Julia's Child (9781101559741)

by Pinneo, Sarah

  Sweaty and desperate, I considered my options. I could break off a bit of dough for Wylie to handle on his own. But time and dough were short, in equal measure. I watched his little face redden from the effort and the insult of our struggle.

  I closed my eyes and reached deep down, finding the last shred of calm in my soul, along with a tiny speck of remaining ingenuity. “Wylie,” I whispered. “Would you like your own batch of dough? You could mix it up with a spoon.”

  He relaxed, nodding and sniffling. Not wasting a second, I grabbed a saucepan from the pot rack, scooped half a cup of wheat flour, and spilled it into the pan. When Jasper was a toddler, once or twice we’d made playdough together. I could almost remember how. I grabbed a carton of salt and poured some over the flour. Then I handed Wylie a spoon. He began to stir slowly, tracing salty circles into the brown flour.

  You have to make hay when the sun shines. So I turned my back on him and rolled that pizza dough out in about thirty seconds flat. I flipped it onto the baking pan just as Wylie made a complaint. “Not gooey.”

  “Oh!” I said brightly. “You want gooey dough.” I raced a can opener around a can of organic pizza sauce like an Indy 500 entrant. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Need gooey dough.”

  I turned on the faucet with my elbow and poured a bit of water into Wylie’s saucepan. He attacked it with his spoon. I began spreading tomato sauce over the pizza before he could notice or insist on helping. The work in front of me was finally beginning to resemble a pizza, and my blood pressure dropped accordingly. I had fifteen minutes left in the kitchen.

  “Gooey!” he pronounced.

  I took a package of shredded mozzarella from the refrigerator, tore it open with my teeth, and began to sprinkle it furiously over the sauce.

  “Stuck!” Wylie gasped. The dough had begun to tighten up on him.

  I scattered diced red pepper over the top of the pie, looking over his shoulder. Then I got out the olive oil, which I intended to sprinkle over the pie like a true Italian. “I’ll bet your dough could use a drop of this, kiddo.” I gave him a dollop.

  He stirred but then turned to give me a funny look. “It smell funny now.”

  “Ah,” I said, thinking that nothing smelled finer than olive oil. But it was his concoction. “What do you want it to smell like, then?”

  Wylie’s round cheeks were set in concentration. “Tookies.”

  I stuck my nose in his soft hair and kissed him. “You got it, buddy.” I reached for the cinnamon. I eased his saucepan onto the stove and lit the flame. “Don’t touch the pan now, okay? But here—add this to your dough.” I handed him a teaspoon of cinnamon, and with a shaky hand he tipped it into the saucepan. Then we added some ginger, and I stirred like hell. By the grace of God, he didn’t fight me for the spoon.

  The heating dough began to hold together. And suddenly the kitchen smelled wonderful, like pumpkin pie or apple strudel. “Wylie, your dough is great.” Seasoned playdough! It had never occurred to me. And not only was Wylie happy, but I felt the same tickle of delight that I always got from recipe development. It was a source of constant excitement for me—familiar ingredients recombined as a surprise. Discovery was my favorite drug. Perhaps Tookie Playdough would be a cheery addition to the Julia’s Child website.

  I moved the pizza out of the way and turned Wylie’s steaming dough onto the countertop. “We’ll just give it a minute to cool, okay? And then you can touch it all you want. This dough is yours.”

  “Mine!” His favorite word.

  Together, we put slices of pepperoni on the pizza while we waited for Wylie’s dough to cool.

  Wylie’s Whole Wheat Gingerbread

  Playdough

  Ingredients 1 cup whole wheat (or any other kind of) flour

  ½ cup salt

  2 teaspoons cream of tartar

  1 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder (for color)

  1 teaspoon cinnamon

  ½ teaspoon powdered ginger

  ½ teaspoon grated cloves

  1 cup water

  1 teaspoon vegetable oil

  Instructions

  Have your child stir the dry ingredients together in a saucepan for as long as it interests him. (Tip: toddler + large spoon = flour flung about the kitchen. Give your child a chopstick or a fork to stir with. You can thank me later.)

