Protect the flock! From JP and Hachette!
What are you doing right now?
Besides posting on here and replying to this thread. Original credit for this goes back to Fate and Nathan on MX.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ovie! Ovie! Ovie! Oy! Oy! Oy! on
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How has your day been? Hopefully not as boring as mine.
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Permalink Reply by Kayte on
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Meh, pretty good. There are a thousand extended family in my house so it's crowded but interesting.
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Luckily we don't have to put up with that for family occasions, it's always at one of my aunts. And besides on cousin I don't really like a lot of my cousins.
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Ha, I see one side of my family once a year on thanksgiving. And family gatherings with the other side of the family alternate between my house and my aunt's house.
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We gather for too many occasions it seems, maybe seeing less of them would make it better.
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My mom's side of the family? We gather once every month or two except in December, then it's like almost once a week. I see my dad's side of the family about once a year, although this year was the first time I'd seen them since I was eleven.
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Permalink Reply by nathan_p on
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So here's the expanded version of the middle section of the Christmas fic. Wow, that's a mouthful.
Incidentally? Kyle's mom's cookie recipe is a real recipe from my family. And the cookies it makes -- my family calls 'em Kringles -- are damn delicious. (Seriously. Try 'em.)
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“Your family is insane.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Kyle muttered. “And you haven’t even met them yet.” He turned off the highway onto a road that would’ve looked perfectly normal if it weren’t surrounded by dark forest on both sides.
Oh, like that wasn’t menacing.
“Well, based on what you’ve told me, and based on you... I doubt they’re all that sane.”
“You don’t give us enough credit.”
“Maybe not,” Kyle said, and put on his turn signal on a stretch of road where there didn’t appear to be anything but forest to turn onto.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Kyle slowed down and made the turn -- onto a shady dirt road that was definitely there if you looked for it -- before bothering to answer.
“We’re going to my family’s Christmas Eve party.” He flicked on the headlights. Turned out they needed them. Oh shit. Reilly hated driving in dark places. “Also, you’ve met them before. Stop panicking.”
“I was, like, fourteen. And they didn’t live in fuckin’ Silent Hill back then!” Oh, were those eyes he was seeing in between the trees? And where was the sun?
“Chill.” Kyle actually laughed. “Actually, we’re in Buttfuck right now, not Silent Hill.”
“It’s pronounced ‘byoot-fick’,” Reilly muttered, looking anywhere but at Kyle, who was smirking. Oh, you bastard. You’re going to hell. Once I strangle you with your own intestines.
“Aww, see, you ain’t so scared, are you?” He swerved suddenly, and the rental car bumped onto another road, this one little more than ruts in the dirt. Underbrush swished against the car’s undercarriage, and Reilly prayed that the shitbox little Honda could take it. Otherwise they were fucked. He was not walking out of here. Wherever here was -- whether it was Buttfuck or Silent Hill -- you couldn’t pay him enough to do that.
“I’m just hiding it.” Reilly relaxed his hands, flexed the fingers. Keeping a death grip on the sides of the seat really cramped up the hands something fierce.
Besides, if some ghostie came out of the woods with a hankering for human flesh, it would have to go through the car before it got to him -- and by that time, he’d probably be dead of fear, so it was all good.
OK, that wasn’t helping.
He saw lights through the trees. “Is that a house?” he asked, mouth getting ahead of his brain before he could remember that yeah, lights usually indicated a house. Reilly, you perpetual dumbfuck. You’re lucky you’re fucking a smart dude -- except Kyle didn’t exactly qualify as “smart” next to some other people Reilly worked with -- or you’d be up shit creek without a paddle or a canoe.
“Yep. Grandma’s expecting us.”
Well, fan-fucking-tastic. He prayed she wouldn’t be waiting with an ax.
Kyle chuckled and parked the car in a wide spot in the road. “She’s not that bad. You met her.”
Reilly unbuckled his seatbelt with shaking hands. “I was, like, fifteen!”
“She likes you.” Kyle locked the car, slipped the keys into his pocket. “You’re a good kid, dude.”
Reilly trudged behind him as they made their way towards the lights in the trees, now clearly shining from the windows of a comfortable-looking house. There were other cars parked along the side of the road, and when Reilly looked up he could see slivers of blue sky through the trees.
Kyle grinned, laughed a little. “See? You remember now?”
“No.” Reilly shoved his hands in his pockets. For the South, it was weirdly chilly. Albeit it was Christmas Eve.
“Well, it’ll come back to you sometime.” He walked a little faster, feet crunching in the gravel -- was he cold too, or just eager to come home?
Like Reilly would ever ask.
Kyle sprang up the front porch steps and knocked on the door. Reilly stood next to him, feeling unreasonably awkward.
Someone inside opened the door -- a middle-aged woman who looked something like Kyle’s mother had the last time Reilly saw her. “Kyle!” she said, looking him up and down. “C’mon in.”
