Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance Read Online Free

herb-roasted chicken, baked potatoes with chive sour cream, and a sort of French bread with basil. We had to make her food look good, even though the recipes were not really workable.
    Mae picked up her copies of the recipes and sat down next to me. I moved my muffins out of her reach. As usual, she got right to the point. “Her recipes suck. Do you think she actually makes this stuff? She cooks the chicken to death. She wraps the baked potatoes in foil, for God’s sake. Even lousy restaurants don’t do
that
anymore. She so can’t cook. I’ll bet she doesn’t even eat. She’s so skinny.”
    I looked at my remaining muffin and thought of Tina chewing gum for breakfast. “Probably not. I told Sonya the recipes needed tweaking and she tried to convince Tina to let us redo them. But Tina said her dinner guests always gobbled them up.”
    “She probably never looked under the parsley left on the plates.”
    “Since she’s not actually giving recipes but only showing how to pot the herbs and offering some ideas of how to use them, Sonya said to go with them. We just have to make the food look good. Don’t wrap the potatoes or they’ll shrivel. I’ll explain that to Tina. We’ll make sure the chicken is fully cooked, but get it out of the oven before it takes on too much color.” Food always looks darker on TV than it really is, so timing is especially tricky with chicken and turkey. Poultry hasto be fully cooked in case the host tastes it, but if it cooks too long, it looks black and shriveled. In the “old days,” magazines used to paint barely cooked birds with a combination of dish liquid and shoe polish so they would have a golden-brown glow. We don’t ever do things like that.
    “If I make the bread her way,” Mae pleaded, “it won’t even look good. Her recipe is a joke.”
    Tina’s basil French bread called for mixing the traditional ingredients of yeast, flour, and water with sauna-raised basil, all of it to be whirred in a food processor and plopped (her word) on a baking sheet, then coaxed into a rounded shape and baked. Voilà, a French
boule
. She insisted that the dough didn’t have to rise.
Stunad!
(My word.) Bread has to rise.
    “All right, Mae. Make a few loaves the classic way. Let them rise and give them surface tension. We’ll slice those so the pieces look like bread and hide Tina’s blob behind Jonathan’s props. I’ll start with the trays.”
    Work on a cooking segment begins a few weeks before the day it is televised. Sonya picks the chef or celebrity, known as “the talent,” who will appear on the show, and then together we choose from the recipes the talent suggests. Sonya decides if they fit into the overall programming; I decide if they are visually interesting and technically possible. Once we’ve agreed on the recipes, it is my job to break them down into what needs to be seen and how to show it in the time allotted, which is usually only three and a half minutes. After Sonya approves my recipe breakdown, I can make shopping and equipment lists for the crew and write the scripts. The scripts are not dialogue scripts with lines for the talent to memorize. They outline what steps and in what order the recipes will be shot. From the scripts, I determine what needs to be done ahead of time and then make prep lists for Mae and myself.
    Since we can’t leave any ingredients or equipment on the set before the cooking spot is ready to air, we set everything up on large cafeteria trays, which wind up scattered all over our tiny workplace. The trays are key. Each one of them represents a different part of the recipe that the talent will demonstrate. We put large pieces of masking tape on the trays and mark them with numbers according to their place on the set. In the three minutes of commercial break time just before the food segment begins, we have to get all that food to the set, and union rules allow only the stagehands to carry it. The numbers on the trays tell them in what