Amidst The Stars

Chaotic Dinner

  Cooking a meal looked, sounded and felt simple enough. But when dinner was twenty minutes away, the only thing cooked properly was plain rice and a pair of overactive kids with no cooking experiences were the sole source of assistance, it ended up as none of those things.

  All this was running through Vicente's mind as scurried around the kitchen with only a vague idea of what was going on. He spotted Leon opening the freezer door and ran toward him, hopping over a fallen spoon. "What are you looking for?"

  "We can't just serve rice." Leon pulled a frosted package from the freezer, brushing ice off of it. "Look, we can make some dumplings."

  He kicked himself for not thinking of that. Vicente took the package from his brother with one hand, unhooked a frying pan from the wall with the other, and, intending to place the frying pan on the stove, instead slammed the bag of dumplings onto the stove.

  Something inside cracked.

  Leon pried the slowly-thawing bag out of his hand. "You're dumb."

  He ignored him and set the frying pan down, calling over his back, "take out, uh..." He did the math in his head. "Maybe fifty dumplings?"

  "That many?"

  "There are a lot of us in this family."

  He snorted and began shaking the dumplings out onto a dish. Vicente turned back to the stove, pouring oil onto the stone-cold pan. It took him three tries to turn the stove on properly without the gas sputtering, but he began to heat up the oil. Frozen dumplings continued to clatter against the plastic dish.

  "Don't tilt the bag so much."

  "Go away, Yue Ling."

  "The dumplings are making a really big pile."

  "Well, duh."

  "They're going to fall over." Ling gasped. "They're falling over, stop pouring, nononoNONO — "

  "The sound of frozen dumpling lumps falling from the dish onto the floor filled the kitchen. Vicente looked down when he felt something cold bump his slippered foot; it was a dumpling that had somehow skidded across the floor all the way from the counter on the opposite side of the room.

  Ling kicked Leon in the shin. "You're dumb."

  "Uh..." He looked at the dumpling-covered floor. "Pick up the dumplings that fell on the floor, and throw them away."

  Then something started to smoke.

  "The pan!" Leon left his sister to deal with the fallen dumplings and lunged at the smoking frying pan. He stuck it in the sink and flipped the tap on, waving away the cloud of steam that rose up. The pan sizzled for a full minute under the cold water, and when all the steam cleared Vicente could see, with a sigh of relief, that the pan wasn't damaged. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't notice the smoke."

  "You're really, really stupid."

  "Now, is that how you should speak to your brother?"

  "You're supposed to put the oil on the pan after it becomes hot, not the other way around."

  "Oh." Vicente felt like kicking himself again. "Right. Don't know how I forgot."

  Ling passed them the plate of remaining dumplings, Vicente heated up the pan again and placed the dumplings onto the pan, arranged neatly in a circle like he'd seen Yao do before. "Can someone pass me the cover?"

  Leon stomped off in hunt of it. "Why are you bossing us around?"

  "Because I'm the oldest."