The next morning at around ten, a chef I’d asked for and I gathered in the kitchen to teach me to cook.
I knew how to cook and I actually did a good job at cooking but I wanted to learn something new. Something I could make use of in the café after I leave this place.
So I had asked Samara to get a hold of one of the chefs. I had decided to do this every alternate day and hoped I would be able to stick to cooking every alternate day.
“So, what do you want to cook, Ms. Jenson?” The chef asked, smiling politely at me.
“How about I get your name first?” I suggested, knowing only now that I didn’t even know his name.
“I’m Keith Richards,” he said, extending his hand towards me.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Juliet Jenson,” I said, taking his hand in a firm handshake.
He looked a few years older than me, probably in mid twenties. He had light brown eyes and a dark complexion. He had black hair which ended just above his eyes. He also had a tattoo half hidden on the side of his neck.
“So what do you want to learn?” He asked.
“Um…” I thought about it for a moment, “… teach me the first thing you learned to cook.”
“Okay,” he said, glancing over at me amusedly. “Baltimore Coddies was the first thing I learned to cook.”
“Baltimore Coddies,” I repeated. “I never had it.”
“Well, now you will.” He said. “First we need to get all the ingredients,” he said.
“Okay, tell me what we’ll need and I’ll get it.”
Keith instructed me to get about a pound of soaked salt cod, potatoes, milk, onions which I diced myself, dried parsley, butter, eggs, Chesapeake Red Bay Seasoning and pepper.
As he taught me how to cook it, we talked a lot. I learned that he grew up in Baltimore, Maryland where Coddies was a popular snack. He told me that being a cook was his childhood dream and his mother would always teach him to cook something every Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, his mother passed away a few summers back and although he stopped cooking for a while because it made him remember his fun times with his mom, he retracted back into his heaven, the kitchen because he couldn’t stay away from there for too long.
He also told me that he had participated in Masterchef America but didn’t win the season. I was so surprised. I was learning how to cook Baltimore Coddies from a former Masterchef contestant!
“Why aren’t you a chef in a top five star hotel?” I asked, baffled that he chose to be the Jenson’s personal cook rather than being a reputed chef in a hotel. I mean sure it would be fun to cook everyday for rich billionaires but if I was in his place, I would’ve chosen to work in a five star hotel with a good pay.
“Well, I was actually working in a restaurant for some time two years back and it paid me decently but it wasn’t enough. I have a big family to look after. I have two brothers who are married and they live with us with their children. They don’t have jobs that pay them well and I have an unmarried sister who has two kids, twins both of them. We’re all a twelve member family.”
“Whoa. That’s a big family.”
“Yeah, so I had to look for somewhere else and one day the Jenson’s had a dinner party at our restaurant and they loved the food so they asked me if I wanted to work for them. The pay was far better, so I took it.”
“How much do you get paid?” I asked curiously.
“You shouldn’t ask a man how much he’s paid.”
“Shut up and tell me.”
He chuckled. “Well, I get paid seventy two thousand dollars per year,” He said casually.
My mouth popped open. Seventy two thousand dollars per year?
“You get paid six thousand dollars per month?!” I vociferated, astounded at the fact.
“Yeah.” He said.
“Wow.”
I focused on the Coddies. I had mixed the ingredients and the flaked cods and was now trying to form golf sized balls and flatten it slightly and I was doing a bad job at it. Every time I would take some of the mix and try to knead it, it would break off or I would flatten it to the point where it looked no where near like balls.
“Here, I’ll show you how to do it,” Keith said as I once again failed to make it ball sized.
He took a lump in his hand and started to roll it between his palms gently. He did that for some time and as soon as it got a decent ball sized shape, he pressed it softly. It turned out to be perfect and I pouted.
“How did you do that?”
“It’s simple. Try it again the same way I did.”
So I took a smaller lump this time to make it easy for me and started doing the way he had done it. It was the same thing I had done earlier and this time too, the ball broke off midway. Frustrated, I tried to amalgamate the two pieces but ended up squishing them with some of it flying in my face.
“I can’t do this!” I finally declared pathetically, vexed about the situation. I looked over at Keith and realized that some of the mix had landed on his face when I had squished it. I laughed as he wiped it off.
“You can do this. Keep trying. It’s really very easy,” he encouraged.
I tried again, but after a few more attempts, I had given up completely.
“Oh my God, I can’t cook at all. However the hell am I going to feed myself for the rest of my life!” I clamored histrionically.
Keith rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll feed you. That’s my job.”
“For the rest of my life?”
“For as long as I can,” he promised.
I smiled at him which he returned with a charismatic one of his own.
“What about this?” I asked, looking down at the mix with a distasteful scowl.
“I’ll help you,” he said and wrapped his arms around mine from the back. He held my hands and moved mine to gently malaxate it as it had somewhat hardened.
As he told me how to knead it into a perfect ball shaped form, we heard footsteps behind us and turned to look.
It was Ethan. He had walked in and towards the kitchen to get some orange juice from the fridge. When he finally noticed us, he raised an eyebrow and I realized just how a third person would view this in a totally wrong way.
“What’s going on here?” He asked, unscrewing the cap of the bottle and taking a sip from it as he leaned against the fridge.