The Recipe I Had No Business Attempting

April third. I had a piece of paper on the counter and I kept reading the same line four times, not because it was hard to understand but because I was trying to figure out if I was actually going to do this.

It started, as these things apparently do now, with Simone. Specifically with a Tuesday evening three weeks ago when she mentioned offhand that she'd been cooking one new thing per week and had already failed twice, and the way she said it, completely unbothered, like failure was just part of the unit price, stayed with me on the bus ride home and apparently burrowed in somewhere. Because I woke up Saturday morning and before I'd finished my coffee I was standing in front of my phone looking up a recipe I have never made, for something I have only ever eaten in other people's kitchens. I'm not going to name it. Not because it's a secret but because naming it makes it feel like a project, and I'm specifically trying not to make it a project. It was just a thing I decided to try on a Saturday in April.

Simone came over in the afternoon, which was either good timing or very bad timing depending on how you look at it. She stood exactly where she always stands in my kitchen, one hip against the counter, arms loosely crossed, and watched me read the same line again. She did not offer to help. She did take a photo.

Simone's face said everything the recipe did not.

I think the face she made at the pot speaks for itself.

I'm going to tell you it turned out fine, because it did, mostly. Not perfect. There was a moment around the forty-minute mark where something smelled slightly wrong and I genuinely considered texting an excuse. But I didn't, and then the smell resolved into something that was actually correct, and I stood there for a second feeling the particular satisfaction of a thing you didn't know you could do. The recipe is still on the counter.

The evidence.

I folded it back up instead of throwing it away, which is either sentimental or practical and I haven't decided which.