Phineas L. MacGuire...Gets Cooking!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “Bummer,” Ben whispered. “Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and then I pointed to the book on my desk, like we better start reading before Mrs. Tuttle got really mad and started throwing frogs at us.

  I hated lying to Ben about not being able to come over, but I knew if he helped me make the brownies, he’d end up eating at least half of them, and then Evan Forbes would halfway kill me. Which maybe was better than being all the way killed, but not much.

  When I got home, Sarah and Margaret were playing beauty parlor in the kitchen. “Hey, Mac, have a snack attack!” Sarah called out when I walked in. “There’s some yogurt in the fridge.”

  “I’m allergic to yogurt,” I reminded her, dropping my backpack by the door. “All flavors.”

  “Your mom says you’re not,” Sarah said, smearing some raspberry-colored lipstick on Margaret’s lips. “And she says you need more protein in your diet. Yogurt’s perfect.”

  “Except for the fact that I’d probably go into anaphylactic shock the minute I ate some,” I told her.

  “That’s what happens with peanuts, Mac. Not yogurt.”

  “Anyway, I don’t have time for a snack,” I said. “I need to get cooking. I’ve got brownies to make.”

  Margaret clapped her hands. “Brownies! Yum!”

  “Sorry, Margaret, they’re for school. I’ll make you some tomorrow.”

  “Wow, you’re really getting into this baking thing, huh?” Sarah pulled Margaret toward her so she could put red stuff on her cheeks. “It makes sense, I guess.”

  “Why? Because cooking is chemistry, and I’m a scientist?”

  Sarah smiled. “That, plus chicks dig a guy who bakes.”

  I could feel the hives popping up across my back. Have I mentioned that I’m allergic to girls, too?

  Well, I am.

  I was super careful to follow the recipe. All I had was the chocolate that Mr. Reid gave me, so I couldn’t mess up. I chopped up the chocolate and put it in a microwave-safe bowl with the butter, and I did exactly what Mr. Reid had told me to. To my majorzoid happiness, the chocolate melted without burning.

  And it smelled better than anything in the world.

  How did it taste before I mixed in the sugar?

  You don’t want to know.

  Neither my mom nor Lyle do much baking, so I wasn’t prepared for the amazing smells that came out of the oven. In fact, they smelled so good, I had to call my dad and tell him about them.

  “Best smell in the world,” he agreed. I could hear his team behind him, yelling and joking around. My dad teaches high school math and coaches the Mathlete team after school. “In fact, when you’re here next weekend, let’s make some.”

  “I’ll be an expert by then,” I told him. “And this weekend I’m going over to Aretha’s to make eggs. She’s working on a cooking badge for Girl Scouts.”

  “Great! You can make omelets for breakfast!” A loud burst of noise erupted through the phone. “Whoops, gotta run—we’ve got a totally out-of-control quadratic equation situation going on here.”

  I hung up the phone and breathed in some more of that great brownie smell. When the timer went off, I pulled the brownies out of the oven. They looked perfect. They smelled perfect.

  And okay, they tasted perfect too.

  I mean, I couldn’t give Evan Forbes brownies that hadn’t been through a taste test, could I?

  The only problem was, after the brownies were done, I still had to clean the kitchen. I looked at my watch—it was five fifteen. By the time the kitchen was clean it was almost six, and I hadn’t even thought about starting dinner.

  I guess it’s a good thing everyone in my family likes Cheerios, huh?

  chapter six

  “Let me explain to you how mayonnaise works. Have you ever heard of a colloid?”

  Aretha’s dad, Mr. Timmons, stood at the kitchen counter with a food processor in front of him. Aretha, Ben, and I were sitting on tall kitchen stools on the other side of the counter. We were taking notes in our notebooks, and Ben was filming. “I don’t want to miss any important information,” he’d explained when he showed up at Aretha’s with his camera. “Plus, who knows? Maybe we could end up doing our own cooking show. ‘Aretha’s Dad Teaches Kids to Cook,’ or something like that.”

  “I don’t know about a colloid,” Ben said now. “But I’ve heard of a collard. Is that the same thing?”

