Lizz Lund - Mina Kitchen 01 - Kitchen Addiction!

Kitchen

Addiction!

Lizz Lund

Copyright © 2011
Elizabeth Lund

All rights
reserved.

ISBN-10:
1466397659

ISBN-13: 978-1466397651

This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents and dialogue are
created by the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.  Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.  For information or
permission please send an email inquiry to: [email protected]

For
my wonderful husband, Chef Andrew Mark –

my
knight in shining Armetale.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This
is my debut novel, so very special thanks and mentions must be made to friends
and family who provided boat loads of moral support and hand-holding:  my
extraordinarily patient husband, Andrew Mark; my best pal, my sister Kate; and
my jolly troupe of GF’s:  Polly, Robin, Carla, Barb and Jill.  I would also
like to thank my old college roommate, Susan Green for her enthusiasm, support,
and providing very useful information. 

Special
thanks also to the Humane League of Lancaster, for allowing me a ‘photo op’
with a resident of its Kitty Colony.

Additionally,
I am very grateful to my wonderful and kind editor from across-the-pond, Nicholas
J. Ambrose of Regarding the Hive. 

And,
as always – much love and thanks to Mom, Dad and Pat.

DISCLAIMER

This
is a silly story about silly people with silly problems for readers who want an
easy laugh fast.  There are no metaphors, symbolism, morals or literary goals
contained.  English majors:  keep out.

The
story you are about to read is completely fictitious.  All of the characters,
groups and events were concocted from my own imagination and too much raw
cookie dough.  Any similarities to actual people are completely coincidental
and/or delusional. 

Some
of the geographic locations referenced are actual places.  Others are completely
make-believe.  There is a Lancaster Polo Club, and the riders and their patrons
are a nice bunch of people.  To the best of my knowledge, their Chukker Tent
has not been set on fire, but there’s always next season.  There is also a
Lancaster Police Department.  I imagine they’re a nice bunch of folks, too –
although I’ve never met any of them or visited any of their precincts and
sincerely don’t plan on it.  Same goes for the U.S. Marshal’s Department.  For
the purposes of this story, all persons and groups herein are made up from
pixie dust.

Some
of the recipes in this book were made and tested.  Most were not.  If you make
any of these recipes, you’re on your own.  You might want to have a frozen
pizza handy as backup.

So grab a beverage, your favorite
forbidden food and scrunch down in your comfy chair.  Put your feet up, crack
open the book and enjoy.

CHAPTER
1

(
Friday
)

I
leaned my
face
against the screen door until my forehead waffled.  I smelled onions, peppers
and kielbasa cooking in my kitchen.  Again.

I
come home for lunch every day to feed my cat and my cockatiel and sometimes
myself.  With the exception of my pets, I live alone.  And with the other
exception of my neighbor Vito, who’s usually here. Like now. Vito’s retired, a
good guy, and considers himself a bit too much like family.  Which means he’s
in my kitchen more than I am.

I
bought the townhouse from Vito over a year ago and still can’t summon up the
chutzpah to make him relinquish his spare key.  Or to change the locks, in case
of hurt feelings.  But that’s mostly for sentimental reasons.  Or as Ma puts
it, seventy mental reasons.

My
half of our adjoined homes belonged to Vito’s late wife Marie, who went on her
final shopping trip to the HomeWares in the sky long before she could feather
the ‘Her’ part of the ‘His and Her’ nests they’d bought as retirement presents
for each other.

But
that’s me.  Sentiment matters and anything resembling a hard cold fact hangs
out in the lunch meat drawer until the fuzzy stuff complains. This outlook
sometimes frustrates my executive-style Ma, who’s from the no-nonsense style Bronx.  Ma scraped her way up, with and without Dad, to pearl-earringed Ridgewood, New Jersey.  She lost her Bronx accent long ago and hates it when environmental factors
sometimes kick my ‘Joisey’ into gear.  When my sister and I were kids, the only
thing that gave Ma away were the occasional screams accompanying a wooden spoon
upside our heads.  Other than that, she seems perfectly L. L. Bean.

