ChapterEighteen
Hope
The oven worked perfectly. It fit in the spot she’d allotted, and it even looked good, on display, so that Hope could cook in front of her guests. This would make the restaurant feel intimate and like a family getting together.
That was the good news.
The bad news was the menu and staff. She had neither.
She spent the afternoon on the computer, looking at logos, noodling names, and vacillating on what to serve. None of it was exactly right, and the to-do list loomed on the card table she was using as a desk in the corner where the hostess station was supposed to be. Eventually, she’d have to have an office. Ugh, more on the list.
She needed to stop waffling on what to include and start cooking.
Ooh, waffles?
No, focus Hope, focus!
She sat up from the computer and went into her kitchen.
That was it. She’d been setting up vendors, stoves, linens, and table layouts for days. What she hadn’t been doing was cooking.
Hope grabbed a white apron and tied it around her waist. She pulled out the pork chops she’d snagged at the farmer’s market in Adrian over the weekend.
She still didn’t have her supplier locked in on that. No, no, this was time to marinate the pork, not marinate in her anxiety.
She focused on the dish.
What if she made a rosemary brine?
Hope pulled down a stainless steel bowl. It was one of the new items she’d purchased online from the restaurant supply company. She needed to have the bowl in her hands, the ingredients out, on her counter.
She paced back and forth, and looked up at the counters, out at the tables, still needing chairs.
That’s it, the dish started to come to her. She grabbed shallots, baby potatoes, and some rice wine vinegar.
She put the ingredients in the bowl. She watched them shift and mingle.
She talked it out. No one was in the empty restaurant with her, but she talked it out.
It was late. There was probably no one in all of downtown Irish Hills to hear her.
So she talked it out, walked it out, and tasted her sauce.
“What if I added this?”
“Is it too mild?”
“Would this make it too tart?”
“Butter, where’s the butter?”
She took the items from the stove back to the back kitchen. And she worked. This was what she’d been missing in the last two weeks since she’d come to Irish Hills. This was what she hadn’t had time for. She’d been working so hard on the building, the look of things, sourcing her ingredients that she’d barely spent time behind a stove or with her fingers in a hunk of dough.
Hope was in her element when she was creating.
The tension she’d felt in her shoulders released. The process of making the dish, perfecting, tasting it, and trying it again was her dance. That was her poetry. And she needed to devote time to it. To protect that time, so the rest of her life was in harmony.
Finally, after hours of experimentation, she had it. She had a dish she’d envisioned.
