“Now for a little zing!” he said, pointing to rows and rows of spice jars.
I looked through the spice jars. I saw curry and sage and dried parsley and cinnamon, but I didn’t see anything called Zing.
Papa Pete ran his finger along the jars until he came to one that said “Hot chilli powder”. It was filled with a dark red ground-up spice.
“This,” he said, tossing the jar into our trolley, “is what you need to give your enchiladas a little zing.”
“I don’t know what zing is,” Yoshi said.
“Zing is what puts hair on your chest,” Papa Pete told him.
“Eeuuuww, who wants that?” said Emily.
“It’s an expression, my darling grand-daughter,” Papa Pete said. “It refers to the kind of food that packs a wallop. Kicks up your taste buds. Puts a little spice in your life. Explodes on your tongue.”
“Like wasabi,” Yoshi said.
“Exactly,” Papa Pete said, holding his finger up in the air like a nutty professor I saw in a movie once. “You’ve had wasabi, Hankie. Remember that spicy green horseradish you ate at Planet Sushi?”
“Oh, that!” I said.
How could I forget that? One night, our family went to a sushi restaurant on Columbus Avenue for my Aunt Maxine’s birthday. I’m not a big fan of raw fish myself, but all the grown-ups ordered a huge plate of sushi. On the corner of the plate there was a little pile of stuff that looked like green mustard. I love mustard, so I took one of my chopsticks and put a smidgen of the green stuff on the end. It didn’t smell like anything bad, so I popped it in my mouth. Let me tell you this: the minute that stuff hit my tongue, I thought my face was on fire. That tiny speck of green horseradish was so spicy, I was sure my whole nose was going to fly off my face and go running all the way to Central Park and jump in the pond to cool off.
I looked at the jar of red chilli powder in our trolley.
“If this stuff is anything like that wasabi, then maybe we should forget about the zing,” I said.
“Hankie, live a little,” Papa Pete said. “You need a dash of spice in your enchiladas. Otherwise they wouldn’t be enchiladas.”
“You mean schmintzaladas,” Frankie said.
We all cracked up, even Papa Pete.
We were all still laughing when we left Gristediano’s and headed home.
My mum must have alerted the entire building that we were having a special visitor. When we turned the corner on to our block, I could see most of our neighbours standing under our green awning, waiting to say hello to Yoshi. There were so many of them, for a minute I thought they were welcoming the president of Japan and not just a fourth-grader like me.
Frankie’s parents were there, and Ashley’s too. Her grandmother, who lives with them, was holding a plate of steamed pork dumplings. She probably thought we needed a backup in case my mum made one of her usual experimental taste-free, mock-tuna-filled dinners.
Good thinking, Grandma Wong!
As we got closer to our building, I could see Mrs Park, who lives on the fourth floor, yelling at Mr Grasso, who’s right above her on the fifth floor. She always complains that he leaves his TV on too loudly at night. Little Tyler King, who lives with his mum on our floor, was dressed for bed in his Spider-Man pyjamas and Elmo slippers. I just love little kids in their pyjamas. They’re so squeezable, like baby koala bears – although I’ve never actually squeezed one of those. I’d like to, though.
My mum and dad were there, waving at us like lunatics. Our next-door neighbour, Mrs Fink, was there too. I like her, even though she almost never wears her false teeth and you can see her pink gums when she smiles. She has a crush on Papa Pete, but he doesn’t have a crush back on her. I’m pretty sure that’s because of the no-teeth problem I just mentioned.
“Peter!” Mrs Fink called out when she saw us coming. “I’m over here.”
Papa Pete handed me the bag of groceries.
“You carry these, Hankie,” he said. “I’m taking off before she invites me up for her poppy seed upside-down sponge cake. Everything she bakes is cockeyed.”
“You can’t leave,” I said to him. “You need to help us make the enchiladas.”
“Hankie,” Papa Pete said, taking my face in his hands. “I would fly to the moon for you. I would pluck a star out of the sky for you. I would catch a whale with my teeth for you. But I’m sorry, darling boy, I cannot spend another evening watching Mrs Fink gum her poppy seed cake into mush.”
