Dressed for Amanda
Category C: Highly Commended (2023) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Peter Lingard
It’ll be Amanda’s first time at my place for a feed tonight and I’ve been cleaning the place for two days. She likes red wine and I’ve paid a tad more than usual for two bottles of shiraz from the Barossa Valley. I got a small wheel of brie and another of goat cheese covered in ash made from burnt vines. I also bought some tasteless crackers.
I am not an accomplished chef, so salad is a given. I’ll mix a tasty dressing found on the Internet and have bought a packet of mixed leaves and stuff from Woollies.
A recipe I found online will be the main dish. It calls for marinated white anchovies, so I open a tin and find there is a marinade already there, so that’s a plus. I leave the fish to saturate in the oily liquid. The contents don’t amount to much, so I return to Woollies and buy a second tin. Said recipe also calls for crisp pita bread and the one I bought is decidedly floppy so I put it in the toaster. I tear leaves from an endive and cut them into strips. I slice a shallot as thinly as possible and separate the bits into rings.
It dawns on me that I can smell burning and look round to see smoke coming from the toaster. The fire alarm goes off. I push the toaster’s eject button but nothing happens as the pita bread is wedged in place. Should I turn off the fire alarm first? No. I get a fork and try to dislodge the pita bread. It comes out in black bits. Having freed the blockage, I pick up the toaster and turn it upside down over the sink. Black dust rains down and some of it lands on the marinating anchovies, plus the endive strips and shallot rings resting on the draining board. I slam the toaster down and rush to silence the effing alarm that seems to have become strident. That done, I return to the sink, put the toaster back in its allotted place, grab some paper towels, wet them and use them to slide the black ashes off the marinating anchovies. I gather the endive and shallot bits in a sieve and run water over them. Some black shit remains but I reckon I can tell Amanda it’s burnt vines similar to that on the goat cheese.
I look at the recipe again and realise I hadn’t paid enough attention to it. The pita bread was supposed to crisp up in the oven. I hastily return to Woollies for more pita bread.
While I wait for the bread to get crispy, I switch on the television and select the food channel. The chef is doing something with dover sole and mentions, ‘One must always have white wine with fish.’
No way! Which white wine? I check the oven before looking up my recipe again. White anchovies are terrific with cava, Spain's earthy, affordable sparkling wine. They have to be kidding. ‘This is Melbourne, mate,’ I shout as I sprint back to Woollies.
The Woollies salesperson has never heard of cava. She looks it up. ‘It’s a white sparkling Spanish wine. Any New Zealand white with bubbles should do.’
I look at the appropriate shelves and see a bottle with a picture of hills around a lake. Sparkling Cuvee Brut it says on the label. I grab two bottles. That’ll be fifty-two dollars, the salesperson says. Amanda better like this dinner – I have spent over a hundred on the wine alone. ‘Make sure you chill them,’ the woman says.
Yeah, chill. As I rush out the door I realize I didn’t turn the oven off, so I turn around and buy more pita bread.
I open my door to the smell of burning. I put the wine in the fridge, turn off the oven, realize I’ll need to use it again and turn it back on. I take out the burned bread and throw the new pieces in. I open windows and put on the air conditioning to get rid of the smell of smoke. A different chef is prattling on about the quality of various mushrooms and I switch the channel to see the kick-off of a Storm game.
My vigil by the oven prevents a third pita fiasco and I take out the crispy bread.
Amanda should be here in fifteen minutes, so I carefully break up the bread and put it on two white plates. I drain the two tins of anchovies and distribute the fish on the bread. The oil that the recipe calls a marinade stains some of the bread and I quickly pick up the pieces. That done, I put the fish on the plate, scatter the endive and shallot bits round and then drop the pieces of bread on the top. I stand back to look at my creation and am not impressed. It doesn’t smell too appetising either.
I drop salad leaves into a bowl, chop up an apple, some spring onions, two radishes and some miniature tomatoes. I add them and dress the salad (whoever coined that phrase must have been well up himself).
The doorbell rings and I greet Amanda with a kiss. Not wanting her to have hopes to high for dinner, I complain about the preparation being a problem.
‘What have you made?’
‘An anchovy dish with salad on the side.’
‘Oh wow,’ she says. ‘Fresh anchovies are my absolute favourite.’