SOTW: Panthers; unfair play
For the prompt: Panthers: Top Chef Challenge (Two teams: each tasked with create a three course meal that will be judged by a local celebrity chef. Chaos ensues.)
For my lovely friend Alison, whose birthday it was yesterday, and whose prompt way back in the day was the introduction of Joe Forster: perpetual sufferer of fools.
Whoever it was on their media team that arranged this? Yeah, they should be fired.
Well, the idea itself isn’t so bad. There are a couple of Panthers that can actually hold their own in the kitchen — Joe is emphatically not talking about himself, but Parey can pull together a good meal. And a lot of that is that Suzette’s legit awesome in the kitchen and he mostly just sous chefs, but he can hold his own. Captain America’s decent at cooking. Whenever they go to his he’s always got something pretty simple but pretty tasty waiting for them.
Volkie has secret baking skills they only found out because he got super bored when he was rehabbing a foot injury and every time he limped into BB&T to see the docs and trainers he brought muffins or cookies or squares. They started out okay, not great but shit they were all going to converge on anyway, and then got pretty good by the time he got healthy. Sadly, there’ve been no baked good since.
So Joe guesses it’s less that someone should be fired for the idea than someone should be fired for putting Parey, Cap America, Volkie, and Ginner on one team, and Joe, Gally, Jumbo, and Skins on the other. Joe doesn’t know if Ginner can do shit — probably not, dude’s nineteen years old and billeting with their assistant coach and his wife, he probably hasn’t made himself anything more fancy than a sandwich in his entire life — but the other three? Unfair advantage. This is going to be a shitshow.
“You don’t have secret depths, do you, Jumbo?” Joe asks without much hope.
Jumbo does a slow blink at him.
“What’s the last thing you made yourself?” Joe tries.
“Kraft Dinner,” Jumbo says.
“Hey, me too!” Skins says.
They’re doomed.
*
Okay, before they even started Joe knew they were not only not going to win this thing, but that they weren’t going to come out of it with any dignity intact. Still, this is a step too far.
“What do you mean we can’t google recipes?” Joe asks. It’d be one thing if they could just do whatever they wanted — Joe’s idea for a three course meal is a salad, a sandwich, and like, he doesn’t even know, do they have cake mix in the pantry? — but no, they have a set menu, and that menu is shit Joe’s never made before in his life. Joe can slap a steak down in a pan, though fuck knows if he wants it a ‘perfect medium rare’ he’d go to a restaurant, but who knows how to bake cupcakes from scratch without a recipe? No one here.
Well, probably fucking Volkie, actually.
“Is ‘phone a friend’ an option here? Can I call my wife?” Joe asks. Jenn’s not a great cook either, but unlike him, she actually makes the effort sometimes, which makes her automatically way better. Plus they won’t be able to see if she googles it for him.
“No,” the monsters behind the camera say firmly.
“I wanna call my wife,” Joe says. Mostly just to bitch at this point.
“No outside help,” say the monsters.
“You don’t have secret depths, do you Gally?” Joe asks. He doesn’t know why he keeps reaching for secret depths. Joe’s known Gally for most of a decade, he probably would have stumbled on those depths at some point. Or, oh, seen Cody make any food in the history of ever.
“Gimme the knives!” Gally says.
Oh great, they’re all going to be dead by the end of this too.
*
“This is so wasteful,” Joe says sadly as the third steak gets thrown in the garbage, charred at the edges and overcooked as fuck. Joe knows this not because they cut into it to find out, but because Gally’s idea of testing for firmness was slapping Joe in the face with it. It was definitely over. And now Joe’s got steak juice on his face.
Across the kitchen, Parey and Volkie laugh happily about something. Volkie’s got flour all over his face from Gally’s last-ditch sabotage attempt. It doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any, considering they have time to be happy and joyful.
“How’re things going, Joe?” Captain America calls over.
“Go fuck yourself, Lourdy,” Joe retorts.
“Great, now we have to cut that,” say the monsters.
“Guys, watch me juggle!” Gally says, and Joe instinctively ducks just in time to avoid getting hit in the face with an egg as Gally shows, very clearly, that he can’t actually juggle.
“I want a trade,” Joe mumbles.