With a dozen tendrils, each tipped with a human-like hand, I did several tasks simultaneously.
Tended to a pot of boiling noodles, shredded, sliced, and grated various cheeses, tend to cooking meat, and holding a recipe up where I could see it.
I tended to the most demanding of the tasks with my natural hands and the bulk of my attention. I'd been better at multitasking ever since my little outburst, but this was important: Cooking pasta sauce!
Crushed tomatoes, filtered water, and just a tablespoon of chianti formed a base, seasoned with five cloves of minced garlic and a medium white onion diced fine as well as some dried basil, some fresh ground black, and just a hint of cayenne for a kick. A pad of salted butter rounded it out. It was simple enough.
The hard part was tending to the source while it simmered. The recipe said that it only needed to simmer for ten minutes, but for the best results you had to cook it for an hour(which was also recommended if minors were eating it because it would burn off more of the alcohol in the wine.) However, you couldn't just let it simmer by itself because it would thicken as it cooked and if it got too thick, you'd have to add more water to thin it back out.
At the forty-five minute mark, I'd started doing the prep work for the rest of the dish. The stuff that the sauce was going in. Boiling noodles, frying up ground meat, preparing the cheese. It wasn't so much to save time as it was to deal with boredom. I could multitask that much.
Five minutes later, I killed the heat on the noodles. Ten minutes after that, I followed on the meat and turned the burner under the pot of simmering sauce down on low.
With a tendril, I reached out and grabbed a stick blender: The sauce was just thick enough but pureeing it with the stick meant that it would also be nice and smooth. That done, I drained the fat and cooked out blood from the ground beef, separated out just a small amount of the almost done sauce, and the carefully started stirring it a little at a time into the main pot. After that, I opened and drained a can of pre-sliced mushrooms(the recipe said it was okay to cheat here) and stirred that into the meat sauce. With that finished, next came the most difficult part yet.
Into a large oven-safe dish, I spread the separated out bit of meat-free sauce in a thin layer, then carefully set down a layer of wide noodles. On top of that came ricotta cheese, which I had to be careful to smooth out, and then a layer of the meat sauce. Then noodles, ricotta, meat sauce. Repeat until the dish was almost full, finishing with the noodle layer, then layer on shredded mozzarella, then a thin dusting of grated parmigiana, and finish with nice round slices of creamy fresh mozzarella, which had a stronger flavor and smoother texture than the brick of mozzarella shredded for the main layer, spaced evenly across the top. The recipe said something about how both kinds of mozzarella were good in different ways and doing it like this gave the best of both worlds.
Then into the over to bake. Not for long, just to bring the layers together, melt the cheeses on top, and finish cooking anything that somehow didn't fully cook while the individual ingredients were being prepped.
"So, is it done yet?" Grace asked. "I've been smelling fragrant Italian sauces for the last hour and they don't really feed me At HQ. And if this isn't as good as my cooking I'm... Something. I'll do something to you."
We'd finally hashed out whether or not Grace was allowed to leave HQ. Since I'd bought out her contract they ruled that it was okay as long as I was supervising her but my neck was on the line if she did something, which was okay with me because it's not like they can do anything to either of us. Since Mister Hebert was working late, something about h Ferry and he might not be in till morning, and I was still learning how to cook, I'd talked Taylor into letting me invite her over for dinner.
I don't think Taylor was comfortable with Grace yet. That was something we had to fix.
Case in point: "I don't know why, but it's kind of disturbing to hear you claim to be a good cook," she said to Grace.
"I only cooked and ate a person that one time," Grace said defensively. "And it made me sick so... I'm not helping my case, am I?"
"No. Quite the opposite," Taylor snarked.
"The lasagna has to bake for a little bit and then it'll have to cool for a bit so it doesn't fall apart when we cut into it, but it'll be done soon," I said to try and head off an argument. I know that grace did bad things when she was Bonesaw but I wish that she and Taylor got along.
"So," Grace started, "Your dad was half Irish and half Chinese. Your mom was Japanese, the Irish grandfather's own grandfather was the son of an Englishman, and through that Englishman, you trace your ancestry back to ancient Egypt. But most of your favorite foods are either Italian or fast-food instead of any of the cultures you come from?"
"Honestly, our heritage wasn't really that important to my parents," I said with a shrug. "And it's really only important to me becuase they're gone and it's a way to connect to them. Though I did find a recipe for something called Kitsune Udon that seemed like it might be yummy if I can find a place that sells the ingredients."
Taylor pinched the bridge of her nose. "My foster sister's best friend is the serial killer that murdered her once, and they're casually talking about food. Fuck my life."
"Please don't swear," Grace said on reflex. "So, I noticed that you put some wine in the sauce?"
"Yeah."
"What kind?"
"Chianti."
"Not Amarone?"
"You are never gonna let me live that down, are you?"
"Nope!" Grace replied cheerfully.
AN: This was born from boredom, writer's block, sleep deprivation, and a sudden craving for baked pasta that I am at this time unable to satisfy.
The recipe for the sauce is improvised and is based on a mixture of how I like my sauce(smooth with no big chunks of vegetables, except maybe nummy shroomies,) the best pasta sauce I've ever had in terms of flavor being a storebought one with cayenne peppers in it so I figure a homemade sauce with some of them would be even better, and things I've heard about being good for a sauce. I do not have an exact recipe or measurements so if you want to try the sauce Ashley used to take it as a guideline the most and trust your instincts and/or the advice of cooks with more experience than me.
Especially the wine. The advice I've heard for using wine to cook is "don't use something you wouldn't drink a glass of but don't break the bank either." I don't drink wine straight up, only very small amounts cooked into sauces and soups, so I went with a small amount of a wine that I've heard goes good in tomato-based sauces that can be gotten at a reasonable price if you know where to look.