Gina stood on the kitchen set, staring down at the counter, which was covered with a white bed sheet. “What’s this supposed to be?” she called.
“Don’t touch that!” Barry hustled onto the set. He’d left the rain suit behind and was dressed in his customary black shirt and pants. Zeke trailed not far behind, dressed in dry clothes—also black.
Barry took her by the arm and ushered her to a quiet corner of the ballroom, set up with folding tables and chairs. “Your surprise ingredients are under those sheets,” he told her. “I don’t want either one of you to see what you have to work with until we start taping. I gotta tell you, Gina, I like this challenge even better than the first one. Don’t you?”
“Honestly? Barry, we’re exhausted. Do we really have to do this tonight? I’m dead on my feet. And I look like crap. Where’s D’John?”
He patted her cheek. “You look fabulous. Fresh as a daisy. Which is why I told D’John we won’t need him tonight. I want you and Tate to look just the way you do—fresh from a brutal confrontation with the elements.”
“But,” Gina sputtered, “I can’t work looking like this. These aren’t even my clothes, Barry—these jeans have got a row of safety pins running up the butt. And this T-shirt—”
“You look awesome,” he said, getting up to leave. “You’ll start a new fashion trend. The day after this show airs, you wait, every chick in America will be wearing jeans just like those.” He glanced down at his watch. “Okay, cookie. Since you’re so tired, I’m gonna give you a break. Ten minutes, then I want you on set. Okay? Terrific.”
Hey,” Tate whispered. “Are you pissed at me?”
She refused to look over at him. The sound tech snaked a mike up underneath her T-shirt and clipped it to the neckline.
Despite Barry’s edict, D’John hovered at her side, makeup kit in tow. “I’m just going to powder her nose a little,” he told Adelman. “To take the shine down, that’s all. And I’ll put a little gel in her hair, to make her color more dramatic.”
“What’s going on between you two?” D’John whispered, cutting his eyes from Tate to Gina. “And don’t even try to stonewall D’John.”
“Nothing’s going on,” she insisted.
“He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since he walked onto the set,” D’John said. “He’s looking at you like he looks at that dog of his. And you’re treating him like dog—crap. What’s the story? I thought you two made nice after the first Food Fight.”
“He sold me out,” Gina said stonily. “If we’d presented a united front on this thing, we never would have had to do this crazy taping tonight. But Barry insisted, and Tate folded, like a cheap tent. He’ll do anything to win this thing.”
D’John squirted styling gel into his hands and began working it into her hair. “The two of you, marooned alone on an island. It’s crazy sexy.”
“You weren’t there,” Gina said.
“Ooh, but I wish I had been,” he said.
“All right, everybody,” Barry called from his seat at the production table. “Let’s get this thing cranked up. I’m going to come out, detail the challenge, and unveil your secret ingredients. You’ll have two hours to cook up a storm, using as many of the ingredients as possible. You can also draw from the supply of kitchen staples that are already in each kitchen. But you’ll have penalty points subtracted from your total if you don’t use one of the surprise ingredients. When the food’s done, we’ll bring the judges back and do the presentation and the scoring. Everybody good with that?”
Tate cleared his voice. “Uh, Barry? What exactly are we supposed to be cooking? A southern meal, or what?”
“Whatever you think will tickle the judge’s taste buds,” Barry said, chuckling at his own cleverness. “Use your imagination. Go nuts. Comprende?”
“Comprende,” Tate said sourly.
Gina stared down at the groceries assembled on her kitchen counter in disbelief. She glanced over at Tate, whose reaction was even stronger than her own.
“What the hell?” He pointed at the boxes and bags. “I can’t make a meal out of this crap. Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?”
“Cut,” Barry said. He strode onto the set, his customary cheeriness gone. “It’s not a joke,” he said tersely. “We’re trying to emphasize the kinds of ingredients the average Joe Sixpack has in his home kitchen. And the crew and I would appreciate it if you would just do your job, without any editorial comments. You’re not the only one who’s had a long day today.”
So, Gina thought. The teacher’s pet had his hand smacked with a ruler. She smiled sweetly to herself, and then started taking stock of her raw ingredients.
A one-pound sack of Martha White flour. A dozen eggs. A can of Campell’s cream of tomato soup. A tin of Hershey’s cocoa. A pound of sugar. A box of Frosted Flakes cereal. Containers of salt, garlic powder, chili powder, and black pepper. A can of Crisco. A package of defrosted chicken parts, thighs, drumsticks, breasts, and wings. A pound of bacon. A huge head of cabbage. A bag of confectioner’s sugar. A jar of Duke’s mayonnaise.