I’m
Mina Kitchen – Mina being short for Wilhelmina.  I’m named after a
great-grandmother I never met and plan to thank in the hereafter by prodding a
heavenly fork in her virtual side.  Not because of inheriting her weird name,
or even weirder nickname.  It’s mostly for inheriting her oddball catering
disorder.

Family
legend still regales Fat Friday of ‘55.  Great-Grandma Mina – Dad’s grandma –
invited neighbors for a dinner that included a 25-pound turkey with all the
trimmings.  Which would have been fine, except the turkey dinner was prefaced
by a ham, hot dogs, lasagna, meat loaf, barbeque ribs, roast beef and Yorkshire
puddings, stuffed cabbage, stuffed shells, stuffed grape leaves, moussaka, and
a pork and sauerkraut casserole.  And three different kinds of bread.  And rolls. 
And salads. And don’t forget the carrot Jell-O mold.  And never mind the
appetizers served with the cocktails and hand-made bar trimmings before that. 
But I wax foodie; I love this story.  It always ends happily ever after with,
“And no one was able to roll away from the table until eleven o’clock that
night.” Although that might have been because Grandma Mina served one pie per
guest, just to balance out the trays of blintzes and ice cream and all.

For
the record, the legendary guests to Fat Friday included:  Mr. and Mrs. DeMicco;
Yorgios and Hale Papadopoulos, with their toddler and Gramma Papadopoulos; Bob
Dietrich and his secretary Cheryl; and Sid and Sally Klingenbaum with their
newly barmitzvahed triplets.  Whether Great-Grandma cooked all that food to
impress, or because she was diversity sensitive, we’ll never know.   All we
know is that this was the first and last time Bumpa – my great-grandpa – let
her cook for large and/or diverse crowds.  They still had some humdinger dinner
parties post-Fat Friday, Ma says.  But Bumpa put the spatula down about Mina’s
cooking for more than four guests.  From then on, only bonafide caterers
covered neighborhood parties.  Bumpa’s heartburn couldn’t handle the menus,
plural.

I
gritted my teeth, accepted my household and entered.  The smoke alarm went off,
the cockatiel shrieked and Vito jumped up and down at the smoke detector with a
potholder in one hand and a giant Modess pad in the other.  I walked to the
back of the kitchen and opened the screen door, and turned on the exhaust fan. 
The air was confettied with cockatiel fluff. I was also pretty sure it was
sizzling in the pan alongside the kielbasa.  Just another normal lunch in my
abnormal household.

“Sorry,
sorry, sorry, Toots,” Vito apologized in his usual triplicate.  “I just gotta
ask you to do this favor for me, so I thought I’d pay up front and make yous a
nice, hot lunch.” 

Of
course that was precisely what I wanted, it being August and feeling like 1,000
degrees.  Vito’s heart was in the right place.  But I sometimes wondered what
occupied the space his brains were supposed to rent.

“Anyways,
I got an extra load of dry cleaning I was hoping you’d take over for me,” Vito
explained, waving the giant Modess pad at the smoke detector.  I looked
closer.  It was a Swiffer pad.  “I was gonna do a quick Swiffer after lunch.”
He blushed.  I’d finally broken down and bought a Swiffer Wet Jet last April
and it was still Vito’s favorite toy.  My rugs and furniture might be full of
bird fluff and kitty fur but you can eat off my kitchen floor most any day,
thanks to Vito.

Sadly,
Vito is also a dry cleaning junkie.  I don’t know why he owns this many dry
clean only clothes.  But unquestioning schnook that I am, I make a few runs a
week to the dry cleaner for him.  I drive past it on the way to work anyway, so
it’s no biggie.  And what the heck, it accrues bonus Swiffer points for me,
too.