“Look on the bright side, Papa Pete,” Frankie said. “At least none of the poppy seeds get stuck in her teeth.”
“I need you to back me up on this, young man,” Papa Pete said to Frankie. “You have all the ingredients you need. And I’m sure you kids can find a recipe for cheese enchiladas somewhere.”
“Mum has hundreds of cookbooks,” Emily said.
“No, I meant with real cheese, not soy cheese,” Papa Pete said. “Maybe try the Internet.”
“I’m quite good at research, if I do say so myself,” said Robert, puffing up his skinny little chest at Emily, who couldn’t take her eyes off Yoshi.
“We’ll be fine, Papa Pete,” Emily said. Easy for her to say – she wasn’t the one bringing in the enchiladas for the whole school to eat.
“Just be careful your mother doesn’t slip any mung beans in when you’re not looking,” Papa Pete warned.
Mrs Fink had taken a white handkerchief out of her sleeve and was waving it at Papa Pete. He went into a whole big pantomime of pointing to his watch like he was really late for something. Quickly, he kissed Emily and me on the heads and pinched Frankie, Yoshi, and yes, even the cheekless wonder, Robert. Then he took off down Amsterdam Avenue like a bolt of lightning.
“Ojiisan is cool,” Yoshi said. “I like your family, Hank.”
Emily grinned at Yoshi with that same goofy smile she’d had all afternoon.
“Don’t get carried away,” I whispered to her. “I’m sure he wasn’t talking about you.”
“How do you know?” she snapped.
“Fourth-graders know these things.”
“Yeah,” Robert piped up, his nasal voice cracking really badly. “We do.”
“Yoo-hoo, little man,” Frankie said to Robert. “You’re in the third grade.”
“But not for long,” Robert said. He had a point there.
Cheerio was on a lead, standing next tomy dad. The minute he saw us walking towards them, he went completely nuts. He’s already pretty nuts, so he didn’t have far to go. He started spinning in circles round my dad’s legs until my dad was all wrapped up in his lead like one of those old Egyptian mummies.
My mum had to undo the lead to get my dad untangled, so Cheerio took off and came running over to us. He sniffed at Yoshi, then started nipping at his ankles. That’s what he does when he likes someone. Yoshi bent down to pet him, and Cheerio licked his face like it was a liver-flavoured doggy biscuit. Boy, if Ms Adolf could have seen my little Cheerio with Yoshi, she’d take back what she had said about him being dangerous. He is without a doubt the sweetest dog on four short legs.
Finally, after saying hello to everyone in the building, we were able to get into the lift and ride up to the tenth floor, which is where we live. My mum unlocked our apartment door and we all went into the living room. Everyone but Yoshi, that is. I stuck my head back out into the hall and saw him sitting on the floor, taking his shoes off.
“You get mud on your feet or something?” I asked him.
“In Japan, we take our shoes off before coming into the house,” he said. “It’s a sign of respect.”
Boy, did I feel like an idiot, multi-culturally speaking.
There wasn’t time for me to be embarrassed, though. The Zipzers had zipped into action. Everyone in my family wanted a piece of Yoshi, and he was being pulled in a million different directions.
My dad nabbed him first and showed him his mechanical pencil collection.
“Ikeru,” Yoshi said, politely touching a couple of the shi
ny silver pencils.
My dad broke into a big smile.
“Ikeru,” he repeated. “A five-letter word meaning ‘It’s good!’ in Japanese. That was in my crossword puzzle last week and I missed it. Thank you, Yoshi.”
If you’re Stanley Zipzer, life just doesn’t get any better than that.
While my dad was demonstrating to Yoshi how you change the lead in a mechanical pencil, my mum kept interrupting.
“Feel free to use the bathroom any time,” she told Yoshi about a million times. I knew she really wanted him to check out the new wallpaper she had put up. I think she was very proud of it. It was yellow, with green pagodas.
Emily dragged Yoshi into her room to meet Katherine, who didn’t even hiss at him. She didn’t look at him, either. I think Old Kathy was still recovering from being glued to the kitchen floor. A thing like that has got to affect you, even if you are a lower life-form.