  Mr. Timmons laughed. “Not quite. You make a colloid when you dissolve one thing into another thing. When we’re talking about liquids, it’s more accurately called an emulsion.”

  Aretha and I both wrote like crazy in our notebooks. Ben popped off his chair so he could move in for a close-up.

  Holding up an egg and a bottle of olive oil, Mr. Timmons said, “The interesting thing about mayonnaise is, here you have two things that don’t typically mix. You’ve got your oil, and in this egg you have water. But because we’re going to slowly dissolve the oil into the eggs, we’re going to bring these two opposites together.”

  Then he broke three eggs into the food processor and punched the on button. Once the eggs were all mixed up, he started dripping olive oil into the feed tube on top.

  “You have to be patient,” Mr. Timmons told us. “Just a little bit of oil at a time.”

  It seemed like it took forever, but all of a sudden the stuff in the food processor turned all creamy and white.

  “Cool!” Ben exclaimed, recording the mayo from all angles. “There’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Mr. Timmons asked.

  “Mayonnaise sort of makes me feel sick.”

  Mr. Timmons nodded. “Me too, but I know you guys are interested in science, and this is the most food science I know. So who wants to learn how to make hamburgers for lunch?”

  We’d already made scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, omelets, and egg salad (which was when Mr. Timmons decided he should to teach us how to make mayonnaise). To be honest, I was getting a little tired of eggs. Hamburgers sounded great.

  After Mr. Timmons gave us all his best hamburger cooking tips (don’t overhandle the meat, fry the burgers in butter, don’t turn up the heat too high), and we had four burgers frying in a pan, Aretha said she thought we should have salad with our burgers in order to keep our meal nutritionally balanced. “One thing I’m supposed to do for my badge is make a meal healthier,” she told us. “Adding a salad in this situation will definitely do the trick.”

  Mr. Timmons gave Aretha the thumbs-up. “Salad dressing is the easiest thing in the world,” he said, handing me the olive oil and a bottle of balsamic vinegar. “Two parts oil to one part vinegar, and you’ve got salad dressing. All you’ve got to do is put it in a jar, put the lid on, shake the jar up, and there you have it—your very own colloid!”

  “But since it’s liquid, we call it an emulsion,” Aretha said, writing in her notebook. “Right?”

  “You got it, my little genius,” Mr. Timmons said. “Now who wants to peel some carrots?”

  After we finished eating lunch, me, Ben, and Aretha cleaned up the kitchen and tried to brainstorm egg recipes, but it turned out everybody was sick of eggs.

  “How about an omelet with bacon and raspberries?” Ben asked as we were getting ready to leave. “Or a BLT omelet?”

  “I don’t think you can cook lettuce,” Aretha told him. “It gets all slimy.”

  “You could use spinach instead of lettuce,” I suggested. “People eat slimy spinach all the time. I mean, you know, the cooked stuff.”

  Of course, at our house, you’ll find most of the slimy spinach in a bag at the bottom of the vegetable bin in the fridge.

  That, you want to avoid.

  When I got home, I decided to study my lab notes from my week of kitchen duty. Since I’d started cooking dinner, I’d learned a lot of stuff. First, there were all the lessons I learned about making spaghetti the first night. The next day, when I made the brownies for Evan, I learned about the importance of cleaning
up as you go, or else you won’t actually have time to make dinner. Last night, when I’d finally gotten around to trying homemade waffles, I learned that a tablespoon is not a spoon you’ll find on a table, but an actual measuring spoon that’s with all the other measuring spoons in the kitchen drawer.

  Which might explain why my waffles came out sort of flat.

  “Kind of like tortillas,” Lyle had observed when I served them up. “Except with syrup.”

  It was my mom who figured out I’d used a cereal spoon to measure out the baking powder. “That would give you about a teaspoon of baking powder,” she explained. “And the recipe called for a tablespoon, so three times as much. Baking powder is a leavening agent. Do you know what that means?”

  “Leavening agent?” I asked. My mom raised her eyebrows—the universal signal in our house for “look it up.”

