Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

  Copyright Information

  Out of the Frying Pan © 2013 by Robin Allen.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2013

  E-book ISBN: 9780738734521

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration by Desmond Montague

  Cover image: iStockphoto.com/bortonia

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  for the Darling of Heaven

  One

  “Why do we have to walk through all this mud?” Nina asked. “No one told me there would be mud.”

  “It’s a tour of a farm,” I said. “They have to water their crops. Water mixed with dirt makes mud.”

  “Thank you for that recipe, Poppy. I’ll ask Ursula to include it in her next cookbook.”

  My stepmother is amazing. Not only can she play a damsel in distress like the best stage actresses—even though she’s much too surgically enhanced to fool anyone with eyesight that she’s a damsel, and the distress was of her own making—she can parlay anything into a reason to bring up her daughter’s cookbook.

  “The invitation suggested you dress for the outdoors,” I said.

  “I wore slacks,” she said, briefly releasing her ruby-jeweled fingers from my arm to swat at a fly, “which are filthy. And my heels are sinking into the floor.”

  “On a farm, it’s called the ground.” I flicked something brown off the sleeve of her cream silk pantsuit. “And that’s called a leaf.”

  My father’s wife and I were among a hundred or so other guests on a guided tour of Good Earth Preserves, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm on the far east side of Austin. The late-

  afternoon tour was part of an annual fundraising event for the Friends of the Farm, which Nina and I both are, but for different reasons. I’m a vegan who believes in supporting local farmers to keep me in good supply of organic produce. Nina is a name-­dropping socialite who accepts any invitation that allows her to wear semi-precious stones and haute couture in public.

  After we saw the various crops and animals where our food came from, we would dine on that food with one-hundred ninety-eight other Friends at an elaborate dinner called Feast in the Field. As I do every year, I had been looking forward to this dinner for months—

  savoring a gourmet meal prepared by an award-winning local chef, drinking exquisite wine I could never justify buying on my public health inspector’s salary, connecting with old friends, and engaging in conversations about a food’s merits rather than recording its demerits on a score sheet. This annual dinner under the sky on a Sunday evening in October hokily harmonizes my soul with nature and so fills me with peace and goodwill that I like to prolong the experience by taking the next day off work. And did I mention the nice wines?

  The dinner coincides with the announcement of the new president of the Friends of the Farm. Most years, most guests show up just in time for drinks and appetizers, but this year, the order of events had been changed to announce the president after the tour instead of after dinner. Probably to end the campaigning as soon as possible. This year’s contest between incumbent Randy Dove, owner of Weird Austin Spirits, a liquor supply company, and challenger Dana White, chef/co-owner of two of Austin’s landmark restaurants, Vis-à-Vis and the White Wolff Inn, would raise a barbarian’s eyebrows.

  Randy fired the first shot across the bow with several barely anonymous calls to the health department, claiming everything from dirt under Dana’s fingernails to her restaurants using illegal suppliers. When justice didn’t drop the hammer swiftly enough, he contacted the media and made assertions that Dana’s restaurants used conventionally grown ingredients in their 100% organic menu offerings. An accusation like that is difficult to prove, but unnecessary to. The rumor was enough to put a couple of dings in Dana’s reputation and leave a few lines blank in her reservation books.

  Dana is what you would call high-strung and she goes through cooks faster than Elizabeth Taylor went through engagement rings, so it surprised no one that she retaliated with higher levels of ugliness. She stopped ordering thousands of dollars’ worth of wine and liquor from Weird Austin Spirits, then convinced several other restaurants to do the same.

  Most food establishments are not Friends of the Farm, but they are members of the Austin Bar and Restaurant Alliance. It holds monthly meetings and has its own grapevine, which meant that Randy’s anti-restaurant antics became bigger than the little Friends election, and when it came time to take sides, ABRA members took Dana’s. Randy’s business already wasn’t doing well and the loss of so many accounts forced him to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

  Tonight, all of that would end. Finally.

  “What’s that smell?” Nina demanded as we stopped in front of the chicken coop.

  “On a farm, it’s called money.”

  Perry Vaughn, the hippie owner-farmer conducting the tour, began to climb an eight-foot rolling metal staircase of the type college marching bands use on the football field during halftime. In a recent Good News of the Preserves newsletter, Perry informed his CSA subscribers that it had been donated by a former band leader of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, which had taken Perry’s policy of full disclosure to members too far. Most of the Friends had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and even though Nebraska left the Big 12 Conference in 2011, a Cornhusker will always be a Longhorn’s lifelong and mortal enemy, football-wise. It caused a minor gripefest among the farm’s subscribers, which Perry attempted to smooth over with a free jar of pumpkin preserves in the next delivery.

