I reached into my backpack to look for a pen, but all I found was my brown-paper-bag lunch. I pulled it out and handed it to Ashley.
“Hold this and don’t eat my lunch,” I warned her. “I made it myself.”
“And that’s why I’d never touch it,” Ashley said with a laugh.
I found the pen at the bottom of the backpack and handed it to Judith Ann, who signed the paper.
“Okay,” she said, “now we’re ready to begin.”
“We?” I asked.
“Yes, Henry. You’re my assistant.”
I sighed, handed Ashley my backpack and lunch bag, and took my place next to Judith Ann.
I looked around the room. Eight mini-kitchens were set up. Each one had a stove, an oven, a counter for chopping, and a tiny sink. Stations one through six were already occupied by serious-looking kid chefs. They all looked nervous, but none of them as nervous as Judith Ann.
“Hank,” she said, her voice sounding very scared, “when the bell rings for the cook-off to start, we have to be a perfect team. You wash. I chop. The end.”
I looked out into the audience and saw Ashley giving me a thumbs-up. I gave her one back.
“Stop clowning around,” I heard a stern voice say. “Our chefs are required to have a serious attitude about this competition.”
I spun around to see Ms. Smiley squinting at me over the top of her glasses. “Oh,” I said. “I’m not one of the chefs. I’m just a vegetable washer.”
“He’s my assistant,” Judith Ann explained. “And it won’t happen again.”
“No, it won’t,” Ms. Smiley said, “because assistants are not allowed in this contest. Each chef must do his or her own work, start to finish.”
“Tough luck,” I said to Judith Ann as I started walking away. “I wish I could stay, but rules are rules.” Then, turning to Ms. Smiley, I added, “I’m not really the assistant type, anyway. In my kitchen, I’m the main guy.”
Before she could answer, Ms. Smiley’s pocket started to ring. Or at least, the phone in her pocket started to ring.
“Chef Smiley here,” she said, putting the phone to her ear. She listened for a minute, and then said, “You can’t make it for even an hour? Okay, I have no choice but to understand.” She put the phone back in her jacket pocket and shook her head.
“This is terrible news,” she said to us. “One of our junior chefs just called in sick.”
“I hope he didn’t get sick from eating his own cooking,” I joked.
Ms. Smiley ignored me. “This is unacceptable,” she said. “We have announced that there are eight contestants. That’s what we promised!”
She straightened her hairnet and looked like she was about to panic. Then suddenly, her expression changed. I’m not going to say she looked happy, but at least she didn’t look like she was going to explode.
Ms. Smiley laid a beefy hand on my shoulder.
“Perhaps I could use you,” she said.
“Use me to do what?”
“I heard you say that in your kitchen you’re the main guy.”
“You heard correctly,” I said, puffing my chest out.
“Excellent. You will take station six. We need all stations full for the photographs.”
Photographs. I liked the sound of that.
“The photos will run in all the New York newspapers,” she said. “The cook-off is receiving great attention, because our grand prize is so special.”
“Really? What does the winner get?” I asked.
“The grand prize is a television appearance on Country Cooking for the City,” explained Judith Ann, who had been listening to our whole conversation. “But you don’t have to concern yourself with that, Henry, since I am going to win.”
I’ve never been on TV, but deep down, I always felt I should be. All I would have to do is flash a little of the old Zipzer attitude, and boom, I’d have my own TV show. To be honest, I couldn’t resist the idea.
“I’m your guy,” I said to Ms. Smiley. “You can call me Mr. Station Number Six.”
“But, Henry,” Judith Ann said, “you can’t cook. And even if you could, you have no food.”
“Don’t worry, young man,” Ms. Smiley said. “There is already food at station number six. The contestant sent it in advance.”
“I hope it’s something I know how to cook,” I said.
“Of course it is,” Ms. Smiley answered. “It’s quite a simple dish. Artichokes stuffed with crab legs and capers.”
“No problem,” I said.
Okay, truth time. I had no idea what an artichoke was, and I had never even heard the word caper. As for crab legs, all I could do was hope the crab wasn’t going to pinch me.
“Are you ready to participate?” Ms. Smiley said.
“You bet!” I exclaimed with a big smile.
That’s what my face and mouth said. But the rest of my body was screaming, “Hank . . . . . . . . noooooooooo! What did you get yourself into?”
To be truthful, my lunch bag wasn’t entirely the answer. It was only half an answer. The contest was starting in less than a minute. Ms. Smiley hurried me over to station number six.
“Your ingredients are laid out on the cutting board,” she said to me. “There will be two judges. Do the best you can. Just make sure you look busy for the photographers.”
With that, she disappeared into the big kitchen space and left me staring at the cutting board in front of me.
There were a couple of crab legs still inside their shells. I thought I saw them wiggle. There was a jar of little green raisin-type things in juice. I figured those were the capers. And right in the middle of the cutting board were some baseball-size green things that looked like cactuses. They had a whole lot of leaves, and each leaf had a sharp thorn at the end of it. I know this because when I picked one up, it felt like a needle had pricked my finger.
