Read Online One Step Closer to You by Alice Peterson - Free Book Online
Authors: Alice Peterson
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including vegetables, cheese, meat, baking, bread, coffee, parties, health, books for kids and spices and herbs. The opposite side is divided into countries.
Our test kitchen is at the end of the shop. It’s small with white tiles, a modern cooker and stove; copper pans hang from hooks, and we have an old-fashioned mixer and white porcelain cake stands, along with a blackboard where we write up the lunch menu for the day. There are five small tables that can seat two to three people, and then a larger communal table that can sit six, just in front of our mural-painted walls of lobsters, chilli, cans of soup and olive oil bottles. There’s a squishy sofa that customers enjoy with a cappuccino and a book. There are also shelves stacked with chef magazines and olive oils for sale, along with my boss’s red wine, produced in his own vineyard in France.
I share the kitchen with Mary-Jane. Mary-Jane is in her late fifties and has worked here ever since the café opened ten years ago. She comes from St Helena, a tiny tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, famous for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. She’s short and plump with a mop of thick dark hair and a determined stride. When I came in for my interview with Jean almost four years ago, she was standing at the sink in her marigolds, steely-faced and certainly not about to make me feel less nervous. ‘Mary-Jane is special,’ Jean assured me, giving her a wink that sheignored, ‘but she’s not too good at …’ he clicked his fingers, ‘small talk.’ Mary-Jane shooed him away with her hand, as if he were an annoying fly, but I could see the affection between them.
She grunts when I say hello, before approaching me with the soupspoon. ‘Taste,’ she orders. I taste and give it the thumbs-up because, as usual, it tastes delicious.
Like me, Mary-Jane had had no professional experience before she began working here. Her passion for food came from her grandmother, who loved to bake. She was famous for her fruitcakes and coconut fingers – slabs of fresh sponge cut into slices and rolled in icing sugar and coconut. Granny lived with the family. Mary-Jane’s father was a farmer; he grew fruit and vegetables. When Mary-Jane talks about her childhood, it’s the one time that her eyes light up and she often giggles as if she were a young girl again. ‘Dad used to grow bananas, Polly. On a Saturday morning we’d help him pick them off the trees and bunch them together with string, and then we’d hang the bunches on the side of the donkeys’ saddles. We had beautiful donkeys, I can even remember their names.’ She smiled, as if she were standing by the banana tree that moment with them. ‘Prince, Violet and Ned. We had guava trees too: they grew wild and Granny used to make the best guava jelly. We’d eat it on toast after school.’
‘Find a boss who will make you a coffee every day,’ Jean says as I’m writing the menu on the blackboard. He’s standing bythe cappuccino machine, dressed in his blue apron. Jean is in his early fifties, tall and fit from swimming every day, with brown hair and probing eyes.
When he hands me a cup I can tell he’s in a good mood. Jean’s behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. Often he loses his cool in the kitchen, spatulas and crockery flying across the kitchen. But today he blows Mary-Jane and me a kiss before disappearing upstairs to prepare his workshop on cooking with wild mushrooms.
As I stick my apron on and begin to assemble all the ingredients I need for my cakes and pavlova, I think about how working here was only meant to be a stopgap. It was something to do to help me through the early months after my break-up with Matt, and to earn some money, but more importantly to distract me from drinking. During the early days of rehab, I needed a sense of purpose until I felt ready to think about a new career or going back to teaching. In my early twenties, when friends, including Janey, were still at
Our test kitchen is at the end of the shop. It’s small with white tiles, a modern cooker and stove; copper pans hang from hooks, and we have an old-fashioned mixer and white porcelain cake stands, along with a blackboard where we write up the lunch menu for the day. There are five small tables that can seat two to three people, and then a larger communal table that can sit six, just in front of our mural-painted walls of lobsters, chilli, cans of soup and olive oil bottles. There’s a squishy sofa that customers enjoy with a cappuccino and a book. There are also shelves stacked with chef magazines and olive oils for sale, along with my boss’s red wine, produced in his own vineyard in France.
I share the kitchen with Mary-Jane. Mary-Jane is in her late fifties and has worked here ever since the café opened ten years ago. She comes from St Helena, a tiny tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, famous for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. She’s short and plump with a mop of thick dark hair and a determined stride. When I came in for my interview with Jean almost four years ago, she was standing at the sink in her marigolds, steely-faced and certainly not about to make me feel less nervous. ‘Mary-Jane is special,’ Jean assured me, giving her a wink that sheignored, ‘but she’s not too good at …’ he clicked his fingers, ‘small talk.’ Mary-Jane shooed him away with her hand, as if he were an annoying fly, but I could see the affection between them.
She grunts when I say hello, before approaching me with the soupspoon. ‘Taste,’ she orders. I taste and give it the thumbs-up because, as usual, it tastes delicious.
Like me, Mary-Jane had had no professional experience before she began working here. Her passion for food came from her grandmother, who loved to bake. She was famous for her fruitcakes and coconut fingers – slabs of fresh sponge cut into slices and rolled in icing sugar and coconut. Granny lived with the family. Mary-Jane’s father was a farmer; he grew fruit and vegetables. When Mary-Jane talks about her childhood, it’s the one time that her eyes light up and she often giggles as if she were a young girl again. ‘Dad used to grow bananas, Polly. On a Saturday morning we’d help him pick them off the trees and bunch them together with string, and then we’d hang the bunches on the side of the donkeys’ saddles. We had beautiful donkeys, I can even remember their names.’ She smiled, as if she were standing by the banana tree that moment with them. ‘Prince, Violet and Ned. We had guava trees too: they grew wild and Granny used to make the best guava jelly. We’d eat it on toast after school.’
‘Find a boss who will make you a coffee every day,’ Jean says as I’m writing the menu on the blackboard. He’s standing bythe cappuccino machine, dressed in his blue apron. Jean is in his early fifties, tall and fit from swimming every day, with brown hair and probing eyes.
When he hands me a cup I can tell he’s in a good mood. Jean’s behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. Often he loses his cool in the kitchen, spatulas and crockery flying across the kitchen. But today he blows Mary-Jane and me a kiss before disappearing upstairs to prepare his workshop on cooking with wild mushrooms.
As I stick my apron on and begin to assemble all the ingredients I need for my cakes and pavlova, I think about how working here was only meant to be a stopgap. It was something to do to help me through the early months after my break-up with Matt, and to earn some money, but more importantly to distract me from drinking. During the early days of rehab, I needed a sense of purpose until I felt ready to think about a new career or going back to teaching. In my early twenties, when friends, including Janey, were still at
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