On the Back Burner (6 page)

“Actually, Mrs. Kramer,” Amanda began.
This job sounds like
much
more work than we agreed to!
Amanda thought. She knew she had to talk to the other girls about all of this extra work before things got any more out of control! But before she could continue, Mrs. Kramer interrupted her.

“You know, on second thought, the kids might get sick of pasta and want something else. So you’d probably better make some sandwiches, too ... yes, let’s say three sandwiches for each night. Peanut butter and jelly...that’s creamy peanut butter with seedless strawberry jelly. It
has
to be seedless or they won’t eat it. On white bread. Oh, and don’t forget to cut off the crusts! And cut one of the sandwiches into triangles—that’s for my youngest, Mikey. It’s fine to cut the other sandwiches into rectangles.”

Amanda felt as if her head was spinning as she wrote down all these instructions. “Mrs. Kramer, wait,” she finally broke in. “This sounds like a lot more work—”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Mrs. Kramer lightly. “It might sound like a lot, but it’s not that bad! After all, I do it every day! You girls will be fantastic. I know every—oh,
no!
Mikey’s about to give himself a haircut! Sweetie, put the scissors down
now!
Gotta run, Amanda. Call me if you have any questions!” And with that, she hung up.

Amanda sighed heavily as she put down the phone.
Oh, this is just great!
she thought to herself.
Everyone will flip when they see how much work this is! Why do I
always
get stuck with the complicated clients?

The next day, all the Chef Girls met in the Moores’ kitchen to start preparing for their big job. “I called last night to tell Mrs. Kramer we’d take the job, and she told me her sister’s baby isn’t due until the twenty-third of February, so that gives us some time,” Amanda told them.

“Excellent—that’s after Chinese New Year,” Peichi said.

“It’s during our winter vacation, too,” Natasha added. “That will be perfect. We’ll have entire days free to prepare meals.”

And we’ll need them, loo,
thought Amanda grimly. She cleared her throat. “Listen, guys,” she began. “Things with the menu got a little...complicated when I called Mrs. Kramer back,”

“Complicated how?” Shawn asked.

“Well, for starters, we have to make full meals for eight people for each night.”

“Right, that’s what you told us yesterday,” Shawn said.

“But some of the kids will, like,
only
eat pasta. So we also have to make pasta dishes for four people for each night. Just in case some kids want pasta. And it can’t be spaghetti with tomato sauce every night—it has to be different pasta dishes. Different, but simple.” Amanda looked at her friends. They were all staring at her with wide eyes. “There’s one other thing,” Amanda finished in a rush. “We also have to make three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for each day. Creamy peanut butter, seedless strawberry jelly, white bread, crusts cut off, two sandwiches cut into rectangles, one sandwich cut into triangles. That’s it, though. That’s all she wants.”

“That’s
all
she wants?” shrieked Shawn. “That’s
all?”

“Amanda, what did you tell her?” exclaimed Peichi. “You told her no, right?”

Amanda bit her lip. “Well, I
tried
to,” she said. “But she wouldn’t let me! She kept interrupting!”

“Why can’t we just make pasta for everybody for every night?” Natasha asked.

“Well, the other kids get tired of pasta. And the dad won’t even eat it any more, he’s so sick of it,” Amanda replied.

“We can’t do this,” Shawn said flatly. “This woman is crazy! That is, like,
so
much extra work! We have to cancel.”

Finally, Molly spoke. “I know it sounds bad, guys, but we can’t cancel,” she said. “First, it would be bad for business. We could get a bad reputation if we cancel a job this big. Second, I think it sounds worse than it is.

Basically, it’s the regular job we signed up for—plus a little extra. Simple pasta dishes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? We can totally do that!”

“I think Molly’s right,” Natasha said. “But listen, maybe this should be the last time we cook for Ms. Barlow or any of her friends. They always get
seriously
complicated.”

“Yeah, but they pay really well,” Peichi pointed out.

“This one will just take some extra planning,” Molly said. “Like, we can have some meals frozen ahead of time so we don’t fall behind. If we make lasagna, and something else that freezes well, this job will feel more like a regular job when we have to prepare the rest of the meals.”

“How much money will we need to buy all these ingredients?” Shawn asked. “We’d better not let the refrigerator get too full between now and then, or we won’t have room for it all.”

