married and a professional hockey player. Oh, yeah. And I’ve never actually met him.

He signed your jersey. But Sam was feeling better, wiping her face on a tissue, leading Kaley back into the kitchen.

He signs everyone’s jerseys. Ooh, we’re going with the pudding? I don’t know about that. Raw food. It just sounds like it’s for a bunch of weirdos. I don’t know if anyone will try it.

We’ll give them some first and then explain how to make it. They won’t know what hit them. Sam checked the avocadoes, which were hefty, full, and with just a little give under her fingers. So rich…so delicious. She stroked the avocado suggestively. "So…ahuacate."

But she had already shocked Kaley with her explanation of the Aztec word for avocado (testicle), and Kaley, whose eyes must be in a perpetual state of dizziness from rolling at Sam’s bad jokes all the time, ignored her and went straight for the freezer. I believe I was promised chai vodka.

They worked on the appetizers for half an hour before Sam remembered the reason she’d asked Kaley to come over. Oh! I almost forgot. That stupid threat on the soufflés. Would you help me check the kitchen? I want to make sure there aren’t any booby traps or anything like that.

Paranoid much?

You know me.

They searched the kitchen, checking the eggs and the other ingredients, looking over the guest list for any possible saboteurs, and discussing the possibility of whether a truck with a super-loud stereo parked on the street could knock over a soufflé: Sam for, Kaley against. Colorado Springs seemed to have become a haven for giant trucks over the last decade.

Anyone who had to park on the street would be blocked by the house, Sam. He might rattle windows on the west side in the living room, but there’s no way the sound could make it all the way back here, not loud enough to knock over a soufflé.

Sam shook her head, waving her short blonde pigtails back and forth. This is our first class, Kaley. I’m so nervous I could almost puke. I just know this is going to be a failure. Like Harry always said—

—Nobody trusts a skinny cook, Kaley finished for her. Honestly. Could you just have a little faith in me for a while, even if you don’t trust yourself? If the company falls flat, it’s as much my fault as it is yours.

Sorry.

And don’t give me that puppy-dog look, either. Save it for your gentlemen callers.

Sam snorted. And who might those be?

You’re doing better than me. The only man under the age of sixty-five who’s been in my house for the last six weeks is Dale.

Sam laughed, then said, How are things going with him? Dale was Kaley’s older brother, an electrical engineer at a computer hardware company.

He’s…

Do you think you can still work with him, if we need to hire him to help with catering? He’s been asking. But if you don’t want him to be around, I’ll tell him no. I won’t explain why or anything. Or I could lie.

You shouldn’t lie to people anymore. You say the craziest shit. No wonder nobody believes you. No, I can work with him, I just can’t talk to him about mom and dad and the garage.

Neither one of you knows anything about cars. You should just sell it and split the profits. After your parents pass on.

"He still thinks he should inherit the whole thing. So he can run it into the ground, I guess. He thinks it’s his ticket out of a desk job. After all, if you can run a business, why can’t he?"

Sam sighed. He shouldn’t take me as an example. It just kind of fell into my lap.

Don’t be silly. All right, I think we’ve checked everything we can check.

Sam took off the lid of the pot where the shrimp stock was simmering. I think we’re good, here. She reached out for her fine-mesh strainer from its hook overhead and swiped her hand through nothing but air. Oh, I forgot. It’s out in the garage. Harry took it with him by mistake and brought it back a few days ago. I’ll be right back.

She went into the garage, swinging her arm around through the dark for the cord overhead. She hit it so hard that the cord popped away from her hand and she had to wait a moment for it to come back to her.

She pulled the cord. For a second, the light flashed brightly, casting shadows all over the garage, and she thought she saw something moving around behind her SUV.

Just then, Kaley screamed and something that sounded as loud as a gunshot cracked out from the kitchen.

Chapter 2

Sam ran back toward the kitchen, grabbing a chef’s knife from the magnetic strip and raising it over her head as she whipped around the corner.

Kaley was running cold water over her hand, shaking her fingers back and forth, trying to pull something invisible away with her other hand. One of the dining-room chairs lay flat on the floor, its seat pointing away from the oven.

Sam laughed and put the knife back on its spot on the magnetic strip. You checked behind the oven and got a handful of spider webs, didn’t you?

"No but I felt something. Check my back," Kaley said. Sam carefully inspected the back of her shirt, first the outside, then peeked down the inside, then rubbed her hands all over it. Better a squashed spider on Kaley’s back than a rapidly crawling one.

You’re fine, Sam said.

Ugh!

Well, are the spiders planning to sabotage us tomorrow?

