“Which strawberry should I pose with?”
Larita frantically swiped through the batch of berries as if it was her Tinder account. She was stumped. Her assigned task of hand-modeling and pretending to cut strawberries was a feat taken on only by the best in the industry. Her colleague Patrice, a Senior Vice President of Posing-With-A-Fork-In-Frame-While-Instagrammer-Takes-Top-Down-Photos, took a look and noped out of there seeing the magnitude of the task.
“If we want to eat whatever we came here for, we have to figure this out!” Larita said emphatically.
Larita couldn’t simply pick a strawberry. She had to consider the shade of red best fit for the lighting condition. Seed density per square millimeter. The curvature of the hips as they sloped towards the pointy peak. Leaf count on the green stem attached on top. There was no room for error. With each unnoticed blemish came a decrease in likes. And with a decrease in likes came the risk of losing an invitation to future meal.
But dear reader take note: what really mattered was not the quality of the modeling fruit, but whether the hand model had her nails done. Patrice, forgetting to do hers, was relegated to the menial position of ghost-prepping: a role where she does all the work yet loses all credit to owners of more beautiful hands.
Luckily, Larita had painted her nails a wistful shade of blue-gray, a perfect compliment to strawberry red, earning her the right to become the “heroine” in this story. (Editor note: Justin, we should probably take Patrice out of the story, she’s just an extra now anyway and likely won’t be invited back)
With her hands earning creative approval, our main character went about with pretending to perform other complex culinary tasks such as coating butter dipped wonton skins in a cinnamon sugar and placing them in baking cups.
“Wow, that’s a lot of butter and sugar,” thought Larita as she wondered how many SoulCycle classes she would need to attend to work this off. But her anxiety slowly turned into complacency as she heard a ding emanate from her iPhone - a boy texting her meant she thankfully no longer needed to work anything off. No you can’t text back yet Larita, you still gotta pose for this baking photo.
Still unsure what the ingredients were to be combined into, Larita placed the beautiful wonton-lined baking cups into the oven and then brought them out realizing that they had formed into deliciously crispy wonton cups.
“I can’t wait for the strawberry salsa!” she thought. Alas! As a hand model, she lacked the precognitive ability to realize what the fuck these wonton cups were for other than to be used as fancy ass Tostitos Scoops Tortilla Chips.
Even more confusing was that egg yolk was being slowly poured into a heated mixture of cream and sugar. Sitting just behind it in a shallow sauce pan was a weird mixture of black shit being reduced.
“Wait that doesn’t look like salsa….” Goddamit Larita of course it doesn’t, we’re not fucking making chips and salsa we’re still on dumpling month.
Finally understanding her place in the story, Larita ended up adhering to dumpling month rules and wrapped little dumplings filled with diced strawberries and dark chocolate bits. These dumplings would be then be carefully set in a hot oil bath to crisp the wrapping and melt the chocolate chips.
But alas, just as things were looking up for our protagonist, she came one demerit closer to the fate of she-who-my-editor-said-should-not-be-named-because-she-forgot-to-do-her-nails. A plastic spatula had been melted by the scalding oil, crippled to never to see kitchen service again.
Metal works just fine though, why didn’t you f.. never mind, does anyone else want to be hand model next week?
And thus with Larita in time-out against the wall our Great Author had to do this shit himself, pouring the custard mix into wonton cups and then topping the custard filled cups with fresh berries.
The cups then were topped with a sweet cream drizzle while the weird black shit that was reducing was revealed to be a sweet balsamic vinegar reduction that was dripped onto the fried chocolate strawberry wontons.
A pinch of powdered sugar was sprinkled onto the wontons with a meme-worthy salt-sprinkle motion and a dessert was born.
“I hate that I had to slut my hands out for this but so worth it,” Larita thought as she scarfed down a fruit custard cup.
No hand models were harmed in the making of this episode.
Any resemblance to real people or events is entirely co-incidental.