“Right,” said Molly. “We’ll need to go on a big shopping trip, but not too soon because we don’t want the fresh foods to go bad.”

“We have to think about what we’re going to make, too,” Natasha said.

“That’s why we’re having this meeting,” Molly reminded them. They sat together and planned their menu, trying to estimate the expenses. It took more than an hour before they could finally agree on what to serve. The girls were finally—after lots and lots of discussion—able to come up with a menu. Molly wrote it in her notebook.

Molly looked down at the menu they’d decided to make and smiled. “I think the Kramers will be really happy with this menu,” she said.

Amanda looked over Molly’s shoulder and also read it. “Where are we going to get the money to buy the ingredients for all this? Peichi, how’s the treasury doing?”

Peichi was the treasurer of Dish. She looked at the list of meals while Molly started another list of ingredients the girls would need to buy. “I don’t know, guys,” Peichi said slowly. “I’m not sure we have enough in the treasury to pay for this. Does anybody have some money they can chip in?”

“I dont,” said Amanda sadly. “I’m totally broke.”

“Me, too,” said Shawn, scrunching up her nose.

“Uh-oh,” said Natasha, looking concerned.

Molly looked up from her list. “Don’t worry, guys,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.”

I hope,
she thought.

“
I
love Chinatown!” Amanda said when all the girls went shopping with Peichi’s dad and grandmother on Sunday. “It’s so exciting.”

“Haven’t you ever been here before?” Mr. Cheng asked. He was loaded with packages that Ah-mah had filled with all kinds of interesting ingredients like chili bean paste, dried tiger lily buds, and
hua chiao,
a kind of mild peppercorn. Although it didn’t look as though Mr. Cheng would be able to carry one more bag, Ah-mah didn’t seem ready to stop shopping. The group was waiting for Shawn and Natasha to come out of a gift shop.

“I’ve been here for dinner with our parents, but I didn’t come that time that Molly and Peichi went by themselves!” Amanda replied with a grin. Molly and Peichi smiled sheepishly at each other, remembering the time they’d gone to Chinatown by themselves last summer—and had gotten grounded.

“Look what I bought!” Shawn said as she came out of the store carrying a plain brown bag. She pulled out a sleeveless red silk shirt with a mandarin collar that sat low on the neck with a slit in the center. The shirt had a colorful dragon embroidered across the front.

“Beautiful,” Ah-mah said. “The dragon is very powerful, very lucky. And the color red is lucky. At Chinese New Year celebrations, people wear red, write poems on red paper, and give children lucky money in red envelopes.”

“That’s so cool!” Shawn exclaimed. “Red is a lucky color for people who are Aries, like me.”

Ah-mah pointed toward the store that she and Peichi’s grandfather, Ah-yeh, owned. “I just need to go in there and get a few more things.”

“Don’t you have enough? What more could you possibly need?” Mr. Cheng protested, shifting the bags in his arms.

“I need ingredients for
nian gao.
We can’t have a New Year’s celebration without cakes,” Ah-mah insisted.

“Okay. You’re right. Let’s go,” Mr. Cheng agreed wearily. The girls followed them into the store with its many jars and cans of food, packed tightly in narrow aisles. Ah-yeh waved at the girls as he helped a customer.

“What’s
nian gao?”
Molly asked Peichi, stumbling over the pronunciation.

“It’s New Year’s cake. It’s very traditional,” Peichi explained.

“Peichi, please get some brown candy, glutinous rice flour, red dates, and sesame seeds, the white ones,” Ah-mah requested.

Peichi led her friends down the aisle until she found a stack of plastic bags containing slabs of flat brown sheets stacked on top of one another. “This is really just a kind of sugar that’s sold in slabs,” she told her friends.

“Could you use regular sugar?” Natasha asked.

“I don’t know,” Peichi admitted. “But I’ve never seen anyone try. They always use this stuff.” After a hunt around the store for the flour, red dates, and sesame seeds, they brought it all to Ah-mah, who stood by the counter. “Very good. Thank you, Peichi,” she said. Finally, they were finished with the shopping.

“Who’s hungry?” Mr. Cheng asked as they left the store. “We’re on Mott Street, just a half block away from Wo Hop Restaurant.”