  Add the water and vegetable oil, and then stir.

  On the stove, stir over medium heat for 3–5 minutes, until you see the playdough form a skin on the bottom when flipped. Turn it out of the pan and knead when cool enough to handle. Dough keeps well in an airtight container.

  Chapter 13

  I grasped the handle of the freezer case and looked fondly through the glass. The Autumn Harvest Muffets looked back at me, at eye level, from their excellent position between the pizzas and the frozen organic vegetables.

  Perhaps Marta suspected my ulterior motive when I’d volunteered to pick up lunch, but I didn’t even care. It had taken long enough to finally get Julia’s Child into the store of my dreams, and I would steal this moment to admire my muffets, shining under the expensive Whole Foods lighting.

  It was impossible to see, from this side of the glass anyway, just how many costly rookie errors I’d made. But Kai and his team had been quick to point them out. Stacked cases of muffets didn’t fit well on standard warehouse delivery pallets. Furthermore, we’d been told that the typeface we’d used to print the ingredients list on the side of our package wasn’t kosher.

  The only solution was a pricey redesign of our packaging. So I’d closed my eyes and agreed to spend the money. Last night I’d lain awake worrying that it wouldn’t matter, that Kai would fit the glass slipper onto some other princess—one whose bar code was already perfectly aligned on her packaging for a good scan in the checkout aisle.

  On the other hand, after a gut-wrenching two-week silence, the trade show had finally admitted us to its roster. So now Marta and I were hurriedly designing appropriate display materials. If Whole Foods dropped us after our probationary period, we’d need to snag another big order—Safeway, Price Chopper, or Piggly Wiggly—just to recoup all the cash we’d spent trying to impress them.

  Unable to help myself, I opened the freezer door and squared the corners of the packages. There weren’t very many muffets left. That might be good news. Or perhaps the store was just slow to replenish the shelves. I had no way to know.

  “Just a few more minutes, sweetie! If you’re a good girl, we’ll head over to the playground.”

  The mom rolling toward me used the roof of her stroller in lieu of a shopping cart. Beneath the flap of fabric, which was sagging under the weight of organic yogurt and all-natural diapers, her infant daughter wore a look of squirmy protest.

  Whirling around, I feigned interest in the items opposite the freezer case. There’s always a chance . . .

  The mother slowed in front of the freezer. As I pretended to scrutinize the jars of salsa, she opened the door and reached in.

  I held my breath while she grasped a package of muffets, reading first the front and then the rear of the package.

  “Eeeeekkkk!” her daughter shrieked.

  The mom sighed. “Okay, pumpkin.” She pushed the muffets back on the shelf, allowed the freezer door to snap shut, and moved quickly toward the checkout aisles.

  I watched her walk away, feeling snubbed. She hadn’t even bothered to set the rejected carton properly on the freezer shelf. It pitched pathetically toward the frozen flatbread pizzas, a situation I quickly remedied.

  With one more proud glance at my babies, I headed for the deli counter.

  “May I help you?” The team member behind the counter snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves onto his hands.

  “Could I please have a half pound of . . .”

  The organic roast beef that I often chose was $12.99 a pound.

  “Yes?”

  “Turkey, please.”

  “Organic honey roasted, organic smoked, al
l-natural roasted, pepper, or maple?”

  I picked the cheapest price tag and pointed. If things didn’t turn around soon, I’d be eating Spam out of a can in order to fund my investment in the world’s most pristine organic toddler food.

  My phone rang as soon as I left the store.

  “Hola, chica. You answered your phone!”

  “Of course. When my phone rings, I answer.” The trouble wasn’t my phone etiquette, rather my lazy phone. It habitually refused to ring. Hours later it would always confess its sins, guiltily blurting out its string of omissions: “Five missed calls.” Marta had been leaning on me to buy a new one, but cell phones contain a mineral called coltan, and Congolese miners had lately been killing off gorillas right and left to get to the mineral deposits. Anyway, I didn’t have two hundred bucks.

