Free Prep work by PD Singer Page A

star, a cookbook that shone briefly in a sea of similar titles, and then it all faded away, except for the lawsuits. Let’s just say that my financial backer and I don’t exchange Christmas cards anymore, although he does remind me of that non-compete agreement every time he hears I’ve pitched a project. Bastard.
    I was a sort-of somebody, and now I’m a different sort-of somebody, lucky to have a gig that at least takes me all over the world and into new experiences. It keeps me afloat in a sea of chefs and ex-chefs all looking for their own personal formula for “Bam.”
    A month of eating my way through year-old cabbage and pig parts in Bumfuckistan and adjacent locales left me yearning for something immediately recognizable. Comfort food. So when the waitress came along to ask if I wanted anything else, I stopped her after the words “pea soup” left her mouth. I liked the irony of eating pea soup in London, I wanted a flavor that reminded me of home, and I wanted honest, unadorned thick green glop that sat in the spoon until bodily removed. Pea soup never sounded better.
    Pea soup went with the ancient carpet in this pub and the tables carved with graffiti. Perhaps I would go shoot a few darts after I ate and give Sadist and Monster another few minutes alone with a mattress that sagged not quite as deeply as the Marianas Trench. It wasn’t like I had anyone who wanted to crawl into any sort of bed with me. Life on tour kept couples apart for months at a time, something that made the producers’ first choice chef back out before the contracts got printed. They found me after that, alone, unattached, not even a cat to feed or an aquarium for someone else to clean. Being a chef in a fixed location was hard enough on a relationship, with the crazy hours and the various temptations, whether it’s the bottle or the food or the waiter in section three.
    I did have qualifications for this gig beyond being single and willing to eat food not found in American supermarkets, though I draw the line very firmly at balut. I could describe what I was eating, and my tendency to say any damned thing I thought was at last a power harnessed for good, though at forty-two, I should fucking well be able to speak my mind. Lacking a filter south of brain, north of mouth had gotten me fired from more than one job in my youth and had figured into losing the restaurant, but was probably a bigger asset now than my “piercing amber eyes,” my “ruffle-able brunet hair,” or “semi-athletic physique” or any of the other bullshit the publicists had written into the promo material. The audience hardly ever saw my eyes anyway. They were usually closed, either from the joy of a heavenly grilled prawn or the horror of quite a lot of things. And they’re light brown, damn it.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that my crew found each other. They were away from their settled lives just as much as I was, if you could call what I had back in New York “settled.” With just the three of us, any tensions between the two of them were likely to slop onto the third party, and that sounded a lot like, “Have another spider on a stick, Jude.”
    I’d had enough of the tensions and food I could barely pronounce—this tour was over just in time, and I could leave Sadist and Monster behind for a few hours while I started to soak back into my own life. A beer and pub grub were a good place to start.
    I didn’t want weird, I didn’t want fancy, I just wanted—
    And the waitress was back now, with a bowl that contained thick green soup and—
    “Oh fuck. What is this?” I picked up a few shreds of the frizzly stuff on top and let it flutter back to the surface.
    “Parsley.” She was probably looking at me like I was an escapee from Broadmoor or wherever they stashed the lunatics these days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was holding my head, shaking it back and forth, muttering, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, what is this, I can’t, no, no.” Or words to