“Sure,”
I said.  “I’ll pick up Monday’s drop-off, too.”

“Well
sure, you wouldn’t want to pick something up without dropping something off. 
It confuses people.”

“Right…”
I said and grabbed a bunch of carrots out of the fridge, then went to the sink
to wash and slice them.  I had to.  It was the only available produce.

Vito
shook his head.  “Tough week?” he asked.  I sighed and nodded.

I’m
the office manager for Executive Enterprises for Job Intuitive Technologies,
otherwise known as EEJIT.  This morning was the usual – I’d spent the better
part of it listening to a litany of complaints from my boss Howard, in
counterpoint to Roger Stumpf’s emailed inventory of grievances.  Roger is
EEJIT’s area rep for our largest client, Buy-A-Lots.  Roger spends most of his
time in Buy-A-Lots’ regional office, which is located near some farmlands
outside of York, toward Baltimore. Consequently, Roger emails a lot of
requests, and complaints.  Roger helps Buy-A-Lots exec folk use EEJIT’s sales
and marketing software, Predict-O, which is supposed to make lots of little
Buy-A-Lots pop up all across the country.  Sometimes they even wind up across
the street from each other, like a nice tight knit Old World family.

So,
at the end of most weeks, I mostly want to forget about my boss and his star
employee and sauté something. It’s making me become an increasingly reluctant
office manager, which could be a problem.  The pay is okay; my boss is not. 
This set up also fuels the maternal fires back in Jersey.  Ma just can’t
understand why I work where I’m “so obviously unappreciated.”  I keep reminding
her there’s this little thing called a mortgage, complicated by monthly
supplies of Cockatiel Clusters and Kitty Cookies, not to mention the occasional
happy hour.  And there’s also my own inertia.

What
this all boils down to is when all is well at EEJIT, I’m invisible and I like
it that way.  But when anything goes wrong, I’m the goat.  As a result, my
catering disorder usually peaks by Fridays.  Luckily, on some weekends, my
friends ask me to cater their parties.   So far, it’s gone like clockwork. 
Mostly.

While
Great-Grandma Mina’s catering crazies tried to please a broad spectrum of
people, mine are about soothing a broad spectrum of stress.  The more stressed
I get, the louder I up the food volume.  My familial claim to catering
disorders was when my college roommate asked me to give a dinner party for her
and her fiancé to celebrate their engagement and new digs.  Her mother, father,
sister and aunt arrived. His father and mother arrived.  I served up 8 trays of
canapés, 9 different cheeses, 4 vegetable crudités trays and 3 sushi platters
followed by a buffet of beef stroganoff, chicken curry, vegetable risotto,
Caesar salad and a jar of homemade pickled beets per person.  To this day, I
have not lived it down.  Especially the pickled beets.

The
basement door banged loudly.  I glanced across. Two large, furry white paws
held the bottom of the door and shook it for all it was worth.  “I think
Vinnie’s hungry,” Vito said, stepping back, armed with his spatula and his
trusty Swiffer pad.

Last
summer my best friend, Trixie, deposited Vinnie at my front doorstep.  Trixie’s
an ER nurse who works the graveyard shift and every other shift in-between. 
Vinnie is a cat who used to belong to the old lady who lived in the apartment
upstairs from Trixie.  Her neighbor moved onward and upward to what we hoped
was a heavenly condo in the sky.  Her last wish, which she told Trixie during
her final trip to the ER, was for Trixie to find a home for her Vincent if she
left the planet before he did.

So
now Vincent is my very large orange tabby.  To put him in perspective, he looks
like a small mountain lion.  To keep his ego in perspective, I call him
Vinnie.   He has white tuxedo markings, white mittens and socks and impossibly
large blue eyes.   Unfortunately his right eye is slightly crossed, which we
figure is the reason for some depth perception issues.  Like when he leaps from
table to floor and a lamp or toaster gets in the way.