To make the evening totally perfect, my mum even made a good dinner. Well, that’s because she didn’t really make it. She picked it up from the deli. Vlady had put together an assortment of mile-high sandwiches for us – roast beef, pastrami, chicken salad and turkey with Swiss cheese. There was enough for Frankie and Ashley and Robert to come too.
“What are you children going to do after dinner?” my mum asked.
“Homework,” I answered.
“I’m dreaming,” Emily said. “Hank Zipzer is going to do his homework. No way.”
“Maybe Hank is turning over a new leaf,” my dad said. He loves that expression. Every time I get a really, really bad grade like a D on my report card, which is every time I get a report card, he tells me it’s time to turn over a new leaf. I’ve turned over so many new leaves, my tree is almost naked. By the time I get to sixth grade, that tree will be completely bare.
“We’re going to make enchiladas,” I announced to one and all.
“You just said you were going to do homework,” my dad pointed out.
“This is our homework, Dad. We’re supposed to bring in a dish for the Multi-Cultural Lunch. Our group has decided to bring enchiladas.”
“Oh, I have a lovely recipe for enchiladas with mung beans,” my mum said.
I was in the middle of taking a sip of apple juice. When I heard the words mung beans, I burst out laughing and sprayed poor Robert all over the front of his white shirt. Even though I accidentally sprayed some of the apple juice on our new place mats too, no one got mad at me. Not even my dad. We were all just in a great mood. In fact, if you had been standing outside our flat and listening, all you would have heard was the sound of us laughing.
Oh yeah, and my mum saying, “Yoshi, feel free to use the bathroom any time.”
It didn’t take us long to find an enchilada recipe. Robert found a site that had seventy-two of them. We chose Mama Vita’s Killer Chilli Cheesy Enchiladas. The recipe was the sixty-seventh one on Mama Vita’s Killer Recipe site, right in between her Killer Prawn Burritos and her Killer Pinto Bean Soup. Personally, I didn’t know how anything involving pinto beans could be killer. If you ask me, they’re like wet paste that sticks to the roof of your mouth.
After we’d decided on which recipe we were going to make, we printed it out and called Papa Pete. He thought it sounded fine, so we were good to go. My mum said we could be alone in the kitchen as long as we called her when it was time to turn the oven on.
“I know where the pots and pans are,” Emily said, who was trying to impress Yoshi and act like she cooked all the time.
We all started digging through the cupboards. I pulled out a frying pan. Frankie was reaching for another pot and got shoved by Robert, who stepped on my frying pan. He went sliding across the kitchen floor like he was on a snowboard.
“Attention, everyone,” Ashley said, getting out a wooden spoon and tapping it against the worktop like she was a judge in a courtroom. “This isn’t working. We need to get organized.”
Ashley is great at running things. Frankie and Ashley and I have a magic act called Magik 3. Frankie is the magician, and we made Ashley our manager. It was one of the smartest things we’ve ever done. She’s so good at it, she’s managed us right into earning a grand total of $58.60. And we’re not even out of fourth grade yet!
“For starters, everyone can’t do the same job,” Ashley said.
“Good thinking, Ashweena,” Frankie said with a nod. “I’ll put together all the ingredients.”
“Great. Hank, you read Frankie the recipe and tell him what he needs,” Ashley said.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
It wasn’t the best job for me to get, since reading isn’t exactly my strong point, but I didn’t want to announce that in front of Yoshi.
“What should I do?” Robert asked.
“Disappear?” Frankie suggested.
“OK,” said Robert. “I’m only in third grade, anyway.” He went into the living room to help my dad with a crossword puzzle.
“Emily, you and Yoshi can be the assistant chefs,” said Ashley.
Ordinarily Emily would have thrown a hissy fit about being the assistant anything, but she was just happy to be next to Yoshi.
I was glad to see that Ashley was acting like herself again. One lovey-dovey girl in a kitchen was plenty for me. I guess Ashley saw how stupid Emily looked staring at Yoshi with her goo-goo eyes and decided to call it quits. Ashley isn’t the goo-goo-eye type, thank goodness.
“What are you going to do, Ash?” Frankie asked. “You can’t just stand there and manage.”
“I’m going to be the director,” she said.