  “Uh-huh. Chica, I’m picking up un café. You need one?” Marta sounded exhausted.

  “No thank you, Marta. I’ll be back with the lunch fixings in just a couple of minutes.”

  When I arrived, I found that my partner looked just as tired as she sounded on the phone.

  “Morning,” she grunted. I looked at the clock. It was twelve fifteen. Marta now spent nearly every night cooking at Zia’s with her cousin Theresa. She got only a few hours of sleep before it was time to see her son off to school. Then, when Carlos had boarded the school bus, she caught a couple of more hours sleep before coming into the office for the afternoon.

  “Greetings!” I put my shopping bag down on my desk as she put a giant cup of coffee down on hers. When I’d met Marta, she was caffeine free. “Is that really coffee in there?”

  “Sí,” she said tiredly. “I think they call this size the bladder buster”—she shook the computer mouse so that the system would come to life—“which is a problem for a lady who is too busy to go to the bathroom. So, any customer e-mails today?”

  Now that our website was up and running, the first few consumer comments had begun to trickle in. We were riveted by the feedback. It didn’t even matter to us that, by volume, most of it was negative. We’d learned that people usually kept their thanks brief. “The baby loves muffets! Keep up the good work!” Whereas people took their time with critiques. We’d received a couple of missives from people who felt that the packaging for the Apple and Cheddar Muffets was too similar to the Autumn Harvest flavor and who had bought the wrong one by mistake.

  “Maybe they should swap,” Marta cracked. “We’ll tell the lady who accidentally bought apple about the one who bought the pumpkin.” Instead, we’d added the problem to the list of packaging fixes.

  I opened my e-mail now with the same hope as a child opening a birthday gift from a crazy elderly aunt. It would probably be another pair of socks, but there was always the chance of a shiny new toy.

  The first letter was short and plaintive. “I really miss you” was all it said.

  “Eh?” asked Marta.

  “This one is from Luke. He promised this morning to look at our site and see if he could spot any bugs.”

  “Ay! The only bug he has is with you, chica. You should do something for that man.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “On one of my many days off?”

  She shrugged wearily. “I’m just sayin’. Are there any more?”

  There were two more messages. One was a brief “We love the new pumpkin flavor.” The other one was short but nasty.

  Dear Ms. Bailey,

  I saw you on The Scene, and you seemed nice, but I couldn’t find muffets at the Walmart where I shop. So I went to look at your website. It says that on your farm you fertilize with goat manure. I can’t for the life of me figure out why you would spread GOAT POOP around vegetables that little children are going to eat. If that’s what you mean by “all-natural,” you can keep it.

  Brenda Veertema

  Kansas City, KS

  “What the hell!” I yelled, leaping to my feet beside my desk. “What is wrong with people? Marta—please take this down.”

  Although her job did not usually involve taking dictation like a secretary from the 1960s, Marta walked slowly over to her own desk and took up a pen with an air of exaggerated cooperation.

  “Dear Ms.”—I checked the screen—“Veertema,” I began. “For thousands of years, the only way to grow food was what we now call ‘organic.’ The human race steadily increased its agricultural output and also its lifespan. Then in just the last hundred . . . No, less than that. In the last sixty years, big agriculture money-grubbers decided that it’s”—I made my fingers into quotation marks—“‘conven-tional’ to pour noxious chemicals all over crops. Suddenly our society is beset by higher rates of cancer, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.”

  I took a breath. “You have allowed yourself to be brainwashed, and therefore you are what’s wrong with food in this country.” I ran out of steam. “Did you get all that?” I asked Marta.

  “Sí,” she said. She held up a piece of paper with a lot of scribbling on it. Then she very deliberately tore the paper into four pieces.

  “Marta!”

  “Chica”—the exhaustion was evident in her voice—“you do not really want to send this message, even if it is all true.” She held two of the torn pieces together. “I may not have a fancy MBA, but I’m pretty sure that ‘you are what’s wrong with food in this country’ is not going to sell any muffets. What happened to ‘the customer is always right’?”

  I put my forehead down on the desk. Some days the mountain seemed insurmountable.

