Erin hands me a bowl before I’ve barely gotten the words out. She’s been doing that this entire time, practically reading my mind and producing everything I need. It’s been a dream to cook with her, like a dance in which we both know the choreography. The editing process for this episode should be a piece of cake, since usually they have to cut out long minutes of rummaging through drawers and cabinets and such. This time, they’ll only have to worry about making sure it reaches our TV-PG rating, assuring the footage of the constant boner I’ve had takes its final resting place in the cutting room garbage can.
“Okay, now my lovely assistant is going to take a fork—” I hand her one out of the drawer I’m standing in front of. “—and mash the beans.”
She takes the bowl from my hand and makes quick work of smashing the red beans up. When she gives it back to me, there’s a slight tremor to her fingers, and suddenly teasing her about being hungry is the last thing on my mind. I set the bowl down on the counter, ignoring the camera and other people in the room, my only concern being the woman I take hold of, forcing her to look up at me.
“Are you all right, babe? When you were saying you were starving earlier, I thought you were just playing around and being dramatic.” I search her eyes, discovering surprise there along with a bit of discomfort.
“I skipped lunch today and took on an emergency patient,” she tells me.
“And what did you have for breakfast?” I demand.
Her face turns guilty. “I don’t normally eat breakfast.”
I feel my face heat with anger, and it startles me. She must read the look though, because she tries to make a joke.
“Those clever millennials. They took skipping breakfast and made it into a fad, calling it ‘intermittent fasting.’” She snorts, her mouth smiling but her eyes looking uncomfortable.
I hate that expression almost as much as I hate that she hasn’t eaten all day, so I give in to her joke for just a moment. “Aren’t you technically a millennial, sugar?”
She scoffs. “I prefer Generation Y. I sleep with a top sheet and have beautiful cursive handwriting, thank you. But they were totally onto something when they invented avocado toast. That shit is gooood.”
I ask as calmly as I can, “So what you’re saying is the only thing you’ve eaten today is the little snack I made you during the break?”
She shrugs. “Hence why my ass was at the grocery store getting a quick heat-up meal.”
I shake my head. “Unacceptable.”
She gets a haughty look on her face, but before she can tell me off for my bossy tone, I cut her off.
“From now on, you prepare yourself meals in advance using this handy appliance I just gifted you with. When you get down to the last day’s-worth of meals, you take one hour of your time to run to the grocery store, grab the list of ingredients I’m going to leave you with for several different recipes, and cook them before boxing them up the way I’m about to teach you. You take one to work with you, so you don’t even have to leave your office in order to grab lunch. You heat one up when you get home and eat it for dinner. That means, during the day, you’ll only have to fix yourself one meal. Breakfast. The most important meal of the day. You are obviously a very intelligent woman, one who needs fuel for her brain in order to help her patients throughout the day. Your brain runs on carbohydrates. It does not run on an empty freaking stomach. So now, sit your ass on the stool and let me feed you.”
Her mouth opens and closes a few times, a look of shock in her beautiful eyes, but finally she just nods, pulls herself out of my hold on her, and sits on the stool Martin brings around from the other side of the island.
“All right, Carlos. Keep up. I’m going to make this fast,” I say, taking hold of the bowl of beans Erin mashed. When he points at me, I begin. “We return the chopped ham hock and mashed red beans to the Instant Pot, and then add our sausage we browned in the beginning. If you want the dish less spicy, leave the sausage out and you can just add a few of your slices to the plate.”
I begin to mix all the pieces together with the spoon once more. “Stir everything together, cooking in Sauté mode, and then let it all thicken to your desired consistency, about five minutes.” I turn around, pulling two bowls out of the cabinet behind me. I dish out some of the rice I prepared during our break into both bowls, setting them on the counter near the cutting board.