Phineas L. MacGuire...Gets Cooking! Read online

  1. I am no longer worried about Evan Forbes clobbering me.

  2. I know how to make the following things for dinner: chicken and mashed potatoes, spaghetti, waffles, biscuits, and Cheerios with milk.

  3. I make the best brownies of any fourth-grade scientist in the United States, maybe the world.

  4. I have about a hundred ideas for next year’s science fair, including experiments with yeast, baking powder, baking soda, lemon juice, colloids, and emulsions.

  The Bad Things list looked like this:

  1. Evan Forbes is my friend.

  2. Evan Forbes wants to start a business with me.

  3. Evan Forbes wants to take over my life.

  4. I still haven’t figured out how to make brownies explode.

  The good things on my Good Things list were definitely really good.

  But the bad things on my Bad Things list?

  I was pretty sure the first three were going to ruin my life.

  chapter thirteen

  Riding the bus home this afternoon, I started reading through some of the bullying questionnaires that kids had filled out. I’d passed the questions around this morning, and by lunchtime twenty people had answered them and turned in their papers.

  It turns out kids have a lot to say about kids being mean to other kids. To me, the most interesting facts were:

  1. Everybody answered “yes” to the question, “Has another kid ever been mean to you (called you names, hit or pushed you, threatened you)?”

  2. Twelve of the twenty responders answered “yes” to the question, “Have you ever been mean to another kid?”

  3. When asked why they’d been mean to another kid, every single person answered, “I don’t know.”

  I thought about the reasons Ben had given me for being mean to Chester Oliphant. The funny thing is, none of them really had anything to do with Chester. They all had to do with Ben. It wasn’t like he had anything personal against Chester.

  He just had something personal against himself.

  I took a quick look at Evan, who was sitting next to me. He was busy poking the kid in the seat in front of us with a ballpoint pen. The kid was totally ignoring him, which just made Evan poke him harder.

  I thought about how I never stood up for myself when Evan was being mean to me. Now I sort of wish I had, even if it meant getting clobbered.

  “Quit it,” I told Evan now. “That kid didn’t do anything to you.”

  Evan looked at me. “The back of his head is bugging me.”

  “Well, it’s bugging me that you keep poking him. Leave him alone.”

  “Okay,” Evan said, shrugging. “Whatever.”

  Evan started tapping the bus window with his pen, and the kid who’d been getting poked turned around and gave me a quick smile.

  Maybe instead of a Labrador whisperer, I should be a bully whisperer.

  When Evan and I got to Ben’s apartment, Aretha was already there. So was Mrs. Klausenheimer.

  And so was Killer.

  As soon as he saw Killer, Evan pulled me back out into the hallway. “You didn’t say anything about dogs. I can’t be in the same room as a dog.”

  “Are you allergic?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s just—well, me and dogs don’t mix. I don’t like them, and they don’t like me.”

  In other words, Evan Forbes was scared.

  “Listen,” I told him. “Killer’s actually a really nice dog. He looks like he’d tear your head off if he got a chance, but he’s not like that at all.”

  “That dog? Nice? I don’t think so!”

  Now it’s true that Killer is a humongous German shepherd with the biggest teeth you’ve ever seen. And it’s true he looks like the sort of dog that would eat you for lunch. But inside all that fur and those razorlike incisors beats a canine heart of gold.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of Killer, I promise,” I told Evan. “All it takes is a treat, and he’ll be your friend for life.”

  “I’m not afraid.” Evan’s face was totally red. “I just don’t like dogs.”

  “If you’re not afraid, then come back inside and I’ll show you how nice Killer is. We can do a kind of experiment. That is, if you’re really not afraid.”

  Evan didn’t have a choice. He followed me back into Ben’s apartment.

  I went into the kitchen and got a couple of pieces of cooked bacon from Ben’s bacon collection in the fridge. Ben liked to have at least half a pound of fried bacon ready at any time, in case he got any new bacon recipe inspirations. Tearing a piece in half, I called, “Come here, Killer!” Killer came galloping over to where I stood, practically knocking me over.

  “Here’s a treat, boy!” I told him, and held out a piece of bacon. He slurped it out of my hand, and when he was done gulping it down, he licked me all over my face.

  Did I mention that Killer is a very slobbery dog?

  Then I handed the other piece of bacon to Evan. “If you give this to Killer, he’ll be your friend for life.”

  “Maybe I don’t want a friend for life.”

