Read Online The Journey Home by Michael Baron - Free Book Online Page B

all we need to think about.”
    Mom always named her original dishes after friends and relatives. Warren had a chicken dish of his own in his name, as well as a rice dish and two desserts. All of those seemed a bit beyond his culinary reach at this point, though. According to family legend, Chicken Margaret was one of his mother’s early inventions, created not long after she’d married his father, and named in honor of her beloved sister, who’d served as her maid of honor. It was essentially an amped-up version of Chicken Piccata. Mom always served it with potato croquettes and sautéed broccoli rabe. Rice was going to have to suffice today, though. This was going to be enough of a challenge without adding complicated side dishes.
    Warren washed his hands and then mixed the rice flour and cake flour together in a dish. He realized as soon as he opened one of the few cupboards in the apartment that he’d failed to consider all the necessary implements. He found a couple of bowls and plates there, but he was going to have to use these to prep the meal and then wash them before serving the food. He opened the package of chicken.
    â€œSeason the egg rather than the flour,” his mother said. She’d moved to the dinette table. Her eyes seemed brighter now than they had a few minutes ago.

    Warren put down the cutlet he’d begun to remove from the package. “Egg, right.” He hadn’t remembered to buy any, forgetting that the chicken went from egg to flour twice before it went into the pan. He guessed he could go to the facility’s kitchen to ask for a couple of eggs, though he really didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he was cooking in his mother’s room. “I don’t suppose I could use water, huh?”
    His mother tipped her head to the side as she had when he was a kid. “No, honey. You can do without if you have to. Just dredge the chicken in the flour.”
    So much for replicating his mother’s Chicken Margaret precisely. Warren added some salt and pepper to the flour and then dredged four cutlets, pressing them deep into the flour in hopes that this would fortify the coating in some way. Once he’d done that, he prepared the other ingredients. After he struggled to get the pit from an olive, his mother showed him how to do so with the flat side of his knife. Cutting tomatoes with a cheap chef’s knife turned out to be a bigger obstacle, and Mom could offer him no solution other than to suggest he seek out a serrated knife if he were going to do something like this in the future.
    With everything prepped, he set out to start cooking. He took out the rice to get that started, only to realize that he hadn’t bought a pot to cook it in. Hoping against hope, he examined the cupboards again and found nothing useful. Why hadn’t he and Crystal brought any of Mom’s cooking equipment here when they moved her into Treetops? They’d left
her with a number of things from her kitchen for sentimental reasons – the ballerina egg timer, for instance – but they really should have thought to move a couple of pots and pans in with her simply for symbolic purposes. It wasn’t an issue now. What was an issue was that the meal was getting simpler – and less like his mother’s – by the second.
    Mom called out to him as he took the chicken to the stove. “You want nice high heat for this. The cutlets are thin; they’ll cook quickly.”
    Warren cranked the burner toward the high end and added some olive oil to the pan. Judging from how long it took to boil water in the teapot, he guessed that the stove was a low-efficiency model, but he figured he’d get some heat out of it if he waited long enough. Eventually, he added the chicken. It started to sizzle immediately, which he took as a good sign.
    â€œYou’re doing great, honey.”
    â€œI haven’t really done much yet,