“Nice to see you too, Ellen.” Kyle stepped over the threshold, and Reilly -- suppressing everything he knew about vampires -- followed him.
The woman at the door -- Ellen -- closed the door behind them and looked at Reilly for a moment, then back to Kyle. “So this is the guest you mentioned?” Compared to Kyle’s flat Midwestern voice, she had just a bit of a Southern accent going -- not that Reilly could tell where from. It was just there.
“The very same.” Kyle put an arm around Reilly’s shoulders.
Reilly ducked away from him and put out his hand to shake Ellen’s extended hand. “My name’s Reilly. I work with Kyle.”
Ellen grinned and let go of his hand. “Aww, you’ve grown up, haven’t you? Last time we met you weren’t in college yet.”
Reilly blinked, briefly surprised. Oh shit. She knew him from the last time he’d met Kyle’s family.
...Why did that have to be a bad thing, though?
He returned her exuberant grin. “It’s been a long time.”
“Damn right it has.” Kyle had vanished somewhere into the house, leaving Reilly alone. Whatever. He dealt with mad scientists on a daily basis, he could damn well deal with Kyle’s crazy family. “I’m supposed to tell you Kyle’s mom has some recipes for you, and she’s waiting in the kitchen.”
Ooh shit. Those would be those cookie recipes he’d asked for all that time ago, wouldn’t they? Karma was a bitch. Or whatever. “All right. Thanks.”
He moved off towards the kitchen -- if it was where he remembered it being, kind of towards the back of the house on the ground floor -- and stopped for a moment when he heard a loud noise that sounded, to him, an awful lot like a gunshot.
When it was followed by a burst of laughter and loud swearing, Reilly grinned and kept walking.
Maybe Christmas with Kyle’s folks wouldn’t be so bad after all.
This conclusion was reinforced when he stepped into the kitchen, which was still painted a really fugly, regrettable shade of pea-green. It smelled like baking, just like it had the last time Reilly was here.
Good. Something in the world had the decency to stay constant.
A woman who’d been bent over the stove at the far end of the room stood up and squinted at him. “Beau, is that you?”
Kyle had always complained about his mom refusing to get glasses. Reilly smiled, ignoring that she’d called him by (a shortened form of) his first name. Those cookies better be worth it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Haven’t seen you in years. Kyle hasn’t been misbehaving? Hate to see a good boy like you get led astray.” She hugged him briefly. “Now. Beauregard. I understand you wanted some of my recipes?”
He winced. “Yes, ma’am. Specifically, I want to know how you make those cookies Kyle likes so much. And you can just call me Beau, or Reilly. Everyone calls me Reilly.”
“All right, then.” She wiped her hands on her apron -- more of an absent gesture than anything, given that her hands looked pretty clean. “Oven’s full right now, but I’ve already got some of the dough ready. It’s the pretzel cookies you want to make, right?” She brushed some loose hair back out of her face with the back of one hand.
“Yes’m. The ones with the sugar on top.”
“OK, great.” She pinned the loose hair back with a spare hairpin. “I have some copies of the recipe I can send with you, but I’m gonna show you how to make ‘em anyway. They can be awful particular.”
“OK, ma’am. I’m in your hands.” He was glad he hadn’t worn a coat, and he rolled up his shirtsleeves. Baking was messy. Maybe he was just a spaz, but at least when he baked, it was messy.
“You can call me Lou if you want,” she said abruptly, going past him to the fridge, giving him no time to say ‘yes, fine’ or ‘no, that’s weird, you’re my fuckbuddy’s mom’. “All right, Beau. I already made the dough, but lemme tell you how it’s done.”
He waited patiently and stepped aside while she hucked a lump of cookie dough wrapped in wax paper off the top shelf of the fridge. “What you need is a pound of butter, ten tablespoons of sour cream, and a pound of flour.”
She thumped the lump of dough down on a counter, and he moved over to stand awkwardly near her.
“How much is a pound of flour -- Lou?” Was there anywhere he could bake these at the School? Fuck it. If there wasn’t, he’d find a way to bake them anyway.
There was a canister of flour on the counter, and she grabbed a handful out of it, sprinkled it on the counter, spread it around a little with her hands.
“’Bout four cups.” She opened a drawer under the counter and retrieved a rolling pin and cover. “Y’ put the flour and the butter together in a big bowl, and you mix those up with your hands. Although my sister likes to use a mixer, go figure.”
He didn’t have a mixer. He did have decent upper-body strength. “Tastes the same either way?”
She grinned at him and stripped the wax paper off the dough. “Near as I can tell. Anyway, you mix those up and then you add all your sour cream and you mix that in, too, got it? Then you chuck the whole mess in a cool place for a few hours.”
Which meant, at the School, the fridge. It wasn’t going to be too hard to bake these for Kyle. “All right.”
“Grab an egg out of the fridge, would you?” she said, and started rolling the dough out on the counter.
He opened the fridge and got one. He hated not knowing his way around a kitchen.
“Bowls are in that cabinet behind you. Crack the egg and get the yolk into one.”