  Perry grinned down at us and I felt a little whirly remembering my fear of heights, which had been renewed and magnified recently when someone holding a gun tried to encourage me to jump off a catwalk.

  After bragging on his well-fed free-range hens, Perry invited us to enter the chicken coop and harvest an egg we were told would later be boiled, deviled, and served with the rest of the appetizers prepared by Dana White, who was in the farm’s kitchen at the moment because she was also the guest chef for the evening.

  For CSA subscribers,
gathering your own eggs is part of the experience, so a lot of the Friends were comfortable walking among chickens and roosters. Nina, however, had never seen eggs in their natural habitat. “I’m not going in there,” she squawked. “What if I get bitten by a chicken?”

  “These chickens have been trained not to bite,” I said, “but if you want a deviled egg, I’ll get one for you.”

  “Get one for your father, too,” she said. “Without yolks. We’re watching our cholesterol.”

  Perry’s wife, Megan, stood at the entrance to the coop holding a large well-used wicker basket. I picked up twin cappuccino-­colored eggs from the closest nest, then gently placed them in the basket with the others. “You’ve got the glam job, today,” I said.

  “Great, Poppy!” she said, her mind somewhere else. “Really, really great.”

  Now that she brought it up, she didn’t look great or even just okay. The fuzzy hank of shoulder-length auburn hair shot with gray looked like she had braided it a few days ago, and the dark circles under her eyes indicated a lack of either sleep or vitamins. She appeared more worn out than she usually did, and a little troubled. I suppose I would be agitated, too, if I had two hundred city slickers traipsing through my farm, not paying attention to what they were about to step on or in.

  “Where’s the rest of your crew tonight?” I asked. She and Perry run the farm with their two grown sons, Brandon and Cory, along with Megan’s brother, Ian McDougal; his wife, Tanya; and their son Kevin. Years ago, when Austin really was weird and didn’t need a PR campaign to keep it that way, my parents were one of the first supporters of the farm, and my family’s restaurant is still one of their best customers. When my cousin Daisy and I were teenagers, our families spent a lot of time at the farm, and we practically grew up with the boys.

  “Tanya’s down with a humidity headache, and Ian’s on the back ten mending a fence that some of our cows got through. He’ll be up later.”

  “Humidity headache?”

  “That’s what she calls them.”

  “And the boys?”

  “They’re around somewhere, helping Ian or Perry. Do you mind?” She handed me the basket of eggs, then put her hands on her lower back and arched into a stretch. Anyone else would have looked catlike and sexy, but Megan looked like what she was—an overworked farmer. She took the basket from me and accepted another deposit of eggs from a Friend.

  At a signal from Megan, Perry called out from the platform of the staircase, “Gather ’round, everyone. Gather ’round.” Then he laughed. “Gather. Eggs. Get it?”

  Some did, some didn’t.

  “I’m sure you’re all curious about fertilizer,” Perry said, then began a detailed and poetic soliloquy on the topic of organic bovine excrement. He explained how the farm’s unusable vegetables were composted and then mixed with manure from their cows to create fertilizer for their crops. “It’s a perfect, sustainable cycle!” he concluded, searching the crowd for faces as excited as his about manure. He found a few female ones, but I knew they were smiling at something else. With his hay-colored hair, hazel eyes, and dimpled chin, the farmer is a hottie.

  “As you know,” Perry continued, “we wanted to buy a mobile irrigation system this summer, but the Friends weren’t able to come up with their part of it. We lost quite a few crops to the recent drought.” We nodded, remembering the skimpy boxes of vegetables the past few months. “But we’re hoping to have it installed this spring.”

  Perry held up his hand and counted with his fingers. “We’ve seen the mechanics of planting, organic pest control, harvesting, and fertilizing.” He hitched his thumb to the left. “Now let’s mosey on over to the washing shed, and I’ll show you how produce is prepared for your weekly deliveries.” School children often made field trips to the farm, and I bet we were getting the same spiel from Perry and in the same nature-is-a-miracle way.

  We waited for our host to descend the stairs, then everyone rumbled across plywood planks that had been jigsawed into walkways over the mud and followed him to a large, rectangular, three-walled shed situated between the kitchen and the office.

  Against the far wall, Perry’s sons, Brandon and Cory, waited for us in front of a long countertop with colorful bushels of onions, peppers, and broccoli arranged near the deep sinks. The boys—well, not boys; they’re in their early thirties—resembled their father, with dark blond hair and dark eyes, both wiry and tan from working every day in the sun. They wore white T-shirts with an image of the earth on the front, and Good Earth Preserves—Honest food from honest folks! printed underneath.

  The demonstration was delayed, however, because all of Dana’s cooks began fleeing the kitchen as if it were on fire.

  Two

  The kitchen wasn’t on fire, but Dana was, and she had been stoked to a roar that we could hear from where we were outside. “You’re a one-trick pony, a hack, and a drunk! You couldn’t cook your way out of a papillote!”