“Ow!” I screamed.
Judith Ann looked up at me from her station.
“That happened to me the first time I picked up an artichoke,” she said. “Those things should come with a warning sign.”
“And a pair of gloves,” I added. “There’s no way I can make anything out of this. It’s dangerous.”
“You have to cook something,” Judith Ann said. “You don’t want to look bad in front of the photographers.”
“Never fear, Hank is here,” I said. “With a plan. Actually, half a plan.”
I bolted from my station. I grabbed my lunch bag from Ashley. I knew exactly what was in there, because I had made it myself. A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, with some extra strawberry jam thrown in for fun. A banana with no brown spots. A box of chocolate milk with a straw. A plastic bag with a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin cookie, because I didn’t want my tongue to get bored. And a Happy Birthday napkin left over from Emily’s reptile birthday party.
“What are you doing, Hank?” Ashley asked.
There was no time to answer. I made it back to my station with my lunch bag just as the starting bell rang. Ms. Smiley’s voice came over the loudspeaker.
“Attention, junior chefs,” she announced. “You have forty-five minutes to create your favorite dish. After that, our judges will perform a taste test and select our two finalists. You cannot look at a written recipe. You cannot pick your nose, touch your hair, or otherwise dirty your fingers. You cannot borrow another contestant’s food. Now—ready, set, cook!”
The first thing I did was push the artichoke and crab legs off the cutting board, being careful not to get pricked again. Then I put my brown paper bag right in the center of the board.
I looked around at the other kitchen stations. The chefs were hard at work. In one station, a curly-haired girl wearing goggles was chopping tomatoes. Boy, were they juicy. It’s a good thing she had on those goggles, because the tomato se
eds were squirting all over her face.
Next to her, a teenage boy with green streaks in his hair was chopping onions. He was crying like a baby. He could have used that other girl’s goggles.
Right next to Judith Ann was a girl named Lily Chun who’s in the fifth grade at my school. I know because her class comes to help us during language arts, and she tutored me in spelling. She was really nice when I couldn’t remember how to spell any of my words except for “cat.” I could tell Lily was going to bake a cake, because she was pouring flour into a bowl. It looked like she was in the middle of a white dust storm. There was flour everywhere—on her hands, on her apron, even on her nose.
“Hank!” a voice called from the audience. It was Ashley. “Get going. Do something. You’ve been just standing there for ten minutes.”
“Oh, right,” I said. I could feel my mind coming back to earth. Sometimes it wanders far away without even asking permission. I want to concentrate on what’s happening in front of me, but my mind has ideas of its own.
I looked around and saw Ms. Smiley walking up and down between the kitchen stations. She was loudly slurping an iced coffee through a straw.
“Where is the artichoke?” she asked me. Slurp, slurp, slurp.
“I rejected it to protect my nine other fingertips. But don’t worry, I have something else to cook.”
She nodded and walked away.
“You’d better hurry up,” Judith Ann whispered. “I already have all my mushrooms scrubbed and chopped.”
I picked up my lunch bag, turned it upside down, and let everything fall onto the counter.
I took my sandwich out of the plastic bag. Okay, that was something. I was on the road; I just didn’t know where it was going.
I looked around and saw that everyone was chopping something. So I picked up a knife and chopped my sandwich into little bits. I did the same thing with the banana. I’m not very good with a knife, so I chopped slowly to make sure my fingers stayed on my hand.
Then I took out the cookies. I took a bite of the chocolate chip one.
Hank, stop eating your ingredients, I told myself. Otherwise, your entire project is going to be inside your stomach.
I chopped the cookies into little pieces, and then stood back and thought about the pile of food in front of me. I wish I could tell you that I had a bright idea about what to do with it. But I didn’t, and time was running out.
My eyes darted around the room, searching for an idea. All I saw was a bunch of kids hard at work, and Ms. Smiley pacing around with her iced coffee. Slurp, slurp, slurp.
There it is! I thought. Slurp, slurp, slurp.
The answer to what I was going to make was right in front of me.
I stuck my hand in the air and waved it around wildly, trying to get Ms. Smiley’s attention. At last, she noticed and came stomping over to me.
“What is it now, young man?” she asked.
“Do you have a blender I can use?” I asked.
“There is a blender on the counter right in front of you,” she snapped.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t do two things at once—like think and look.”
“I suggest you concentrate,” she said. “You’re wasting precious time.”
She was right. I noticed that Judith Ann was already putting her meatballs into the pot.
I scooped up all the pieces of my chopped lunch and carefully dropped them into the blender jar. Then I pulled the straw from the carton of chocolate milk and poked it inside. Turning the carton upside down, I squeezed it and watched the milk squirt into the blender through the straw. I made sure I got every last drop out of the carton.
“It’s showtime!” I called to Judith Ann.
With a big grin, I pushed the blender’s start button. Oops! I had forgotten to put the top on. Chocolate milk and bananas and cookies and chunks of sandwich flew out the top of the blender and landed smack in the middle of my face. A few chunks sprayed on Judith Ann’s counter.