I
grabbed some Smackerel Mackerels – Vinnie’s favorite treat – and slid my leg
across the door to keep him in the basement for the moment.  “Here,” I said,
putting some of the treats on the top step in front of a pair of large, glowing
eyes.

“Fhwankyoo,”
he said, and began crunching.

I
closed the door to the basement and poured myself some ginger ale.  I figured
that would wash down the bird fluffed kielbasa and eggs pretty good.  And
besides, it was the only cold beverage I had in the fridge except for a few
stray beers and a swig of cranberry juice.

The
phone rang.  Marie screamed, held onto her perch and flapped her wings in a
demented attempt to lift off, cage and all. Vito looked frantically for a pan
cover, and waved the Swiffer pad at Marie and the cloud of nuclear fluff
hovering over the stove.

I
coughed and answered the phone.

“Oh,
I got you at home!”  It was Ma.  I’d been coming home for lunch everyday since
I bought the place last year and she still acted surprised when I answered the
phone.  “I just wanted you to know I’m sending some swatches in the mail,” she
began.

I
gazed at my Technicolor walls reprovingly.   Traitors.  Ma’s visit last Easter left
her horrified when she realized my walls matched my psychedelic Easter eggs.
Ever since then, the walls have been on Ma’s side and continue to fink me out.

My
walls are lacquered in various nail polish colors – tangerine, lilac, electric
blue and some kind of silverish geometric wallpaper – by various flavors of
tenants; Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and apparently some kind of Middle Eastern
judging by the Arabic lettering on the fuse box in the garage.  I also have
multiple cable hook-ups in each and every room – including the bathroom and
downstairs powder room.  Why the powder room is anyone’s guess: who watches TV
in the potty?

I
also wonder if my house might be under some kind of Homeland Security
surveillance, because sometimes I hear clicking sounds when I’m on a long
distance phone call.

Anyway,
from what Vito’s told me, it wasn’t his sainted Marie’s fault that she didn’t
get around to redecorating after they bought both houses.  According to Vito,
her last stroll in my backyard ended with a fatal stroke before she could
switch her swatch.  So I was pretty sure she was forwarding heavenly paint
ideas at Ma.  You know what they say: those we lose are always with us.  I just
didn’t think they were supposed to be only a paint swatch away.

Ma’s
been mailing me paint swatches since I’ve moved in.   No notes, no messages. 
Just swatches.  I finally stopped opening them and stashed the envelopes in the
bread drawer.

“Thanks,
I’ll look out for them,” I lied.  “I gotta go, though, I’ll be late back from
lunch. Bye.” I rang off.

“I
can get the clean stuff from you before the Brethren Breakfast tomorrow,” Vito
continued, setting a dinner plate full of the fluffed egg mess in front of me.

I
looked at him blankly.

“You
forgot, didn’t you?” Vito asked.

He
was right.  I’d completely forgotten about the Brethren Breakfast.  Tomorrow
was the third Saturday of the month, which meant it was St. Bart’s turn.

St.
Bart’s Episcopal Church is my godmother’s church.  Aunt Muriel is a
card-carrying Episcopalian.  (Really – they honest-to-God give you a card.  I
guess it’s in case you’re proofed.)

Aunt
Muriel was and is Ma’s best friend since they both crawled out of the swamp
somewhere around the dawn of time. They’d even evolved from the Bronx together soon after high school graduation.  Long before I was born, Muriel and
Louise slipped into power suits and accent-free white collar voices like second
skins.   A couple of divorces and a few broken glass ceilings later, they are
success stories.  Ma belies her years and generation as a freakishly astute
techno nerd.  There isn’t a piece of digital wizardry she hasn’t test driven or
owned.  This explains her fast-tracked VP position at SUZ, a top tier IT
company.  It also explains her sometimes being slightly embarrassed about me. 
I’m not quite a Luddite; I just refuse to own a cell phone and still play
vinyl.