Mesa Trail ch. 16
Draft 2

"Keeper knew that the pot would sit on the stove top all day, simmering and stewing, and at the last minute, just before she served it, Signe would drop the crabs into a pot of boiling water, one at a time, and then add them to the gumbo. Fresh crabs. Caught in Dogie's net just hours ago. Blue crabs. Tasty crabs." – Appelt, from Keeper









Oh well, Hannah thought, as she eyed up the kitchen as though it were her workspace, not her home.  What had happened on the mountainside was no longer happening for them.  It had rained for three days straight and they were talking about county wide damage, luckily not to the same extent as the 1,000-year rain in '013, but right up there.  She had wanted to be an up and rising chef before she became a gold miner, but it did not come easy to her.  When boiling the fettucine, she was hasty, and after draining it, it became pasty and stuck together like a new form of paper mache.  When she cooked the pork chops, they became like sandals, and tasted similar too.  In salads all the good stuff sunk to the bottom and Josh would dig back through trying to find the pepperoni discs.  It went on and on.  Cooking wasn't like up in the mountains at all where everything came quickly and naturally.  At the Mermaid grocery store, she hastily filled her basket after school with potatoes, ham, bacon and heavy cream for potato soup.  Once the groceries were set on the center island of the kitchen, before you know it Kitie had slunk up into her room never to be seen again and Josh, when it was not raining, outside you go, lurching around the red rocks like Zebulon Pike himself, staking out claims, and fishing the rocks for dinosaur eggs.  She peeled and cut the potatoes into quarter inch cubes before anything else. She held an onion in her had for dicing but thought better of it, and didn't have the time to chop it properly.  She remembered a video of the proper technique for dicing onions and knew that it got cut in half first, but which way to cut, through the stems or the side? The French chef then skinned the onion and placed three quarter cuts along the dome of the half onion before he began his dice.  So easy for them.  So easy to live alone and cook all day and learn all of these techniques.  What about those of us who are trying to simply get a meal on the table, she thought, and cooked in mild resentment.  She cut the ham as slowly as possible, making sure to keep her knuckles exposed to where the knife sunk into the side of the meat and not the tip of her fingers.  What would happen, she thought to herself, if I just left it all here, for them to do.  When she got like this, she always decided to create a contingency plan for herself, to give herself something else to do while she was doing this, the cooking, and it usually worked: 1) first of all the potato soup would for certain become a masterpiece and would receive such acclaim that it might show up on the front page of the food section next week; 2) some day she would own her own little food hut and if she didn't have the patience now, she never would, so cut, and cut well! 3) some day soon the gold would come back and she would claim the treasures and it would never rain again.  As she thought her three things, the recipe had done itself, the cream had been stirred and butter melted, the pepper sprinkled and the ham and potatoes had begun to soften and the kitchen carried the smell of creamy gently spiced potatoes.  She placed a check on the upper left hand page of the Better Boulder Cookbook, this recipe sent in from Jocelyn Hand.  "Well thank you Jocelyn." She placed three piping hot bowls in order on the dinner table and left the rest of the pot covered at the back burner of the stove for mom and dad.  They would be the votes that count and she hovered over the stew for hours.