  “Why don’t we have some lunch?” Marta changed the subject.

  “Okay,” I said weakly. “I’ll do the honors.” I peeled myself off the desktop. From our mini fridge I extracted a jar of mayo and a loaf of bread. On a couple of recycled paper plates, I began to assemble our sandwiches.

  I was just adding my special touch—a razor-thin layer of sliced apple, for crunch—between the turkey and the bread, when the phone rang.

  Marta answered. Whenever she was exhausted, she slipped deeper into her accent, so the name of our company took on a Latin pronunciation. “Hoolia’s Child,” she said into the receiver. “Marta speaking.” She listened attentively. “Yes, sir,” she said. More listening. Then she said, “That’s fantastic,” but the look on her face told a different story. She looked like she might cry. “You can have them tomorrow, in our existing packaging. Or you can have them next week with the new design.” Her frown grew deeper. “Tomorrow, then. Excellent. Thanks so much.”

  Then she hung up the phone and leaned back in her chair like a stricken woman.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Without opening her eyes, she said, “It’s Kai. He needs more stock. You’ve nearly sold out at the Time Warner Center and in Chelsea. And you’re sold out at Union Square.”

  I could hardly believe my ears, especially given Marta’s lack of enthusiasm. “So it is true! What did he say? In spite of all the packaging snafus, people are actually buying them?”

  She opened her eyes. “He was careful to say that it often goes like this with a new product. Lots of people try it. The second batch will be more telling. We’ll either have repeat customers or we won’t.”

  “But that’s not why you’re depressed?”

  “I’m depressed because we’re going to have to ship him all the muffets we just baked for the trade show. And I thought we were almost done.”

  I clapped my hands together joyfully. “Tell me what he said when you told him the muffets could be there tomorrow.”

  Marta stood up and maneuvered around the desk to reach for her sandwich plate, which I handed over. “He did seem a little surprised, now that you mention it.”

  “I just know he takes us for small-timers. I’ll bet he thought we couldn’t rise to the challenge.”

  Marta looked at me, blearily, over her plate. “This is the corporate titan taking a bite of her turkey sandwich.”

  “Marta, as soon as your coffee kicks in, you’re going to agree with me that this is a good th
ing. We need the revenue from Kai to pay down our credit cards.”

  Marta nodded. “Are you cruising the suburbs today?” Marta asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, taking a bite. I’d been piloting my Subaru all over New Jersey, scoping out warehouses and food-production facilities—called copackers—searching for the right place to manufacture Julia’s Child. This meant donning a hairnet to tour factory floors that seemed impossibly large and automated. And expensive. The search was not going well. As I watched cans or cartons twirl by on overhead conveyor belts, I had a hard time reconciling those impossibly industrial places with the company I wanted to run.

  “It only takes one.” But Marta’s voice wasn’t as optimistic as her words. I wasn’t sure which of us she was trying to buoy up. But then she seemed to gather herself and sit up a little straighter in her chair. “Hey, the apple tastes good in here. Nice touch.” Then the phone rang, and she set down her sandwich to answer. “Yes? Chris!” she said to her caller. “Of course I remember you.”

  I worried the rim of my paper plate. The trick was, as in all things, timing. I couldn’t afford to change manufacturers until we got another big order, either from Whole Foods or another big buyer. Then I’d need to instantly switch, somehow, to a new facility, simultaneously increasing production, staff, and marketing. If I got the timing wrong, the business would lose cash flow and die. It seemed as impossible as a trapeze artist’s fingertip catch of a swing in midair.

  Marta hung up the phone with a joyful clap of her hands. “I met someone at my son’s school!”

  “A guy?” I asked through a bite of sandwich.

  “No, chica. I met a journalist. From the New York Post. Her name is Christine. I chatted her up, you know, hoping for free publicity. And guess what? It paid off.”

  “Again, Marta! You have the touch. She wants to do a story? About Julia’s Child?”

  “Sort of,” Marta said coyly. “It’s a story about me.”

  “Oh!” I waited for her to explain.