fandomhigh | Culinary Crimes; Tuesday, Second Period [06/22].

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culinary crimes

Culinary Crimes; Tuesday, Second Period [06/22].

Thanks to a nice two-day intensive recovery period, Summer was pretty much recovered and back to normal by the time her class on Tuesday rolled around, which was good, because, thanks to a certain present and having been down for the count on Father's Day, she already had a busy rest-of-the-week ahead of her.

But first! Traumatizing people with food! Or at least making them scratch their heads a little, because she felt she was going a little light on them for their final class, but, as stated many times previously, her guage on this sort of thing had broken beyond repair a loooong time ago.

"Welcome back, you guys," she started, "and welcome the final week in which you're subjected to the terrible things people can do to food, unless you plan on taking my course next session, too. In a way, there's something about today's class that will tie into the focus of the next one, but that's all I'm saying on the matter. Today, we're going to focus on a specific food, one that's actually very near and dear to my heart, and that food is spaghetti.

"More specifically, we'll be making spaghetti filled peppers and a nice spaghetti pie, finishing off with a lovely spaghetti pudding."

Why, yes, you did hear all of that correctly.

"That's a lot to fit into one class, and I wouldn't wany any of you misisng out on any of it, so let's just get right into it, shall we?"

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Now that's-a spicy meatball!

Stark

Ignis Scientia

Nina Argentum

Clare Devlin

Nell Ingram

Hannibal Lecter

"Obviously," Summer started as she lead into the first one by lifting up a can of spaghetti, "you can take this recipe to the next level with spaghetti from scratch, but since the recipe calls for it and in the service of time, we will be using canned prepared spaghetti in this particular instance. However, since the recipe literally just says 'fat,' I encourage you all to get creative on exactly what kind of fat you choose to use for your nice spaghetti filled peppers."

"Now, while those are baking," Summer continued, once they time skipped ahead to finishing their peppers and slipping them into the oven, "we can move onto the spaghetti pie, and here, you can really let your creativity fly, because it's a template that calls for personalization, and I will say this now, anyone who vies for pineapple on their literal pizza pie is terrible, and quite personally my new personal hero."

"And finally," she said, with the next timeskip and the pie now in the oven as well, "our spaghetti pudding, for a nice little dessert afterwards. This isn't going to mess with anyone's head's at all, I'm sure, so let's go ahead and get our pasta cooking, our eggs beaten, and our strawberries sliced..."

This class was really just a gold-mine for brand new sentences.

It was probably something about how desensitized to the weird that the spaghetti pie didn't seem that odd? Like, it was just another take on a casserole, really...

Nina was heavily side-eyeing the dessert though because, like, pudding and noodles just... what?

Well, the pudding had Nutella on it, so that could cover a multitude of sins, but Clare was not excited about any of this. At all.

Stark was mostly recovered from Saturday night (and the aftermath) and was almost prepared to face this class. Almost. He did keep absently rubbing at a rather unmistakable mark on his neck from Sunday morning while he worked but he wasn't entirely conscious of doing so.

"Didn't know spaghetti came in a can," he said, mostly to himself as he worked on the first recipe. At least it seemed like a safe and reasonable thing to eat.

"And this seems fine," he added suspiciously at the pie.

"This...I don't know..." The pudding was a bit much, Summer.

It was like the reverse of all the time she made non-dessert things into a dessert form!

"Something wrong with your neck, Stark?" asked Summer, who was pretty sure she knew exactly what was wrong with with his neck.

Stark, who hadn't realized his hand had gone back to his neck again, dropped that hand quickly. That didn't help matters, did it?

"What? No! No, it's..." He ducked his head briefly. That recipe was very interesting all of a sudden. "Nothing's wrong. It's fine. It's... it's fine."

"Oh," said Summer, "I'm sure it is."

But now that she felt she had sufficiently given him a little bit of shit over it, she just asked, innocently, "Doing okay with the recipes?"

"It is!" It was great, really, but he wasn't going to say that out loud. Instead he was going to be briefly torn between looking embarrassed and grinning a little goofily before finally getting his face under control.

"The pudding is...odd," he admitted. "It might be all right."

Yeah, that little reaction was going to do nothing to temper Summer's smirk, but she would be willing to pretend she hadn't noticed for the most part.

"I thought it was just kind of whimsical and fun," she allowed blithely. "A bit of a mind fuck, but in a different way."

"It's definitely different," Stark agreed, eyeing the ingredients a little warily.