She heard pots and pans being rattled and slung around from Tate’s kitchen, and plenty of muttering. But she tuned it all out. Scott, damn him, was right. This challenge was hers to win or lose.
This time around, she couldn’t lose. The foodstuffs on her kitchen counter could have been straight out of Birdelle’s kitchen back home. Right out of the aisles of Tastee-Town, in fact.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the shelf of stained and tattered cookbooks in her mother’s daisy yellow kitchen. The red-and-white-checked Better Homes and Gardens was her mother’s biblical authority on culinary theory. It sat beside the faded green metal file box full of recipes, clipped from Southern Living, the Savannah paper, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But the go-to cookbook, the one her mother and her grandmother had cooked from day in and day out was Simply Sinful: Recipes from Tabernacle Baptist Church Women’s Missionary Circle—or Sinful, in her grandmother’s shorthand.
Gina had learned to cook from that cookbook, with its cheerful pink laminated cover and its spiral-bound spine. Later on, after college and cooking school, where she’d flirted with the works of Julia Child, Paul Bocuse, and Pierre Franey—not to mention every Junior League cookbook published in the South—she’d sneered at Sinful’s reliance on convenience and processed foods, its two dozen recipes for congealed salads, its reliance on gimmicky recipe titles, but now, she thought, now was the time to bring back Sinful.
Gina reached for the can of tomato soup and stepped back twenty years in time. For the next two hours she sifted and stirred, chopped and crushed, fretted and frosted.
She was just taking her chicken dish out of the oven when she heard the Food Fight buzzer go off.
“Time’s up!” Barry announced from his place at the director’s table. He stood up, stretched, and yawned. “Gina, Tate, why don’t you guys take a little break, then we’ll come back and show you plating up your food.”
Scott rushed onto Gina’s kitchen set. He looked at the dishes assembled on the counter, his forehead wrinkled in concern. “It looks…interesting,” he said. “Did you manage to use all the ingredients?”
“I think so,” Gina said numbly. She yawned hugely and glanced over at her opponent’s kitchen. Tate had disappeared. As far as she could tell, his counter held only two dishes, a baking pan that seemed to contain a casserole, and a plate of cookies. Her own counter held half a dozen dishes.
“You’ve got Moody beat by a mile,” Scott said smugly. “He made barbecue sauce with the tomato soup and poured it over the chicken, and then he mashed up some of the Frosted Flakes for some bizarre kind of cookie. Look over there,” he pointed. “Half his ingredients haven’t been touched.”
Her pleasure at the prospect of besting her rival suddenly dimmed.
“Wow!” Lisa wandered over and handed her a cold Diet Coke. “Geen—I’ve never seen anybody cook that hard or that fast. It was like you were in some kind of trance or something.”
“It kinda felt that way,” Gina admitted. “Come on, I need to sit down before I fall down.”
Deliberately ignoring Scott, Lisa led her to the makeup room. When she opened the door, the first thing she saw was Tate, sitting in one of the chairs, leafing through a newspaper. He looked up when she walked in, and then, quickly, back down at the paper.
“Hey, Tate,” Lisa said cheerfully. “Are you as tired as we are?”
“Yes.”
Gina dropped into the chair next to his, while Lisa perched on the edge of a table.
“You think they’ll let us eat some of that food once the judges have finished?” Lisa asked, desperate to fill the awkward silence in the room.
“Why would you want to?” Tate flipped the page of the newspaper.
“I haven’t eaten in hours,” Lisa said plaintively. “And everything smells so good. My stomach was screaming the whole time you were cooking. Geen, what was that chicken thing you made?”
“Oven-fried chicken,” her sister said. “Mama used to make it when I was little. You weren’t even born yet. The original recipe called for crushed up cornflakes and buttermilk. But I only had Frosted Flakes, and since they’re way too sweet, I added chili powder to the crushed cereal. I just dipped the chicken in a mixture of the mayonnaise and egg, instead of buttermilk, and then coated it with the cereal. God knows how it’ll taste.”
Tate laughed despite himself. “Frosted Flakes and chili powder. Damn. Wish I’d thought of that. I used the Frosted Flakes for cookies—it was the only thing I could think of.”
“Too bad,” Gina said. She finished her drink and stood up. “Come on, Lisa. We better get back before Barry sends out another search party to look for us.”
“You’re still mad at me,” Tate said, tossing the paper in the trash. “Why?”
“I’m not mad at you,” Gina said coolly. “I don’t care about you one way or the other. I have a job to do, and I’m doing it.”
She had her hand on the door, but Zeke pushed it open and stuck his head in. “Time, people,” he said excitedly. “The judges can’t wait to get started.”