  So I looked it up. A leavening agent is what makes stuff puff up by producing carbon dioxide. I already knew about yeast, but it turns out that baking powder and baking soda are leavening agents too. Without them, cookies, waffles, bread, and cake would all fall flat.

  Lesson learned.

  Reading my lab notes, I felt like I’d had a pretty good week, even if I hadn’t made anything explode yet. I knew deep down that exploded food probably wouldn’t taste all that good, but I bet it was the funnest food to cook.

  So if my week had been so scientifically successful, why did I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach?

  Two words: Evan Forbes.

  I’d made two batches of brownies already for Evan, and next week he wanted me to make him three. “I’m selling some of them to my buddies,” he explained. “Fifty cents a pop. I’m raking in the dough, Mac.”

  To be honest, that didn’t seem very fair to me. I was doing all the work. Why should Evan be making all the money?

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the guts to ask him.

  One thing I knew for sure was that Sarah was going to start getting suspicious if I made brownies nearly every afternoon. And if Sarah got suspicious, she’d start nosing around and figure out that Evan Forbes was a brownies bully. Then she’d tell my mom, and my mom would call Principal Patino, and Principal Patino would call Evan into the office, and then after school Evan would clobber me.

  I needed a plan.

  Fortunately, I was a scientific genius, so it only took me eight hours to come up with one. I was brushing my teeth, and I was thinking about what I was going to do the next day. Ben wanted me to go over to his apartment so we could work on our prizewinning recipe. He still didn’t know what he wanted to make, and we needed to decide fast.

  I thought about what Aretha said. Make something you like, but make it a little bit different. Give it a new twist.

  Well, I liked brownies, or at least I used to like brownies before Evan Forbes started forcing me to bake them.

  So why not work on a fantastizoid brownie recipe? That would give me just the excuse I needed for making a ton of brownies. I could make fifty brownies a day and start stockpiling them in the freezer. By the end of the week, I might have enough brownies to give Evan for the rest of the year.

  I’m a genius, I thought, spitting toothpaste into the sink. I bet there were a million ways to make brownies. Brownies with chocolate chips, brownies with marshmallows, brownies with broken-up peppermint candies.

  And, okay, sure. Why not? We could even try brownies with bacon.

  chapter seven

  “Brownies are kind of boring, don’t you think?” Ben was sitting on the couch in his apartment, drawing a new Derek the Destroyer comic book and watching Saturday morning cartoons. Derek the Destroyer is this superhero Ben made up a couple of years ago. In spite of his name, he’s actually a good guy, and he’s always saving the world from total annihilation. In the most recent series of Derek the Destroyer comics, Earth is under attack by an army of giant mold monsters who slime everything in their path as they fight for world domination.

  It’s totally cool.

  “Boring? Brownies?” I shook my head like I couldn’t believe how dumb Ben was being. “They’re like the most exciting dessert product ever. They’re practically a dessert event. Thick, rich, moist, chocolaty. Plus, they’re easy to make, and I bet we could come up with an original recipe that will blow the judges’ socks off.”

  Ben thought about this for a minute. “I wonder if we could come up with a brownie recipe that you could set on fire. Like, there’s this dessert called cherries jubilee, and right before you serve it, you make it burst into flames.”

  “How do you do that?”

  Ben shook his head. “I’m not sure. I guess you pour something on it that flames up and then burns out.”

  “And isn’t poisonous,” I added.

  “Right. We can find out. Brownies jubilee. That has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  I actually thought flaming brownies sounded like a great idea, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. Evan Forbes would definitely clobber me if I gave him burned-up brownies. “Maybe we should start with some simpler recipes and build up to brownies jubilee,” I said. “Perfect our recipe and then add special effects to it.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Ben agreed. “I’ll just go call Mrs. Klausenheimer, and we can get started.”

  “Why do you have to call Mrs. Klausenheimer?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, my mom’s at work, which means we are currently semi-unsupervised. My mom said if we even thought about turning on the oven, we had to call Mrs. Klausenheimer to come over and be the official adult.”

