Boiling the Chicken: Part I
As cooked by
Duo "Improvisation" Maxwell
"Ok, Maxwell, now we add the chicken, celery leaves, giblets, onion, salt, and pepper."
Duo nodded and said, "Chicken." He placed the chicken in the pot.
"Celery leaves," he then picked up the celery, unceremoniously pulled the leaves off, and tossed them in with the chicken.
"Giblets." Duo looked around. Giblets... His eyes swept over the ingredients assembled on the table: carrots, noodles, parsley, basil... "Um..." He looked over at Wufei, who was carefully slicing the onion. "We must have forgotten to get those out," he said off-handedly as he quickly stepped over to a cabinet, peering over his shoulder to make sure the other boy was still concentrating on the onion. Behind the shield of the cabinet door Duo bit his lip and stared at the contents of the shelves. What are giblets? Do we have them? I don't see any! He glanced out at Wufei again, but fortunately he still seemed quite intent upon his task. Duo continued to stand in front of the shelves of food nervously playing with the end of his braid. His eyes roved the labels of the neatly stacked cans: pineapple slices, ravioli, cream of mushroom soup, extra crunchy peanut butter. Damn. There were no giblets anywhere! Maybe he could substitute something else? The brown haired boys eyes lit up as an idea came to him.
"Hey, Wufei? I've never had giblets before. Are they soft once you cook them?"
A low grunt came from the other side of the kitchen.
"What was that?" Duo chirped.
"I said of course they ARENT SOFT MAXWELL!" The knife hit the cutting board with a loud thunk and a few onion slices flew off the table.
"Oh...Ok," Duo cringed back behind the cabinet door, glad he hadn't asked what giblets were. At least he had an appropriate substitute. Drawing upon all of his extensive training in stealth he slipped over to the pot, put several large spoonfuls of the extra crunchy peanut butter into the mixture, stirred it around until it looked like watery peanut butter with celery leaves stuck in it, decided that was good enough as long as Wufei didn't look too closely, and quickly put the peanut butter back in the cabinet.
Right. Now..."Oh, salt!" Duo added the correct amount of salt.
"Pepper." Into the pot went the pepper.
"Grhmph," said Wufei, which Duo assumed meant 'onion' when the Chinese teen added it as well.