"But maybe it will be like the fudge and be fine? I didn't understand the fudge." The fudge was a mystery that might never be fully explained!

There wasn't much that was going to save the peppers - though if they'd been made with fresh spaghetti, possibly, since peppers stuffed with tomato sauce and rice were quite good.

The spaghetti pie was sort of an oddly deconstructed lasagna, so with the right seasoning it should be good.

The pudding, well, Nell was a bit skeptical, but as it turned out, it was really very tasty!

Spaghetti three ways! Well, technically, spaghetti two ways plus a pasta-centeric pudding meant to recall a classic spaghetti, but details, details.

The food is all done and ready to meet their verdict!

She's out of bed, she's hydrated, she's definitely avoided jello molds for at least today.

Nina hung back after class, which had been her plan, but now that it was happening she was giving serious thought to just flinging the present at Summer and bolting because, like, she didn't even know how she was supposed to address her let alone talk to her right now.

Professor Smith? Ms. Smith? Ms. Summer? Or just Summer? But, like, that last one she was the most unsure of.

Eventually she decided to skip a name or title entirely, just setting a small pink box tied with a white ribbon down on the desk.

"This is for you," Nina said, keeping it simple. "Since I missed your birthday!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Oh. Good. It had been a while since she'd been over-enthusiastic in order to avoid being uncomfortable.

Summer was...honestly surprised Nina had even come to class that week, but she'd dedicated herself to focusing on the spaghetti instead of the awkwardness, and figured that would be that, but then Nina had hang back after class, and then there was a present...

Summer looked from Nina, to the box, then back again.

"Nina..."

And out of all the ways that faintly desperate single word could be interpreted, there was at least one way that was undeniable, and that was that it just sounded tired.

Way too tired to be up for trying to dismantle whether this was some sort of olive branch, or a trap, or a gotcha moment, or a powder keg, or what.

"You didn't miss my birthday."

Or semantics. It could just be semantics, apparently.

Nina shrugged a little, more casually than she really felt. She played the semantics game too.

"I mean, like, I wasn't even on the island thanks to a suspiciously fortuitously timed trip!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So, looked at that way, I did miss it!!!!!!!!!"

Which was about as close as she was getting to acknowledging that she was pretty sure it was Summer who'd set that up.

And Summer took a moment to just look at Nina a little more, half feeling bad for wondering if she should make a bet with herself about just how quickly this all turned into a disaster.

There were so many different ways this could go, and Summer didn't like how any of them felt.

So she just sighed a little, realized that the path of least resistence was probably the best, and reached out to bring the box a little closer. "Well," she said, nodding a little as she looked at Nina, "then, thank you. That's very...nice of you, Nina. I'm...sorry that things couldn't have worked out better."

It took more effort than she was willing to admit to keep from scoffing at that. Maybe it was even true but Nina didn't believe it for a second.

She hesitated a moment and then said, "I'm, like, sorry for yelling at you, swearing, and breaking the door at Chilly Boulder too."

Nina was specific because she was decidedly not sorry for being hurt and angry about the whole thing.

"I'll pay for the door," she added.

Edited 2021-06-22 15:44 (UTC)

Good thing, then, that literally no one had been asking her to be sorry for those things.

Summer shook her head. "Don't worry about it," she said. "It's already taken care of. But I'm pretty sure they're the ones you need to apologize about the door to."

There was a hesitation before she added, "And sorry for icing you out of my birthday party. I still stand by the fact that it was not an appropriate party for students," students, Nina, not Nina-and-only-Nina-alone, "but...it probably could have been handled better."

Mostly by Nina, if she was being completely honest here, but Summer was...trying to, like, make amends or whatever.

"We were both caught off-guard, I think."

It certainly felt like outside forces were trying to punish her for having feelings.

“I mean, like, obviously,” she said, because… yeah. “I assumed that your age-line was as arbitrary as they usually are and you assumed I’d just know that it wasn’t.”

Nina hesitated.

“So, like, I don’t believe you one bit about being sorry I wasn’t allowed to come,” she settled on, picking her words carefully. “The whole point of your planning was that people under twenty-one couldn’t go. Maybe you’re sorry for hurting my feelings and maybe you’re sorry you didn’t give me a heads up that I understood as being serious.”

Part of Nina really wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t hit up Caritas before the day of the party and then just showed up assuming she could go on the night of...

“And maybe you’re just tired I exist in your general vicinity at this point,” she said. “So, like, I’ll get out of your hair.”

