Rick Carter's First Big Adventure (Pete's Barbecue Book 1) by Samuel Belcher Read Free Book Online Page B

Alcoholism was never a vice he had to worry with.  Instead, he usually kept a few cases of the bubbly grape stuff around for general refreshment and the ever possible binge night.   
         He moved himself to the edge of the bed trying to remember what it was Mel was telling him in the car the night before.  That was Mel, wasn’t it?  Where did he come from?  Blast all that, where had he been?  There were 26 years of explanations waiting out there in the wind, and he suddenly pops up, says hello and then goes running off in the night.  How can that be?  It smacked of fiction, the really bad kind where the author struggles to figure out how to tie a sketchy plot together with a limited vocabulary and a stalled out imagination.
          He rubbed his hair and got up, grunting as he made his way to the toilet down the hall of his apartment to have his morning constitution.  As he stood gratefully over the toilet relieving his over-burdened bladder and yawning, he caught his reflection out of the corner of his eye in the nearby mirror.  Something was wrong. He narrowed his eyes and he turned to look directly in the mirror.  What the..!
          On his head, starting from the forehead and running back to the top of his head, highlighted by his naturally dark brown hair was a silvery white streak of hair about 2 inches wide.  His mouth opened in amazement.  He looked like a skunk, a one-sided skunk.  He stood staring at it, mouth open, unable to say anything.  He didn’t understand why things like this had to happen.  He rubbed his hand through it, reassuring himself that it was his hair and not some nasty brain sucking alien slug that had crawled through his bedroom window during the night.  It was his alright, just white as snow.   He had heard of people having this happen, people who went through dramatic shocks and gray streaks appearing in their hair from the stress.  But, this wasn’t a streak.  It was a swath.  He shook his head in disbelief.  I need food, really good food he thought.  Or I need to hit something.   He decided he would fix something, something he liked, for dinner that was complicated and took a long time to prepare.  It would give him time to think, time to put the night before into perspective.   After all, hadn’t he agreed to a new job too?   Somewhere in that mess of deranged lunacy where he spent last night he remembered accepting a new job.  Maybe I need to start drinking, he thought.   I think I have a good reason to.   He decided to get a shower first then get into the kitchen.
         Culinary art was one of Rick’s real passions in life.  It went well with one of his other passions: eating.  He loved cooking, and he was good at it.  When he stepped into the kitchen and started laying out ingredients, preparing meats, sauces, spices, chopping vegetables, marinating that, pounding on this, glazing something else, angels began to sing in heaven.  And it was practically all self-taught, something he took a lot of pride in.   His dad had passed this love for cooking down to him.  Henry, in his younger days, had owned a fry joint.  His place wasn’t the typical greasy spoon.  It was a place where a cheeseburger took on a whole new experience in your mouth and where even the strictest vegan would have thrown caution to the wind.  Rick grew up under his tutelage.  He eagerly learned all the old man had to teach and then, he moved on to other aspects of plate decorations until he had raised his abilities to almost world class level.  French chefs would tremble at his soufflé.  That is if they knew about it, which they didn’t.  Instead, Rick used his time in the kitchen to think, to prepare for his night, to occupy his time, so he stayed away from the casinos and to hone a craft that he never grew tired off. 
         Tonight’s best beef stew had all the hallmarks of complexity and attention to detail that would occupy his over-active