  Ben lives in an apartment building. His mom is the apartment building manager. Most of their neighbors are old people, and a couple of months ago when we did the dog slobber experiment, we went around to different apartments to get slobber samples. Mrs. Klausenheimer’s dog was one of the scariest ones we met, a huge German shepherd with teeth the size of baseball bats.

  Very sharp baseball bats.

  “She’s not going to bring Killer with her, is she?”

  Ben looked worried. “I don’t think so. Chocolate is really bad for dogs. She probably doesn’t want to take the chance that he’ll eat a bunch of brownies and have to go to the vet.”

  Five minutes later there was a knock on the door. “Bennie! I’m here!”

  When Ben opened the door, Mrs. Klausenheimer shuffled in clutching an overstuffed purse and headed directly for the couch. “Now, you’re making brownies, is that right? I know the most divine recipe. It calls for eggnog, whipped cream, and crème de menthe. Does your mother keep those things in her pantry, Bennie?”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Klausenheimer,” Ben told her. “She mostly keeps normal stuff.”

  “Too bad, too bad.” Mrs. Klausenheimer pulled a copy of Celebrity Homes and Recreation Vehicles magazine out of her purse. “Well, you boys run along and make your brownies. Don’t get your fingers caught in the mixer!”

  “She’s our official adult?” I whispered as I followed Ben to the kitchen. “She’s like the opposite of Sarah Fortemeyer. You could get away with anything!”

  “I know, cool, right?” Ben asked with a grin. “Sometimes she babysits me, and we order six pizzas with all different kinds of toppings. Then we have a contest to see who can eat the most slices. After that, Mrs. Klausenheimer falls asleep and I can do whatever I want.”

  Sometimes I think Ben’s the luckiest kid in the world.

  All the ingredients for basic brownies were lined up on the kitchen counter. I grabbed my backpack, which I’d thrown on the kitchen table earlier. “So I figure we have time to try three different kinds,” I told Ben, dumping the contents of my backpack out on the table. “First, M&M’s brownies. Second, marshmallow brownies. And third—”

  “I got it!” exclaimed Ben. “Pizza brownies. Genius-zoid! Why didn’t I think of that earlier! Pepperoni, mozzarella, delicious!”

  “Yeah, except for the part where you start throwing up. Pizza
brownies? Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly serious,” Ben said with a perfectly serious expression on his face. “Everybody loves pizza, everybody loves brownies. Why not combine the two?”

  “I mentioned the part about throwing up, right?”

  Ben shrugged. “I think you underestimate people, Mac. It’s the twenty-first century. We eat all kinds of stuff now!”

  I could see that Ben was not going to be budged unless I figured a way to work around him. “Okay, how about this? We call the M&M’s pepperoni, the marshmallows mozzarella, and for the tomato sauce . . .”

  “Actual tomato sauce! It’s sweet, right? It’ll work, Mac, I’m telling you!”

  “No, it won’t,” I said. “You have to trust me on this. But maybe we could chop up some maraschino cherries?”

  Ben sniffed a couple of times, like the idea sort of offended him, but then he gave in. “Yeah, I think we have some maraschino cherries in the fridge,” he admitted.

  “Okay, we’ll do pizza brownies first,” I told him. “And then we’ll try a couple of other kinds.”

  “Do you think we’re going to start getting sick of brownies?” Ben asked.

  I was already sick of brownies, but I couldn’t admit that without explaining the Evan Forbes situation. So I kept my mouth shut.

  By the end of the afternoon, we had seventy-two brownies. The pizza brownies were okay, but Ben thought the next time we tried them, we ought to use marshmallow cream instead of marshmallows, spread it over the top of the baked brownies, and then put the M&M’s and maraschino cherries on top.

  My favorite brownies were the ones that just had marshmallows in them. Simple, gooey, delicious, and nothing at all like pizza.

  “They’re all fantastic, boys,” Mrs. Kleisenheimer said when she woke up from her nap and sampled one of each. “Next time with the M&M brownies, add some more M&M’s. You can never have too many M&M’s, in my humble opinion.”