Posted Jan. 27, 2021, 8:18 p.m. by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) (Lindsay B)
Posted by Captain Alexander Cochrane (Commanding Officer) in Captain’s Quarters- If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Posted by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) in Captain’s Quarters- If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Posted by Captain Alexander Cochrane (Commanding Officer) in Captain’s Quarters- If You Can’t Stand the Heat
(snips)
Alex picked the dough and nodded. “Got it. Low gluten development and a lot of moisture.” and he took a step back and took a drink of wine. “So let me ask you something… did T’Lora ever run her fingers through your hair? Not just once?” he asked as he popped a stray piece of sweet-hot root in his mouth.
Cochrane
Faye halted her mixing of the dough and peered at him curiously. “What an odd thing to ask? Are you suggesting she acted maternally towards me? If so, it wasn’t a stretch. As you’ll see, she became very much a part of our family.”
Alex simply smiled knowingly and went to stir the vegetables.
Flouring the counter generously, Faye turned the flour out of the bowl. “So 2369 rolls around and the Cardassians finally leave Bajor. As many Bajorans did, a man left there, unable to stay now that they had the option of leaving.” She paused for a moment as she felt a strange twist in her gut at her choice of words. But she slowly moved the dough into place.
“So one day, this Bajoran man arrives at our colony. We were on the other side of Cardassian space from where he had fled from, but Kardin Jaris decided that our colony was where he wanted to be. Jaris was… haunted, for lack of a better word. One look at him and you knew there weren’t words for everything inside of him. He was quiet though, not outwardly angry the way I thought he might have been. A bit of time passes and I noticed that something started to change,” she said as she sprinkled flour over the top and began gently kneading the dough with the absentminded motions of someone who had done it many, many times.
“Probably six months after he arrived, Jaris smiled. I remember it being this strangely beautiful thing. I think I thought he was so sad that he might never ever smile again, but there he was. And it didn’t take long to see that it had something to do with T’Lora. They spent a lot of time together and slowly Jaris seemed to relax, like he could breathe again,” Faye said with a warm smile. “And because T’Lora was our dear friend, Jaris joined her when we had dinner and soon he became dear to us as well.”
“How are the vegetables doing?” Faye asked, stepping away from the kneading with doughy floured fingers to lean his way.
~Faye Calloway
Alex turned off the heat and said “Ready when you are, chief.”
Cochrane
“Okay, so turn it down a bit, and pour about half of that brine into the pan, stirring it really well. We want it to cook out a bit and then at at that point”-she gave a smirk-“add the rest and slow cook it till really soak into the vegetables. Chef’s choice whether you want to chop up that fiery little seed pod and toss it in, or sample this without.”
Having kneaded the dough till it was well combined and able to be handled, she began sectioning off bits and rolling them in her hands into balls. “Long story short, T’Lora and Jaris got married a few months later and my parents served as witnesses. A couple months later, it was my birthday. Now, this was right before the treaty was signed so it sort marks my in my head this defining point of before and after. And on Tracken, we didn’t really celebrate birthdays. Celebrations were always communal, so there might have been something special at dinner that night, but we didn’t have a lot of resources and material objects weren’t highly valued, so we didn’t really do presents. Maybe for something really big, but birthdays weren’t one of them. Anyway, Jaris pulled me aside that day and said he had something special to show me. See, he knew how my mom and I loved spicy food but my dad hated it, and I always loved his hasperat, so he said that he would teach me how to make it so my mom and I could enjoy it for ourselves whenever we wanted.” She smiled sadly as she came over to the stove and turned on the other skillet. “It was his grandmother’s recipe. She had died two years before he left alone because he had been in a work camp.”
~Faye Calloway
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