  “I’ve been sober six years!” a man yelled with equal heat.

  I tapped one of the escaped cooks on the arm. “Who is she talking to?”

  “Some guy named Bjorn,” she whispered. “He came in asking Chef for a job.”

  That would be Bjorn Fleming. He and Tanya McDougal occupy the farm’s kitchen when testy guest chefs don’t have temporary custody. He had a pretty cushy job at the farm. Why did he want to leave?

  “How can I say this so you’ll understand?” Dana said with forced calm. “I do not now nor will I ever need you.”

  “That’s the wrong answer,” Bjorn said evenly.

  “Out of my kitchen, Bjorn.”

  “My implies ownership, which you don’t have.”

  When any professional chef is at the helm of any kitchen anywhere, that kitchen is the chef’s kitchen. Bjorn knows that. Being literal is an effective way to be difficult.

  Bjorn stepped through the open doorway and stopped when he saw all of us staring at him. With his white-blond hair and eyelashes, skin the color of biscuit dough, and attitude the color of scorched milk, he would be perfectly cast as the victim of schoolyard bullies in a British drama. He looked over at Brandon and Cory, then pushed through us gawkers without a word.

  Several people offered their take on what Dana and Bjorn had tangled over. “Are they dating?” “Did you hear her fire him like that?” “No, he said he drank six beers.”

  If you work in the restaurant industry and don’t want anyone to spread rumors about you, take a drive up to Niagara Falls—the Canadian side—and whisper your conversation as you tumble over the falls in a barrel.

  “Sorry about that, folks,” Perry said. “Let’s get back to the tour.”

  He nodded at his sons and they began bathing vegetables. Bathing? Before I raised my hand to ask, a Friend shouted, “I want dirt on my food!”

  “I do, too,” Perry said, “but we’re now offering pre-washed vegetables for those subscribers who want to use their produce as soon as they get home.”

  More like for those subscribers who are used to shopping for groceries in a pristine, air-conditioned environment like Whole Foods, and have no idea that carrots spend their formative weeks underground with dirt as their blankies and earthworms as babysitters.

  “For an extra ten dollars per box,” Perry added.

  CSA operations work on a subscription basis. Members purchase a weekly or bi-weekly subscription to whatever a farm sells—meat, eggs, cheese, milk, honey, fruits, vegetables—and either pick up their bounty at the farm or at a central location in the city. Or, like Nina, they shield themselves from nature and hire a delivery company to bring it to their doorstep.

  After closing the full boxes and bowing dramatically at our applause and playful cheers of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” the guys removed their gloves and placed both boxes on a slatted wooden pallet on the dirt floor.

  “And now,” Perry said, waving
an index card, “I have in my hand the name of the new president of the Friends of the Farm.”

  Our immediate attention and complete silence seemed to frighten Perry and he blurted, “It’s Dana!”

  I slid my eyes over to Randy Dove. He looked like he had been told he had a month to live.

  The president’s job is mostly a professional networking position, which is why so many restaurant suppliers want it, and Randy’s visibility among restaurant owners, managers, and chefs had helped grow his fledgling liquor supply company. But every so often, a restaurant owner or manager runs for office, especially if they’re opening a new restaurant or trolling for investors.

  Losing the presidency would smack down Randy’s ego, of course, but on top of the bankruptcy, it could also clobber his finances.

  Several people patted him on the shoulder, murmuring condolences, which he ignored. I assumed he would leave, but he crossed his arms over his chest and stared into the future.

  Dana White sprinted out of the kitchen, her face full of vindication and victory. She looked good for a woman in her mid-fifties who’d had two mild, but widely reported, heart attacks in the past three years and still put in a chef’s day’s work. And she came off rather girlish with her petite frame, blue eyes, and short dark hair.

  She held a spatula in one hand and a glass measuring cup in the other filled with what looked like ice water. It’s not unusual for cooks to drink from unusual containers. All food service employees are supposed to drink from cups with lids and straws while preparing food, but they often try to get away with drinking from a measuring cup or pickle jar.

  If you didn’t know Perry, you might assume from his big grin and enthusiastic embrace of Dana that he was especially excited that she had won the election, but Perry acts excited about everything. I’ve seen him welcome unannounced visits by FDA, USDA, and county health inspectors to the farm with the same smile and excitement as he does a new calf to the herd.

  “Thank you, Perry,” Dana said, then she faced her constituents and brought the spatula to her mouth as if it were a microphone. Polite laughter all around. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends and Friends, I hope you all have enjoyed your tour of this beautiful farm. And isn’t it nice to know that the new vegetable washing process uses organic techniques, too?” Her voice ended on a high note, giving her words the emptiness of a true politician’s.