Shouldn’t the heat kill them back there?

Apparently not. Oh! The light went out in the garage, and I thought I saw something. I’m probably freaking out over nothing. Sam pulled open her odds-and-ends drawer at the end of the counter, which included a screwdriver, a handful of fuses, and a flashlight, after she’d shorted out the electricity in the kitchen a number of times by running every appliance she owned at the same time. She clicked the flashlight on and off and on again, shook it. It seemed reliable, like it wouldn’t fuzz out on her, anyway.

You can’t go out there by yourself, Kaley said.

Why not?

What if there’s someone out there?

Sam pulled the knife back off the magnetic strip. There. Feel better? You know I can chop an onion at ten paces.

I’m coming with you.

Sam handed her the flashlight and unlocked the door to the garage, kicked it open, and screamed out a hiyaaa! that her self-defense coach had made her practice in class.

The door almost bounced back in their faces, and Sam pushed it open with her foot, more gently this time.

Kaley shone the flashlight around the garage, even covering the ceiling.

Check under the SUV, Sam suggested. If I were going to try to rape and murder two women in a garage, I’d want to grab them by their ankles first.

Don’t you have a gun?

Somewhere, if Harry didn’t take it, Sam admitted. "But I’m much better with this big, gigantic knife. Chop chop chop, little burglar. I’m coming to get you…"

Kaley squatted down and shone the flashlight under the SUV. Nothing.

Sam grabbed the strainer off the top of a box of Harry’s things that she’d found in the basement, cans of malt of all things. He hadn’t used canned malt for years. She had mostly kept them in case she needed an excuse to call him. Oh, by the way, I have a box of your old cans of malt that you need to pick up and please come back I can’t do this alone! He’d hang up on her in a heartbeat.

Okay, if there are any burglars or soufflé saboteurs in this garage, we’re leaving now, Sam announced. It was probably just me being spooked when you screamed.

She and Kaley went back out of the garage, and she shut and deliberately locked the door behind her. There. All better.

But Kaley kept the flashlight next to her for the rest of the night.

They contentedly cooked together, chatting about this and that, and finally sat down to stuff themselves, drink chai vodkas with cream and honey, and watch Pirate Moon III, Jack Malpeque’s new movie on DVD.

I can’t believe you turned down that job for Danielle, Kaley said.

I promised we would start a catering business together, and that’s that, Sam said.

But you’d be working under Robert again. Didn’t you have the hots for him?

Robert Langoustine had been one of Sam’s first chef crushes, back when she was just starting out cooking. She would go to the Rose Hotel to eat dinner with Harry as often as they could afford it (which wasn’t often) for years, trying to figure out how everything that came out of his kitchen could taste so good.

And then she’d decided to make the switch over to full-time cooking, and he’d hired her. Ugh. It had killed the romance in a heartbeat, the abuse and insanity of that kitchen. It was good training, but bad on the stars in her eyes.

She’d quit at the end of a screaming match, threatening to upend Robert’s ludicrously lame ideas about food by starting her own business…and that’s how Sweet Granadilla Catering had started.

Oh, the food was good at the Rose.

But it was boring. Large, expensive slabs of meat with potatoes and roasted asparagus. Beet and goat cheese salad still on the menu a year after it had stopped being interesting at merely average restaurants. Truffles, truffles, and more truffles. Not that she had a problem with truffles, per se, but you shouldn’t be able to order a meal with nothing but truffle this and truffle that, from beginning to end. Unsurprising truffles. Expected truffles. It was a waste of truffles, that’s what it was. And the chocolate volcano cake with raspberry sauce that had been on the menu for what, a decade?

Sam didn’t know if she would succeed as a dot-com businesswoman with an inventive catering company on the side (or was it vice versa?), but she knew she would fail as a sous-chef under Robert Langoustine. She’d make a mild suggestion of adding vanilla to a lobster bisque; he’d take offense; it would be knife-throwing across the dining room before she knew it.

Robert hates me, Sam said.

He does not. He’s just loud and authoritative.

Exactly. It’s like being kicked in the gut. She popped another spoonful of pudding in her mouth. Creamy, buttery, yummy. And easy on the heart, too.

Kaley leaned back, sighed, and put the bowl of shrimp bisque on the side table. That’s really good. I still think you should put the roasted red peppers in there. And use the same sherry that’s in the figs and chorizo. The Marvolio? Manzanilla? Madeira? Too many chai vodkas.

You had it. Manzanilla. Look! Shirt off!

They had a long-running game of raising a toast whenever Jack Malpeque took his shirt off in a movie. They clinked glasses and took a drink of vodka.