He turned and grabbed one down, cracked the egg on the countertop, stood over the sink and reduced it to a yolk perched in a broken shell half. God, he loved baking. He poured the yolk into the bowl, put the bowl on the counter next to where Lou was rolling out the dough.
“All right.” She nodded at the dough. “So after you have all your dough and it’s been in the fridge a few hours, you cut it into thirds. And you take one of those pieces and you roll it out thin, like an eighth of an inch. Which is what I’m doing here.”
She paused for a moment before spinning the dough to roll it in a different direction, squinting at its thickness. “This looks about right. See how thin that is?”
Reilly took a good hard look at the dough. Well, he wasn’t blind or anything. “Yep.”
“Get the egg and put it on the dough. You want to spread it out, or d’you not want to get your hands dirty?” She grinned at him as he stood frozen with the bowl in his hands. Definitely Kyle’s mom. Reilly wished he could’ve grown up in her house.
“I’ll do it.” He tipped the yolk out on the rolled-out dough, squished it under his fingers, carefully starting spreading it out.
“Get it all over the dough. All the corners.”
It was like finger-painting, he found. Except with raw egg, so not much like finger-painting at all.
“Mmkay,” she said, watching. “Looks good. Now you need to sprinkle sugar over it, same way as the egg.” She took the scoop from the sugar container and dumped sugar on the dough. He spread it out.
Cooking is chemistry. Well, so he could see how that was true, but chemistry didn’t end nearly as deliciously. And you could mess up more in cooking.
“Beau.” She caught his attention, and he glanced up at her. She nodded at the sink to his left. “Go wash your hands.”
When he came back, hands cold from the water, she was holding a knife -- she watched him for a moment, then handed it to him. “Now cut the dough into strips, all right?”
“’Bout how wide?”
“Third of an inch.” She turned away, left him to his own devices to cut the first strip from top to bottom. He made a guess at how much a third of an inch was.
She turned back to him holding a cookie sheet, set it down on the counter next to him.
“Right, you have a strip cut?” She lifted it from the counter and onto the cookie sheet. “This’s an ungreased cookie sheet. Remember that. But now you wanna make a pretzel shape.”
“Lou,” he said with the same tone he used at the School when someone was refusing to make sense, “show me how.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Watch my hands.”
You couldn’t make it any simpler: she made a pretzel shape with the dough. He stared, hoping he could imitate that. Reilly had always kind of sucked at imitating things like that.
“You got that, Beau? My other tray of cookies is done. Make me some more like that and I’ll be back in a minute.” She vanished.
He did his best to mimic what she’d done. Cut a strip. Transfer to cookie sheet. Make a pretzel shape. Cut a strip.
Well, it was a damn sight less boring than paperwork back at the School. And more normal.
He listened to Lou transferring the other cookies to what he guessed was a cooling rack on some other counter somewhere.
Yeah, the School was great and all that. Good pay. Nice coworkers. (Stupid sexy Jeb.) Interesting work.
It just couldn’t compare to some other things in life, though. Like baking cookies with your best friend’s mom. Maybe that was a little bit weird, but dammit, it was fun for Reilly.
Sure, it was... enjoyable working with werewolves and dreaming about analyzing angels.
But there was definitely something to be said for more down-to-earth pursuits. Christmas, for one thing.
He grinned to himself, called, “Hey -- Lou? Tray’s full.”
“Great.” She came over with the tray she’d just emptied, exchanged it for the one now full of mildly-misshapen pretzel shapes. “You did a good job. Keep it up.”
“Thanks.”
“I never got to teach Kyle how to bake these,” she mused. “I guess you’re my best chance to pass the recipe on.” Metallic clanging as she slid the tray into the oven. “This is 350 degrees. Bake ‘em about ten or twelve minutes. When they’re done they’ll be kinda sizzling, maybe bubbling a little. Don’t touch that tray yet, it’s still hot.”
She came over and moved the tray over a little, kept talking as she did so. “Pretzel cookies are fine right out of the oven, but they’re kinda crumbly. Let ‘em age a while. They only get better.”
“Thanks for teaching me how to make these,” Reilly said, wiping his hands off on his jeans, even though they were pretty clean. “I... wanna make them for Kyle’s birthday.”
“High-five,” she commanded, and he complied, rather shocked. Kyle, your mom is so cool. “Beau, you’re the best friend my son ever had.”
“Thanks... uh, Lou.”
She grinned. “It’s God’s truth. I consider you part of the family, whether or not you’re blood kin to us.”
It might be creepy, but Reilly hugged her anyway. “Thank you.”
She took the knife out of his hand, started cutting more strips for pretzel cookies. “Family’s part of Christmas, Beau. You’re part of ours. I’m glad Kyle finally brought you.”
Reilly started making more pretzel shapes.
He was coming to a conclusion here.
Best. Christmas. Ever.
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>.> Make the damn cookies. They're legit, and this is as close as I can get right now to mailing everyone a box.
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