Phineas L. MacGuire...Gets Cooking!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

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  For Win Hill and Gavin Schulz, two of my favorite geniuses

  chapter one

  My name is Phineas L. MacGuire. A few people call me Phineas, but most people call me Mac. Yesterday, when I was riding the bus to school, I came up with a bunch of cool things the L in my name could stand for. My list included:

  1. Lithosphere (the outmost shell of a rocky planet)

  2. Lunar Eclipse

  3. Light-Year

  4. Labrador Whisperer

  Unfortunately, the L in my name does not stand for any of those things. It stands for Listerman, which was, like, my mom’s great-aunt Tulip’s last name or something. My mom is very big on family traditions, but even she’s not allowed to call me Listerman.

  I mean, ever.

  You can probably tell by the first three things on my list of L names that I am a scientist. In fact, I’m the best fourth-grade scientist at Woodbrook Elementary School. Or at least sort of the best. There’s this girl in my class named Aretha Timmons who might be kind of as good at science as I am, but her goal is not to be the greatest scientist in the whole world one day, which mine is. I think that gives me the edge.

  The last thing on my list has to do with a certain Labrador retriever named Lemon Drop. I walk Lemon Drop every day after school, and earlier this year I did a major dog slobber experiment inspired by Lemon Drop’s natural dog slobberiness. It was awesome.

  The fourth grade has been my best year as a scientist ever. So far I have:

  1. Gotten an honorable mention in the fourth-grade science fair.

  2. Grown my own slime and established the Phineas L. MacGuire Mold Museum in my bedroom.

  3. Performed important dog slobber experiments that prove, when you get down to it, slobber is alive.

  4. Attended Space Camp and ridden the Mars roller coaster without throwing up.

  For most people, that would be enough for one year, but when you’re a scientist like me, you want to do scientific stuff all the time.

  The problem is, sometimes you run out of good ideas.

  I’ve been in the middle of a serious dry spell that has lasted over two weeks, and I’ve been feeling pretty grumpy about it. Usually I’m in a good mood, so people notice when I’m not. Yesterday my teacher, Mrs. Tuttle, put one of the rubber frogs from the jar she keeps on her desk on top of my head. She was trying to make me laugh.

  Everybody else laughed, but I didn’t.

  At lunch my best friend, Ben Robbins, who is a genius artist, drew a bunch of pictures of me as a superhero scientist. There was one where I was wearing a lab coat and holding up an exploding beaker of chemicals. It was really cool-looking, but it didn’t cheer me up.

  During recess Aretha went out and found three dried worms to give me for my dried worm collection. This should have made me extremely happy, since this hasn’t been a good spring for dried worms, and I’m behind on my monthly quota. And it sort of did make me happy, but only for about ten minutes.

  Then I went back to feeling grumpy because I didn’t have a good science project to do.

  My mom has been grumpy a lot lately too. She’s a naturally irritable person, but that’s not the same thing as being grumpy. Being irritated is a reaction to a situation. Being grumpy is a state of mind.

  “I don’t know why I can’t lose this last five pounds,” she complained at dinner last night. She took another bite of pizza before saying, “Phyllis and I walk two miles every day on our lunch break. You’d think the pounds would just fall off.”

  My stepdad, Lyle, reached across the table and grabbed a slice from the box. “You look great, Liz. I’m glad you’re exercising, but you don’t need to do it to lose weight.”

  “We could stop eating pizza all the time,” I said. “That might help.”

  I should point out that I wasn’t actually eating pizza. Pizza is pretty much my favorite food group, but I’ve learned you can get tired of even stuff you love a lot if you have to eat it three nights a week. So for the second night in a row I was eating a bowl of Cheerios for dinner.

  My mom’s expression was 50 percent grumpy and 50 percent irritated. “Mac, we’ve been through this. I’m tired when I get home after a long day at work. So’s Lyle. Cooking takes time, and it takes energy, two things I really don’t have a lot of at the end of the day.”

