The phone rang while I was scrambling eggs. Scrambled eggs is now my go-to meal on days when I have lots of homework or have spent most of the afternoon hanging out with Ben or walking Lemon Drop.
Here’s the trick to great scrambled eggs: Keep the heat low and cook ’em slow.
That’s all there is to it.
“Mac, phone’s for you,” Sarah called from the living room, where she and Margaret were having a fashion show. “It’s a girl!”
The way she said, “It’s a girl” was all singsongy and romantic.
I pretty much broke out in hives just from the sound of her voice.
“It’s Aretha, so quit breaking out in hives,” Aretha said when I grabbed the phone from Sarah. “I’m calling because I need help.”
I turned the heat way down under the eggs. “All right, but I can’t talk for long. I’m putting dinner on the table.”
Okay, that sounded sort of weird.
“I need to figure out how to make exploding brownies,” Aretha said. “Or some kind of crazy food. It’s for the food science part of this badge I’m working on. I could do something boring like a presentation on lemon juice, but I want drama. I almost fell asleep at our last meeting, the presentations were so boring.”
“So you want dramatic food?”
“That’s right, Mac. I want food that will make everybody spin in their seats. Can you help me?”
“Meet me at the playground at recess tomorrow,” I told her. “I’ll have a report.”
As I spooned the eggs onto the plates, I had a strange feeling. It was like I was remembering something I used to know but had sort of forgotten.
Like, oh yeah, I’m a scientist.
If I’d been wearing an apron, I would have flung it off. It wasn’t that I was tired of cooking. I sort of liked cooking. But every night?
Not so much.
At dinner, I looked around the table and said, “I have an announcement. From now on, I’ll cook dinner two nights a week. If we have pizza and Cheerios all the other nights, that’s fine with me. I am a scientist, and I have work to do. Cooking is a full-time job.”
My mom thought about this. “It’s true, cooking has been taking up a lot of your time. And your scientific work is important.”
“Maybe I could make some freezer meals on the weekends,” Lyle said. “There was an article in the paper the other day about a woman who does all her cooking for the month on one day—stews, casseroles, you name it. Then she puts everything in the freezer, and every morning she takes something out to thaw.”
“You’d need a pretty big freezer to pull that off,” I pointed out.
“Ours is big enough for a couple of casseroles at least,” Lyle said. “If your mom makes dinner Sunday nights, then we’re set.”
“Great,” I said, pushing my chair away from the table. “Now I need to go make some food explode.”
When you’re a genius fourth-grade scientist, you keep files about all sorts of scientific matters. I keep my files in a shoe box in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with my dried worm collection and the shoe boxes with my dried fungus collection.
I have a very interesting closet. Though it does smell sort of funny.
I pulled out my scientific files shoe box and dumped its contents on my bed. There was stuff I’d clipped out of the newspaper and from magazines, like articles about Pluto losing its planet status (totally unfair, in my opinion), and notes I’d taken when I was coming up with ideas for my mold museum (my favorite idea was having the museum in the bathroom, because mold likes humid places, but my mom said no way). There were ads for chemistry sets I wasn’t going to be allowed to get until I was fifty, but I still liked to dream about.
And then there were my notebooks. I like to get those really little spiral notebooks that you can put in your back pocket. That way, if I get a scientific genius idea or come across some scientifically super-important information, I can write it down right away.
I started flipping through the articles and my notebooks to see if I could find anything about exploding food. I found something about exploding soda cans, and how to make an exploding cake using dry ice, which sounded way too awesome and too dangerous for any adult to give it the thumbs-up.
Okay, I said to myself, lying back against my pillow, what are we trying to accomplish here? Aretha wants drama and excitement, but the fact is, she’s really trying to demonstrate something about food science. So what do I know about food science from personal experience?
I knew about emulsions and colloids. I knew how to curdle milk. I knew that if you didn’t put enough baking powder in your waffle batter, your waffles would fall flat. But.
But!
What if you put in too much?
• • •
“So you’re saying I should make exploding waffles?” Aretha asked me the next day at recess. We were sitting on the swings, with one empty swing between us so that no one would think we were swinging together.
I nodded, and Aretha smiled. “I like it,” she said. “I like it a lot. It’s about time someone did something to stir my troop up, and this ought to do the trick.”
Just then Ben showed up. When Aretha told him about the exploding waffle idea, he got this big grin on his face. “I have a stupendazoid idea. You ought to add food coloring. Imagine it—exploding green waffles. I could film it and put it on YouTube. We’d be famous!”
“Green is the color of the Girl Scout uniform,” Aretha said. “Plus, it might add a little more pizzazz to the whole project. Let’s do it!”
At lunch, we went to the library to find a good waffle recipe on the Internet. As it turns out, there are over two million waffle recipes on the Internet, so we just checked out the first five and picked the simplest one. Then we did some research on baking powder so that Aretha understood the science behind the waffle explosion.
“So baking powder is made by combining baking soda with an acid,” Aretha said, taking notes as she talked. “When you add a liquid like water or milk, the acid and the base interact, and that creates carbon dioxide, which makes the stuff fizz up.”
She looked up from her notes. “Basically, if our experiment works, the baking powder will produce a whole lot of carbon dioxide.”
“Which is a kind of gas,” Ben added.
“Which will make the waffles explode instead of just rise while they’re baking,” I finished up. “At least, that’s our hypothesis.”
Aretha grinned. “I’m glad we’re doing this at Ben’s house and not mine.”
Ben was the only one of us with a waffle iron and a mom who wouldn’t go nuts over somebody exploding waffles in her kitchen.
“So do you think we could explode brownies by putting in too much baking powder?” Ben asked as we walked back to Mrs. Tuttle’s class. “Because our recipe’s due pretty soon, and I’m not feeling all that confident about it.”
“One, I don’t think exploding brownies will taste all that good,” I told him. “And two, the problem with your recipe is the pepperoni. Bacon is fine, but pepperoni is going too far.”
Ben thought about this for a minute. “You could be right. Maybe I should take out the pepperoni and add some beef jerky.”
“Have you ever thought about just making plain brownies?” Aretha asked. “Maybe with chocolate frosting to jazz them up a little bit?”
Ben and I looked at each other. Plain brownies with chocolate frosting?
“No way,” Ben said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“No offense or anything,” Ben told Aretha, “but really? I’m trying to win a recipe contest and that’s what you come up with?”
Aretha shrugged. “Simple is good. Simple works.”
“Simple’s boring,” I told her. “We need brownies that make a statement. We need life-altering brownies, brownies that pop—” I glanced at Ben, looking for a little backup here, but it was clear that at the moment he was too busy thinking to talk.
Which is always a dangerous thing.
“Simple,” Ben muttered. “Simple and to the point. That’s boring, all right, but you know what would make it a lot less boring?”
“If you sprinkled bacon on top?” I guessed.
“Exacto-mundo!” Ben exclaimed, back at full volume. “Bacon and chocolate chips! That turns a simple, boring recipe into a classic recipe!” He pounded me on the back. “Mac, you’re a genius!”
Aretha and I watched as Ben skipped down the hallway.
“Well, at least you got him to take the pepperoni out,” Aretha said.
“At least the brownies won’t explode all over the judges,” I said.
Aretha and I slapped high fives.
Scientifically speaking, it had been a good day.