Nina nodded at the present. “It won’t bite. It was bought for a friend.” The fact that she wasn’t sure if Summer was a friend now didn’t change that, at the time she’d bought it, she’d considered her as such. “And……. like, whether you want to see me or not, if you can, you should come to Dad’s birthday. It would mean a lot to him. He hasn’t celebrated many.”

He was younger than Nina was. But Nina kept other people's secrets well.

“I’ll stay out of your way.”

Summer was about to open her mouth and say something right along the part where Nina said it better than she had managed to, that what she was sorry about was hurting her feelings and not even realizing that this would be an issue, because apparently, the two of them saw their friendship in completely different ways...

...but then Nina had to go on and pull that whole 'despite you saying this was not personal and was just for one event thing, you clear don't even want me to exist' thing again, and she had to sigh.

Closed her mouth, and just listened.

Wondered if it would really mean that much to Liam when Liam and Summer barely even really knew each other either, but, then again, she hadn't expected her birthday to mean that much to Nina, so what the fuck did she know anymore?

"It wasn't necessarily under-twenty-one, Nina," she felt the need to clarify, "and I've been over this, you seem to conveniently ignore every time I mention the word students in this case. Yeah, I put a lot of emphasis on the whole 21 part because that was important to me as I was turning twenty-one, but this all kind of came out of no where for me, I didn't really understand it all until I had some time to sit with it, you know? But...

"I mean, you're going to believe whatever you want to believe, Nina, because I've said these things like that it's nothing personal, and that it has nothing to do with you, Nina, as an individual whose mere existence I don't care for, but more to do with you, Nina, as a student, as a member of a whole group that should not be at a party of that kind.

"But it's like you've made up your mind to make it personal, and there's nothing I can do to change your mind, so the only thing I'm tired of is trying to.

"You're not in the way. The only thing that's...in the way...is...whatever it is blocking your ears, or...something, because you're only hearing what you want--"

She stopped, shook her head.

"That...worked better in my head, never mind."

Well, really, Summer wasn't doing much better at understanding Nina...

"I didn't mean tired I exist in general," she said coolly. "I meant now, because when you said my name you sounded exhausted."

Nina watched Summer for a long moment.

"And by the way you brought up students as a last resort on Thursday and are now hiding behind it as the primary reason, I'm going to assume someone went to your party who was under twenty-one."

She was prone to jumping to conclusions and building her own narrative but she wasn't stupid.

"So, yeah. That's just... great."

It wasn't but, like, Nina was determined to get out of this conversation without having to apologize for anything else no matter how awful this new relevation made her feel.

She picked up her bag, slinging it over one shoulder, obviously getting ready to go.

"I am exhausted with this, Nina," Summer informed her, with the sigh to match. "And, yeah, me bringing up the students thing was definitely not about me coming into a deeper understanding of the situation than I had when I was blindsided by a tantrum and was definitely all about me forgetting one of my best friends was just shy of twenty one after we had the conversation about how inappropriate it was for a student to come on a bender with her teacher. Because, yeah, people definitely don't make mistakes, and there definitely aren't nuances to situations like that that make things uncomfortable and hard to swallow and difficult to understand in the moment..."

Honestly, that accusation was all she needed to pick up the box, only this time, she set it closer to Nina.

"Maybe you'd better just take this," she said.

Did it feel a little...harsh? Dramatic? Hurtful? Yes, to all of those things.

But did it also feel important? Necessary?

Well. Maybe next time try a little less emotional blackmail and a little more flexibility.

Guess this conversation wasn't the only thing Summer was feeling determined to get out of right now.

Nina looked at Summer for a moment.

Then just walked out.

The present could sit and rot for all she cared.

"Fan-fucking-tastic," Summer murmured to herself, shaking her head for a moment before picking up the box again. She looked it over a little, then slipped it into her purse for now and went to focus on getting things in the classroom cleaned up before heading out.

Literally five minutes after complaining about HBO Max not having the new season of canon, I discovered Adult Swim is actually being cool and uploading it to YouTube.

Stay tuned to see if something actually happens to the episode between now and when I can actually get a chance to watch it. XD

Part of me is horrified I'm asking about this, but the links for the spaghetti pie and pudding are both for the pie and I need to know what the pudding is all about! The suspense is killing me.

WHOOPS.

It's fixed now! You're...welcome? XD

I brought this on myself. I acknowledge that.

I'd probably make it with egg noodles instead of spaghetti, but it seems very similar in some ways to kugel - which is delicious when made right. I think this would be surprisingly tasty!

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Culinary Crimes; Tuesday, Second Period [06/22].

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