  I shrugged. “I’m just saying that scientifically speaking, it’s hard to lose weight when all you eat is pizza. I’m not complaining or anything.”

  “You might be complaining just a little bit, and I guess I don’t blame you,” my mom said, and then she smiled a grumpy sort of smile. “I can’t tell you how often I wished the workday was like a school day—you know, home by three, plenty of time to get everything done. If I got home at three every day, I’d be able to—”

  She paused. She looked at me for what seemed like a really long time. And then she got this smile on her face. A very scary kind of smile.

  “I know just what to do about it,” my mom said, picking up her phone and tapping on the keyboard. After she was done, she said, “There! Problem solved!”

  Lyle and I looked at each other like, What’s going on?

  My mom lost her grumpy expression. In fact, she looked downright happy. That sort of scared me, if you want to know the truth.

  “I’ve just texted Sarah that tomorrow when you get home from school, she’s to take you to the grocery store.”

  By Sarah, she means my babysitter from outer space. Going anywhere with Sarah was not high on my list of things to do.

  “Why?” I asked.

  My mom smiled. “Because from now on, you’re going to cook dinner, Mac. And I know you’ll do an amazing job.”

  chapter two

  “Wait, you have to do all the cooking from now on?” Ben shook his head, then swung his way across the monkey bars. “That’s, like, a mega amount of work, Mac,” he said when he reached the other side. “You won’t have time to do anything else.”

  “I just have to make dinner,” I told him. “Lyle’s still going to make our lunches, and we’re all sort of on our own for breakfast.”

  “Even Margaret?”

  Margaret is my two-year-old sister. “No, my mom fixes her breakfast. Only Margaret never eats it. She just mushes up the toast and the banana and smears it all over her face.”

  Ben grimaced. “Little kids are so gross.”

  “It’s actually sort of cool-looking,” I told him, grabbing on to the first bar of the monkey bars and swinging back and forth. “Like slime mold.”

  As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing cooler in the world than a little bit of slime.

  “But I don’t get how you’re going to do dinner all by yourself,” Ben said, starting to draw a picture in the dirt with a stick. “You’re not even ten yet. That’s kinda young to be in charge of the most important meal of the day.”

  “I thought breakfast was the most important meal of the day.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Mrs. Tuttle says, but here’s my question: Do you have dessert with breakfast?”

  I shook my head.

  “I rest my case,” Ben said, taking a bow. “You can have dessert with lunch, it’s true, but usually it’s a pretty small dessert, like a couple of cookies or s
omething. But dessert after dinner? We’re talking ice cream, my friend, we’re talking cake, pie, baked Alaska.”

  “You have baked Alaska for dessert?”

  “Theoretically speaking, I could,” Ben said. “I’m not actually sure what baked Alaska is, to be honest, but I know nobody ever has it after they’ve eaten breakfast.”

  I didn’t know anybody who ate dessert after breakfast, though I did know a few people who sort of ate dessert for breakfast. There’s this kid in our class, Roland Forth, who gets on the bus every morning carrying a doughnut wrapped in a napkin. Some days it’s a powdered doughnut, other days it’s one with sprinkles. Everybody around him says, “Hey, Roland, I’ll be your best friend if you give me half,” or “Hey, Roland, if you give me your doughnut, I’ll do your homework,” but Roland never shares. He just sits and eats and makes these little happy humming noises.

  Roland Forth is a famous hummer, in case you were wondering. It’s like having a radio playing in your class all day long.

  In case you’re wondering, Roland Forth is also pretty annoying.

  I sat down next to Ben in the dirt and started collecting pebbles to make a frame for the picture he was drawing. “My mom thinks making me cook dinner is the greatest idea in the world, but it’s pretty stupid, if you ask me. First of all, I don’t know anything about cooking. I mean, okay, I can use the toaster oven to heat up frozen waffles, but that’s it. And when I told my mom I don’t know how to cook, she said that Sarah can teach me.”

