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The location was secured. The time confirmed. And all personnel and equipment were accounted for. Despite this, Sarah still felt uncharacteristically nervous about this evening. It was, after all, a new and entirely different kind of mission for her. She stood from her seat and walked to the window overlooking the courtyard, a noticeable soberness to her steps. The bus was just departing with the last throng of cadets going home for the holidays. None of them had even an inkling of what will transpire tonight. With her back now to Anacostia, Sarah spoke for the first time since she was briefed on the situation. “What’s the estimated duration?”
“Two hours and ten minutes,” Anacostia supplied.
“Confidence interval?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“And you’ve run through all of the likely what-if scenarios that could prolong this or lead to failure?”
“Yes.”
“What is the predicted success rate?”
“You were initially at seventy-two percent. With Craven, that bumps the success rate up to eighty-four percent.”
“What about the other candidates?”
Anacostia read off the numbers for the other three cadets that volunteered their services but weren’t chosen. All higher than Craven.
“What’s the reason for Craven’s success rate being much lower?”
“No one will have a hundred percent success rate. Random errors will prevent that. But Craven’s is lower than the other cadets because of her clumsy streak despite her alleged prior experience.”
Tally Craven. The thorn in her side since the moment she barged into Sarah’s office uninvited, unannounced, and uncensored. Now she was volunteering her services. And Sarah was accepting it against her better judgment. “Anacostia. Thank you, you are dismissed.”
—
Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she stepped foot in the cafeteria kitchen. It might have been fifty years ago. Maybe even more. Hopefully not too much has changed with kitchen appliances that her prior, albeit limited knowledge, would be rendered obsolete. She circled the kitchen island to do a quick inventory of the ingredients that Anacostia gathered for her. Fourteen items like she requested. Sarah then checked the oven and the stove. The buttons were different but the functions looked to be the same from what she could tell.
“Having fun there?”
Craven was standing at the entrance watching her with an amused look on her face. Dimples shallow from just a slight upturn of her lips. She was out of her military uniform.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’m in my normal clothes. Anacostia said you considered it a mission, but I didn’t think I needed to be in my military uniform to help cook a Yule dinner for the biddies.”
“No, of course not,” Sarah replied, despite the fact that she was in her uniform. But Sarah needed to maintain appearances as the General, unlike Craven. And to her, this was a mission. Though not a high stakes one, the outcome was far more uncertain than what she was used to.
“So what’s on the menu?”
“It’s a three course meal with an appetizer, a main dish, and then a dessert. I’ve pre-selected what to cook based on dietary restrictions. Instructions are printed out and laminated in this booklet. We just need to follow them.”
Tally flipped through the booklet, scanning each page with a haphazard gaze. “Hmm...okay. Got it.”
“You seem confident.” Perhaps Anacostia miscalculated their success rate.
“Cooking is quite simple. At its core, we just need the base level ingredients. Everything else is a matter of adjusting it to your personal pallet.”
Sarah didn’t know much about cooking. And whether what Craven said was true or not, she played it off well enough that Sarah was willing to go along with it for now.
“Let’s start off with the chicken. It takes the longest to cook so we should get that starting. Then we’ll make the Asian pear salad. We’ll save the cookies for last. There are two ovens in this kitchen so we don’t have to wait on the chicken to be done to bake the cookies.”
“Alright, lead with the chicken, cadet.”
Tally brought the chicken into the sink and began unwrapping it from the bag as the oven was preheated. “How do you feel about raw poultry?”
Sarah stared at the slime spilling out and remembered how grateful she was for the kitchen staff. “We were stranded in the wilderness for four days once. I hunted and cooked fowl for the group. Hated it then. Hate it now.”
“Was it a battle or a mission?” Craven asked, overly eager as usual.
“Focus on the poultry, Craven.”
“I am focusing on the chicken as much as one can focus on a chicken.” She patted the chicken dry with some napkins and transferred it to a plate. “We’re going to marinate it now. Would have been better if we could have gotten it marinating since last night, but that’s okay. Can you sprinkle some salt on it?”
“The recipe calls for two tablespoons of salt.”
“No need for that. Just start sprinkling it on the chicken, and I’ll tell you when to stop. Can you get the paprika and the garlic powder as well?”
Craven’s logic was definitely suspect. Recipes existed for a reason, and the cadet seemed content with flying by the seam of her pants.