She disappeared through the swing door and came back a second later, holding her dad’s video camera.
“This is Ashley Wong, reporting for the Zipzer Cooking Channel,” she said, turning the camera on. “Our special guest tonight is Yoshi Morimoto. Yoshi, what do you have to say to your friends back home?”
“Cowabunga, dudes,” Yoshi said, grinning into the camera.
“Thank you for your words of wisdom,” Ashley said.
“Ash, why are you videotaping this?” I asked her.
“We want Yoshi to remember us, don’t we? When he looks at this tape, he can see us whenever he wants.”
See what I mean about Ashley being a good manager? She thinks of everything, even before it happens. I wish I could do that.
“OK, I’m ready to roll,” Frankie said. “Lay it on me, Zipola.”
“Translation, please, Frankola.”
“Read me the ingredients, dude. I’m ready to cook up a storm.”
I propped the recipe up on the worktop, holding it upright with two cans of tomato sauce and a jar of Papa Pete’s pickles.
“Twelve corn tortillas,” I began, reading off the first ingredient listed.
Truthfully, I couldn’t read the word tortilla, but there was a picture on the page of Mama Vita’s hands rolling up what looked like a tortilla, so I guessed that’s what the word was. I do that a lot when I can’t actually read something. You might call it guessing, but I like to call it figuring it out. Any time I can figure out a word on my own and not have to ask someone, it saves me from being embarrassed one more time. By the way, shouldn’t tortilla be spelled TOR-TEE-YA? Where did all those Ls come from?
“Twelve tortillas. Check,” Frankie said, tearing open the plastic bag and spreading the tortillas out on the side.
“Three cups of grated cheese,” I said.
“Cheese, Louise,” said Frankie. “Check.”
It took a while for Emily to grate the cheese. Every two seconds she kept saying, “Oh, I nicked my knuckle. Oh, I nicked it again.” When it was finally done, Frankie put a handful of cheese into each tortilla. Yoshi and Emily helped him roll them up so the cheese stayed inside.
“What’s next?” Frankie asked.
“One tin of tomato sauce,” I said.
“Check,” Frankie said. He handed Yoshi the tin opener and the tomato sauce.
“Get busy, Yosh, my man,” he said.
> “Check, Frankie-san,” answered Yoshi.
“Emily, stop staring at Yoshi and look up here at the camera,” Ashley said. “Say something you want Yoshi to remember.”
Emily put her hand over her mouth and started to giggle. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her giggle. Correction. She once giggled in the pet shop when George who works there told her she could feed a live mouse to the snake. Yup, that’s what the girl giggled at, all right.
“What’s next, Zip?”
“Chilli powder,” I said. “You’re supposed to mix it into the tomato sauce.”
“Oh right, for zing,” Frankie said. “How much, my man?”
I looked back up at the recipe in front of me. There were a lot of words on that page. The chilli powder was way down at the bottom of a long list of ingredients.
Don’t tell me. Could that be a fraction? No, please don’t be a fraction. You know how I feel about them.
Ashley turned the camera on me.
“Come on, Hank,” she said. “Let the camera have it. With feeling. How much chilli powder?”
“Uh, let’s see.” I squinted at the page. I could feel myself getting confused.
What does that stupid little line in the middle of the numbers mean? Face it, Hank. You don’t have a clue.
I stared at the numbers next to the words chilli powder. There was a one and a three and a little black line floating around somewhere in the middle of them. I was getting nervous, which happens to me when I know I don’t know what I’m supposed to know. The type on the page was starting to swim all over the place, like it had a mind of its own.
Maybe it isn’t a fraction at all. Maybe that line is just a smudge on the paper. Or a little bug that flew in there and got squashed.
“How much chilli powder, dude?” I heard Frankie saying. “The tomato sauce is getting lonely.”
I looked up and saw the camera on me.
“Speak up,” Ashley shouted. “We’re rolling!”
Yoshi was taking this tape back to Japan. He was going to watch it with all his friends there. And what were they going to see? Me, Hank Zipzer, boy moron. They were going to see me make a stupid mistake on a stupid fraction because I’m too stupid to figure out how much chilli powder we needed!
The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Killer Chilli Page 5