  Ben’s eyes widened. “Whoa! That’s harsh.”

  Totally harsh. Time with Sarah is not time well spent, in my book. She is seriously into purple, a color I happen to be allergic to, and she is always trying to make me eat nutritious snacks after school. I would find her 100 percent annoying except for the fact that she built a mold museum in my room earlier this year and found twelve dried worms for my collection.

  You have to admit, it’s hard to be 100 percent annoyed by a babysitter who understands your passion for mold.

  Still, spending my afternoons cooking with Sarah did not sound like a great plan to me. It sounded more like a punishment.

  “And anyway,” I told Ben, “cooking seems totally boring. Besides, it’s really more of a girl thing than a boy thing.”

  “Excuse me, did I just hear you say cooking is a girl thing?”

  I looked up to see Aretha Timmons standing behind me. Uh-oh. Aretha definitely didn’t like it when you said only boys can do this and only girls can do that. Come to think of it, Ben didn’t either, since he wanted to be an artist and his dad said that art was for girls.

  “Well, y-you know,” I stammered, “it just seems like something girls, uh, sort of like more than boys. I mean, Melissa Beamer and Michelle Lee are always talking about baking cupcakes, and Stacey Windham watches every show on the Cooking Channel.”

  Aretha put her hands on her hips. “And you think that means cooking is a girl thing? Just because you know three girls who cook? Well, I can name at least three guys who cook, number one being my dad. He cooks dinner every night.”

  Come to think of it, my dad cooks a lot too. I go stay with him every other weekend, and he makes these big pans of lasagna and baked ziti. In fact, he’s a much better cook than my mom, except when it comes to pumpkin pie. My mom is, like, the world’s best pumpkin pie maker. It’s one of her most stellar qualities, besides the fact she totally gets that I’m a serious scientist, which not every mom of a fourth grader would.

  Aretha raised three fingers. She tapped one and said, “Okay, so number one guy cook is my dad, and”—she tapped another finger—“number two is my grandfather, who taught my dad to cook in the first place. Number three is Mr. Reid. You know those awesome chocolate-chip cookies at the bake sales? Mr. Reid!”

  Mr. Reid is our school janitor and a fellow scientist. I didn’t know he was a baker, too. “I thought Mrs. Reid made those cookies,” I said.

  Aretha shook her head. “Mac, Mac, Mac. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Everybody cooks. Besides, I thought you’d be into cooking.”

  I stood up and wiped the dirt from my jeans. “Why?!”

  “Because cooking is science,” Aretha said. “It’s chemistry!”

  Ben drew a huge atomic cloud in the dirt. “Even I knew that!” he said.

  Chemistry? I thought about scientists in lab coats wearing protective goggles and gloves and pouring dangerous chemical concoctions into beakers, watching as purple-and-blue smoke poured out. I thought about the chemistry set my mom wouldn’t let me get because she thought I’d burn a huge hole in the kitchen floor with the chemicals.

  When I thought about chemistry, I never once thought about cooking.

  But now I could sort of see it.

  “I need to go do some research,” I told Aretha and Ben. “When’s recess over?”

  Aretha checked her totally awesome watch, which doesn’t just tell the time, it gives you the weather report too. “Ten minutes,” she informed me.

  That was just enough time to get started. I ran to the library and got permission from Mrs. Rosen, our school librarian, to use the computer. I searched “chemicals used in cooking,” and this is the list I made:

  1. Baking soda, also known as NaHCO3 or sodium bicarbonate

  2. Salt, also known as NaCl or sodium chloride

  3. Baking powder, a mix of cream of tartar and sodium bicarbonate

  4. Cream of tartar, which is potassium bitartrate, also called potassium hydrogen tartrate

  5. Lemon juice, also known as citric acid, also known as C6H8O7

  Here’s what else I discovered. There’s a kind of science that’s all about experimenting with chemistry in cooking. You can go to college to study it, and even get your PhD.