“Henry!” she cried. “Turn off the blender and put the top on. Don’t get your mess on my meatballs!”
I switched off the blender and put as much of the goop as I could back inside.
“Six-minute warning,” Ms. Smiley called over the loudspeaker.
I put the top back on the blender and turned it on. At least everything stayed inside this time. I stood there watching my lunch swirl around in the blender jar. The banana, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the cookies turned to liquid, blending with the chocolate milk to make a thick, frothy smoothie.
“Look at that,” I said, pointing to the glass jar of the blender. “It’s a work of art.”
“It’s a mess,” Judith Ann said. “Fine cooking is not throwing things into a blender and hoping for the best.”
“I’m not hoping for the best,” I snapped back. “It is the best.”
Truthfully, I had no idea what my smoothie was going to taste like. It did turn a pretty ugly shade of mud brown, not a color that makes your taste buds stand up and say hello.
I poured my smoothie into two glasses, one for each judge, and put each glass on its own little plate.
“Psst, Hank,” I heard Ashley call from the audience. “I watch cooking shows on TV all the time. The winners always make their dish look pretty. You need to dress those plates up.”
The only thing I could think of was the half-eaten box of gummy bears in my backpack. I left my station and ran to get it. Of course, it wasn’t where I thought I had put it. I had to unzip every little pocket until I found it buried beneath my crumpled-up spelling test. (By the way, I got a D-minus, which is better than an F.)
When I returned to the counter, I emptied the box into my hand and spread the colorful gummy bears around the edge of the plates. Ashley was right. All of a sudden, my smoothies looked like a party on a plate. Now all I had to do was wait for the judges.
When the buzzer rang, the two judges appeared.
“Our first judge is Maxine Nosebomb, the head pastry chef at Café Sweetooth,” Ms. Smiley announced. Ms. Nosebomb waved her hand at us.
“Our other judge,” Ms. Smiley continued, “is Bob Bones, master chef of one of our city’s finest restaurants, Robert’s Kitchen.”
He looked like he was going to be a strict judge.
I stood at my station while the two judges went down the row, starting at kitchen station number one. They stopped and chatted with each junior chef, including Goggle Girl and Crying Onion Boy. At each chef’s station, the judges took one bite of the dish and made notes on their clipboards. When they got to Judith Ann, I could see that her hands were shaking. She tried to smile, but her lips were quivering so much, it looked like they were doing the Chicken Dance.
“It’s my pleasure to invite you to taste my special meatless meatballs,” she told the judges.
I could tell she had been practicing that sentence all the way from Chicago.
Chef Bones and Chef Nosebomb each popped a meatball into their mouths. I waited for them to scream in horror, but just the opposite happened. Ms. Nosebomb actually made a purring sound like a kitty cat. I saw Bob Bones wiggle his mustache. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad sign.
Then the judges turned to me.
“What have we here?” Ms. Nosebomb asked.
“An entire lunch in a glass,” I said proudly. “I call it Hank’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Smoothie with Surprise Ingredients.”
From her station, I heard Judith Ann let out a big sigh. The judges were supposed to take only one sip of my smoothie. But after that sip, they took another and another, until they each finished their entire glass! Chef Bones even licked his mustache clean because he didn’t want to miss a drop. I could see Ashley out in the audience, clapping her hands.
The two judges walked off with Ms. Smiley, and I saw them all whispering in the corner.
I was surprised at how nervous I had suddenly become. My stomach went from calm to crazy in a matter of seconds.
“The judges have selected the two finalists,” Ms. Smiley said. “They will compete against each other in tomorrow’s final cook-off, which will take place on the set of Country Cooking for the City.”
The room became silent, as everyone in the audience moved to the edge of their chairs.
“Finalist number one,” Maxine Nosebomb declared, “is Judith Ann Zipzer, who impressed us with her delicious meatless meatballs.”
Judith Ann started to squeal, and then slapped her hand over her mouth to stop the sound. What came out sounded more like a burp.
“Our second finalist,” Bob Bones announced, “has produced a creative and original sweet delight.”
I glanced over at Lily Chun, whose entire head of hair had turned white from the flour she used to make her cake. She was looking pretty confident, and she had every reason to be. Her cake was beautiful and decorated with flower petals.
“And the second winning chef is . . .”
Lily stepped forward, ready to receive her award.
“Hank Zipzer, for his unique and yummy Peanut Butter and Jelly Smoothie with Surprise Ingredients.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I threw my arms in the air, jumped as high as my short legs would take me, and hollered, “Let’s hear it for me!” Ashley screamed my name. And my mom was hopping around in a circle.
Before I knew it, a photographer was pulling Judith Ann and me out from behind our stations and snapping our picture. The other junior chefs came to shake our hands, even Lily Chun.
“Isn’t this great?” I said to Judith Ann. “We’re in the finals. Now we can be cousins and friends.”
She didn’t answer. She just turned and walked out of the room. I could tell she was upset, but I didn’t know why. I mean, the judges liked her meatballs, but they probably thought my smoothie was more fun.
You Can't Drink a Meatball Through a Straw #7 Page 2