I have to go to bed, Kaley groaned. No more drinking.

No more drinking. Look at those abs. It’s like looking at corn on the cob.

But neither of them moved. Finally, Sam noticed that Kaley was asleep with her head on the back of the couch, braced between a couple of quilts. Sam laughed, put a pillow from the spare bedroom on the couch beside Kaley, and went up the stairs to bed.

Suddenly, there was a thump from the front door. Sam rushed back down to make sure the front door hadn’t blown open, but she’d locked up hours ago without realizing it. She looked outside through a couple of different windows, but didn’t see what had happened.

As she passed the oven, she found that it was still hot. She’d forgotten to turn it off after they’d agreed they had to have some broiled sourdough croutons to go with the bisque. Idiot, she thought. Could have burned the house down.

With Kaley in it. She had to be twice as careful now that she had a business partner.

Chapter 3

"The first thing you need to know about soufflés is that they are not difficult. They are horribly, horribly simple, Sam said. Soufflés are the same as meringues are the same as angel food cake are the same as marshmallows are the same as a bubble bath. That’s all they are. Bubbles. If you make the bubble wall stronger than the air pressure inside it and you heat the bubbles, then the bubbles expand without popping.

One good way to strengthen the bubbles is by using protein. Protein, whether you get it from wheat, as gluten, or from eggs, as albumen, is strong and stretchy. For example, gluten, the protein in wheat that we use in bread, comes from the same word as glue. And, if you think about it, you can notice many similarities between bread and a soufflé. They both have bubbles, right?

Her twelve students around the room nodded.

"One of the main differences between gluten and albumen, for our purposes, is that gluten will hold its shape rigidly after being baked, while albumen will not. That’s why, if you’re making something with egg whites, you will generally add something to the egg whites to strengthen their structure after cooling. In the case of meringues, it’s sugar. The more sugar, the stiffer the meringue. In the case of angel food cake, it’s flour. In the case of a marshmallow, it’s not even eggs at all. Even though a homemade marshmallow looks like a meringue, it contains no eggs. Instead, it has gelatin, which is—you guessed it—a protein. Although in this case, gelatin gets less stable as it gets warmer, rather than more stable.

In the case of a soufflé, what makes it so divinely light and angelic is that it doesn’t use gluten, that very gluey protein, to make it stand up. It doesn’t use a whole heck of a lot of sugar to stiffen it by creating a network of crystals, either. You might add some protein in your ingredients, like cheese, sugar, or a little flour, but that’s not going to be the main reason that a soufflé stands or falls.

Kaley passed around a plate of marshmallows, angel food cake, and soft and hard meringues for people to compare (and eat). Danielle, who considered herself a terrible, hopeless cook, was one of their first customers; she’d paid them sixty dollars to learn how to make a dish she was never going to make again. Ever. Unless Sam and Kaley talked her into it, of course. But if they could teach Danielle, who considered herself way out of her league (Sam had to laugh at that; the general manager of the Rose Hotel? Out of her league? She talked to movie stars, five-star generals, and politicians on a daily and familiar basis), they could teach anyone.

"First, the eggs themselves. For the best, strongest protein, you’re going to want to take into consideration two things, the grade of the egg and the age. Double-A eggs are best, because they have the thickest, best proteins. If you’ve ever made a sunny side up egg and seen a plateau halfway along the white of the egg, that’s because it has thick proteins that stay together, rather than spreading out perfectly flat. However, albumen degrades over time, so the longer you leave your double-A eggs in the fridge, the more like A or even B eggs they will be. So buy fresh, best-quality eggs for any cooking project where you need to have a lot of structure coming from your egg whites, like angel food cake or meringues.

A trick for determining whether the protein in your eggs has degraded is by measuring how much water has evaporated out of the shell. Eggshells are slightly porous and lose water every day. So more air in the shell means older eggs means less strength in your egg whites. I have two bowls of eggs here. One of these bowls is full of eggs that we’re going to use in class today. Can anyone tell me which bowl it is?

Sam loved finding out tricks like this, because she couldn’t rely on her memory for anything (like shutting off the oven last night).

One of the women shyly raised her hand. Yes? Sam asked. She knew what the woman’s name was. She knew it. She just couldn’t remember it to save her life. She was the shorter of the two retired ladies who had come to the class together, determined to finally, once and for all, learn how to be the kinds of cooks that their grandchildren worshiped. She’d promised them a cookie class in time for Easter, if everything went well. She should have had a cookie class today, so people could go home with a couple dozen cookies to give away as presents. But she just couldn’t