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"The following evening, Ilya leaned against the rail of the deck and watched Shane flip burgers on the barbecue. Shane seemed very excited about the burgers. He had followed a recipe online."
[With the rigor of his hockey schedule from a very young age, Shane hadn’t allowed himself to focus on learning how to cook. As a child and young adult, he’d just relied upon his parents for sustenance. Once he was in the NHL, a private chef had made most of the meals he ate at home, whether cooking them fresh or prepping beforehand so Shane could just put them in the oven to finish up.]
[Thus, he was both particularly proud of having found, sourced and followed a recipe and very nervous doing something he hadn’t really done before.]
"Ilya took a sip of his beer. 'Why the fuck are you making eight burgers?' he asked."
"'That’s how many the recipe was for!'"
“'You can’t do math? Cut it in half?'”
“'Leave me alone.'”
[Ilya did know how to cook. His father and older brother never learned, and when his mother died when he was 12, it was either teach himself to cook or suffer at the hands of what the older men in his household considered edible.]
[Fractions became much more interesting in school at that point because the recipes he found fed families and he was damned if he was going to become the cook for the house. He was constantly cutting them down to make sure he only made enough to feed himself. Occasionally he would splurge and make an extra helping so that he could put it away and not have to cook the next day.]