“Trust me on this,” Craven said, trying to assuage the questions Sarah hadn’t verbalized. It startled her how easily Craven could read her. “Cooking is what you make of it, remember? Base ingredients and we’re good. I think it calls for some black pepper too.”
To her surprise, Sarah reached for those ingredients and followed as instructed, sprinkling spices onto the chicken until Craven was pleased. Goddess, she was really losing her touch.
“So will you tell me about the time you cooked for the group in this battle slash mission?”
“I would hardly call it cooking. As you can tell, otherwise, I wouldn’t have enlisted your help here. I hunted the fowl, cleaned it, and put it over a fire. And it was a mission. But that’s all the information you’re getting out of me, Craven.” Sarah meant for her words to be admonishing, but it came out rather playful. And she was thankful no one else was there to hear it. In the corner of her eye, she spotted a dimple deepening.
“Alright, I think we’re good here. We can put this in the oven now.”
“I’ve set the timer to an hour and ten minutes as the recipe instructed,” Sarah said. Timing was important. She knew that much about cooking.
“Right, a timer. I usually just keep my eye on the clock, but that’s good. Yes.”
They moved on to the Asian pear salad next, which was thankfully less slimy than the chicken. Craven was insistent that they’d cut the pear into thin slices instead of cubes like the recipe suggested.
“Why?”
“Seems odd to have huge chucks of pear in a salad, don’t you think?”
Sarah conceded that Craven had a point, even if her point went against Sarah’s centuries experience of military discipline. She’d let the thinly sliced pieces of pear go. That could be easily overlooked. Sure. But then Craven did the unthinkable next.
“The cookies require three cups of flour.”
“Yep.”
“Did you measure out three cups?”
“It’s okay. It’s a five pound bag of flour, which is about twenty cups. I eyeballed it.”
“You eyeballed it,” Sarah repeated, unsure of what she just heard. The measuring cups and spoons laid untouched, but the dry mix was already completed and sitting in the mixing bowl. “You eyeballed three cups of flour from this alleged twenty cup bag. Then the teaspoon of baking powder. And the half teaspoon of salt.”
“Yes,” Craven said absently as she fiddled with the knobs on the mixer to turn it on. Sarah’s hands itched to grab the mixing bowl back, but they already deviated twenty minutes from their allotted time. And the machine came to life before she could give it a second thought.
“What about the wet mix?”
“The recipe calls for a stick of butter, two eggs, and a cup each of the brown and cane sugar,” Craven recited. Memorization clearly not an issue she struggled with. Sarah tried not to let on that she was impressed. It would not bode well with Craven’s school-girl crush on her.
“Let me guess, you eyeballed the sugars too.”
“Sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everyone knows that cookie recipes overestimate the sugar requirements. So you should always add in less than what the recipe calls for. I eyeballed about three quarters of a cup each.”
“I had no idea imprecision was a tenet of baking.”
“That was a joke. The great General Alder made a joke.” Craven smiled again. And Sarah thought, on top of imprecise, this cadet was also overly smiley.
And Craven continued to smile the rest of the night. She smiled when they worked together to combine the mixes. She smiled when the cookies came out golden but lacking in sweetness. She smiled when Sarah defied her preconception that the great General Alder didn’t indulge in sweets by taking a large bite of the cookie. She smiled even in dull moments, like when they were cleaning up. And she smiled when she thought Sarah wasn’t looking. It was exhausting. This golden retriever of a person who just exuded light and optimism constantly. Absolutely exhausting. And equally addicting.
“You should return to your dorm to freshen up. Dinner is at seven.” Sarah pointed to Tally’s black top that was dusted with flour and the remnants of their cooking.
“Oh. I—didn’t know that I was invited to this dinner,” she flushed.
“I,” Sarah needed to be careful about her words, she reminded herself, again. “Consider it a thank you for your services.” Her cheeks felt a bit heated, but she chalked it up to the cooking and baking.
“Right. Okay!” Another smile. And before she turned to leave, Craven asked, almost preening now, “So it was a success after all?”
“Sure,” Sarah answered, her tone noncommittal. But as she watched Craven disappear from the kitchen, she wondered how much of it was true. And how, despite her own reservations, she continued to seek the cadet out and be a willing participant to her whims and charm.