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What I would be needing her for was baking, and that was it.
“I don’t…” She shook her head and walked to my kitchen, opening up cabinets as she went to the stove and started preheating it. “I can’t just start without at least cooking you something.”
I leaned my hips against the farthest kitchen counter, not in the actual kitchen, but almost.
And watched.
I watched as she flitted around, found every single thing that she would need, and proceeded to cook breakfast.
And she didn’t half-ass it, either.
She made cinnamon rolls, a quiche, and funny enough, a cookie for dessert.
I watched the cinnamon rolls skeptically, knowing the best ones needed to rise for at least an hour to be any good.
But she pulled through, letting them rise for all of twenty minutes before she started the process of rolling the cinnamon, sugar, and butter up into the dough.
I stayed silent and watched, listening to her talk.
“When I was younger, I started making these cinnamon rolls,” she chattered. “My dad was a real jerk. He used to tell me that morning what he wanted, and I was usually forced to give him what he wanted, or pay the consequences for not giving it to him. A lot of times, I’d be able to pull it off. But never when he wanted cinnamon rolls. Until one day I discovered a recipe that called for twenty minutes of rise time. I know you probably know this, but a good cinnamon roll requires rise time. My father never, ever gave me that time. Had he, I’d have been up at four in the morning making my favorite cinnamon rolls. But that never happened. Hence these.” She pointed at the rolls.
I watched her move, watched her hair shift from her shoulder to her back, back to her shoulder again as she moved.
In the kitchen at my place, all that beautiful hair would be stuck in a hairnet. Even worse, it’d be flattened down and ugly. Unable to see the curls because of the compressing material that we were forced to use thanks to Intercourse, Texas city ordinances and the food administration.
But now, I watched the glossy black curls move. If she moved just the perfect way, the black would look like oil slicks. All dark green and purple mixed in.
“These are okay,” she said. “Better than the ones you get out of the can, the big fluffy ones that come in packs of five, and not eight. But they’re not as good as they could be.” She looked at me. “Cream cheese icing or regular icing?”
I scrunched up my nose for a second and said, “I don’t know. Surprise me.”
She did.
Kind of.
I mean, it was obvious what she was making when she pulled the cream cheese out of my fridge and started to thaw it out.
Her hands worked quickly, deftly shaping rolls, then breaking eggs into a small bowl before transferring to a bigger bowl.
“I’m guessing these are fresh,” she said as she stopped cracking and eyed the yolks. “They’re richer looking than store-bought.” She hesitated. “Do you use fresh eggs at the bakery?”
“Always,” I confirmed. “Even the ones at the store that say ‘cage free’ aren’t really cage free. They’re just stuck in this huge outbuilding where there are about two thousand birds in an enclosure. So they’re skirting around using ‘cage free’ for the animal lovers out there. To make them feel better that they’re not buying eggs from an egg farm that literally their chickens never see the outside of the cage in their life. Granted, the cage free do have a better life than the caged ones. But not by much. Hence always using farm fresh eggs from a local farmer. I have chickens myself that lay, but I can’t produce, nor do I want to, enough for my business.”
“Don’t they cost like ten times more?” she asked.
They did.
Well, kind of.
At the store, I’d pay four dollars for an eighteen pack. Farm fresh ones from the local grower would cost me about five to six dollars, depending on how many I was getting. Which, when I got as many as I did, added up fast compared to the ones that I could get in bulk. However, after tasting the superior taste of a fresh egg, I’d never thought to go back.
My customers could either eat the cost of the fresh egg, or they could find somewhere else to shop.
Which, saying that, they never did.
They came to my place for the quality food made with quality ingredients, and they didn’t care how much I charged.
I could charge five bucks for a chocolate chip cookie the size of a quarter, and they’d buy it because TikTok told them to.
“And I’m sure, with your store, that you can practically charge anything and they’ll buy it.” She shook her head. “How did that even happen, anyway?”