  In other words, I wouldn’t just be a cook, I’d be a molecular gastronomist.

  That, I liked the sound of.

  chapter three

  Going to the grocery store with Sarah Fortemeyer is not my idea of fun. In fact, I try to avoid doing anything with Sarah if at all possible. My Sarah Fortemeyer phobia began last year, when she first started babysitting us and asked if she could paint my fingernails. She was testing out different colors, and she’d already painted her nails and Margaret’s.

  I’d run upstairs as fast as I could and shoved a chair against my door. Ever since then I’ve avoided Sarah Fortemeyer like two weeks’ worth of extra homework whenever possible.

  But today she wasn’t so bad. First of all, she wasn’t armed with fingernail polish. Then, she actually let me do the shopping by myself while she and Margaret looked at magazines. “Pasta’s on aisle two, and so is the spaghetti sauce,” she told me, handing me the list. “Your mom says to get the organic kind. Frozen garlic bread’s in the frozen food section, and the bagged salad is over in produce.”

  I have to admit, it didn’t sound like the most scientific dinner in the world. Where was the baking soda? The citric acid? Tonight’s dinner was strictly amateur stuff. Normally this would be okay, since I’m a kid, but I’m also a scientist.

  As a scientist, I was hoping for the kind of dinner that might blow up at the last minute.

  I pushed the cart to aisle two. Was there a science to cooking spaghetti? I wondered. Why did the water need to be boiling to cook pasta? Why couldn’t you just soak the pasta in cold water? Would it still get soft?

  When I got to the shelves where all the pasta was, I could see it wasn’t going to be as simple as just grabbing a box and chucking it into the cart. If my calculations were correct, there were seventeen different kinds of spaghetti, including thin spaghetti, regular spaghetti, whole wheat spaghetti, pasta-plus spaghetti, and extra-long spaghetti. There were a bunch of different brands, too. I decided to get the box that looked most familiar, but I got the extra-large size, because I wasn’t sure how much spaghetti I needed to cook for four people. I read the instructions on the back of the box, which said a serving was two ounces, but that didn’t seem like enough to me. Besides, bette
r too much than not enough, right?

  There were even more kinds of spaghetti sauce than spaghetti, but there were only two kinds of organic sauce, which made choosing a lot easier. I got the kind that cost eight dollars instead of the kind that cost four dollars, because I figured the eight-dollar stuff would be twice as good.

  “Wow, pretty fancy,” Sarah said when I showed her everything I’d gotten. “Are you sure your mom wants you to spend that much on the sauce?”

  “She only wants the best for her family,” I assured Sarah.

  “Okay,” Sarah said with a shrug. “Let’s get this stuff home and start cooking.”

  When I walked into the kitchen, I decided to think of it as my lab. The stove was a giant Bunsen burner, and the pots and pans were beakers and flasks. If only I had a lab coat, I thought, and then I had a brilliant idea. I ran upstairs and grabbed one of Lyle’s white work shirts. It was long enough on me to look like a coat. All I had to do was roll up the sleeves a million times and I looked like a genius scientist. If I did say so myself.

  Next, I needed a plan. When you work in a lab, you have to be organized. I read the instructions on the pasta box, which said that I should boil the spaghetti for ten to twelve minutes. I started to write that down on the notepad my mom leaves on the counter, but then I stopped. Ten minutes didn’t seem long enough for two pounds of pasta. I checked out the serving size, which was two ounces. If you multiply two ounces by four servings, you get eight ounces, or a half-pound. But since I was going to make two pounds of spaghetti so we could have leftovers the next night, I calculated I should boil the pasta for four times as long: forty to forty-eight minutes.

  Easy peasy.

  I got out a big pot from the cabinet, filled it up with water, and then put it on the burner. Here’s where I ran into my first problem.