  I gave Evan a hard look. “I thought you said you weren’t afraid.”

  Evan sighed. “I’m not. Give me the stupid bacon.”

  His hand was shaking. “Here, Killer,” he whispered in a squeaky voice.

  Killer snatched the bacon from him, gulped it down, and then covered Evan Forbes with kisses. He knocked Evan down and licked him all over his face and hands.

  At first Evan was doing this squeaky scream thing, and Mrs. Klausenheimer looked worried, like maybe we should pull Killer off him. But then all of a sudden Evan started laughing.

  “You’re slobbering on me, you stupid dog!”

  And that was all it took.

  Evan Forbes and Killer had bonded.

  For the rest of the afternoon, while Ben, Aretha, and I made brownies, Evan played with Killer in the living room while Mrs. Klausenheimer watched from the couch. When it was time to go home, she smiled at him and said, “If I had a grandson, I’d want him to be just like you, Evan. You’re so good with Killer. If you were my grandson, you could come over every afternoon and play with him. I can’t give him all the exercise he needs.”

  Evan was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “I could come over in the afternoons and play with Killer. I could sort of pretend I was your grandson. I never see my real grandparents, anyway.”

  Mrs. Klausenheimer bounced on the couch with excitement. “Oh, that would be lovely! I’ll bake you cookies every day! Do you like oatmeal raisin?”

  Riding the elevator down to the ground floor, Evan said, “I guess I can’t go into the baking business with you, Mac, now that me and Killer are going to be hanging out every day.”

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “I’m getting a little sick of brownies.”

  “Those pizza ones are pretty good, though,” Evan said. “Except I don’t think you should use real pepperoni.”

  “That was Ben’s idea. He likes to experiment.”

  Evan nodded. “I can tell. Who knew a bacon milk shake would taste so good, though, right?”

  “You learn something new every day,” I agreed.

  chapter fourteen

  The phone rang while I was scrambling eggs. Scrambled eggs is now my go-to meal on days when I have lots of homework or have spent most of the afternoon hanging out with Ben or walking Lemon Drop.

  Here’s the trick to great scrambled eggs: Keep the heat low and cook ’em slow.

  That’s all there is to it.

  “Mac, phone’s for you,” Sarah called from the living room, where she and Margaret were having a fashion show. “It’s a girl!”

  The way she said, “It’s a girl” was all singsongy and romantic.

  I pretty much broke out in hives just from the sound of her voice.

  “It’s Aretha, so quit breaking out in hives,” Aretha said when I grabbed the phone from Sarah. “I’m calling because I need help.”

  I turned the heat way down under th
e eggs. “All right, but I can’t talk for long. I’m putting dinner on the table.”

  Okay, that sounded sort of weird.

  “I need to figure out how to make exploding brownies,” Aretha said. “Or some kind of crazy food. It’s for the food science part of this badge I’m working on. I could do something boring like a presentation on lemon juice, but I want drama. I almost fell asleep at our last meeting, the presentations were so boring.”

  “So you want dramatic food?”

  “That’s right, Mac. I want food that will make everybody spin in their seats. Can you help me?”

  “Meet me at the playground at recess tomorrow,” I told her. “I’ll have a report.”

  As I spooned the eggs onto the plates, I had a strange feeling. It was like I was remembering something I used to know but had sort of forgotten.

  Like, oh yeah, I’m a scientist.

  If I’d been wearing an apron, I would have flung it off. It wasn’t that I was tired of cooking. I sort of liked cooking. But every night?

  Not so much.

  At dinner, I looked around the table and said, “I have an announcement. From now on, I’ll cook dinner two nights a week. If we have pizza and Cheerios all the other nights, that’s fine with me. I am a scientist, and I have work to do. Cooking is a full-time job.”

  My mom thought about this. “It’s true, cooking has been taking up a lot of your time. And your scientific work is important.”

  “Maybe I could make some freezer meals on the weekends,” Lyle said. “There was an article in the paper the other day about a woman who does all her cooking for the month on one day—stews, casseroles, you name it. Then she puts everything in the freezer, and every morning she takes something out to thaw.”

  “You’d need a pretty big freezer to pull that off,” I pointed out.

  “Ours is big enough for a couple of casseroles at least,” Lyle said. “If your mom makes dinner Sunday nights, then we’re set.”

  “Great,” I said, pushing my chair away from the table. “Now I need to go make some food explode.”

  When you’re a genius fourth-grade scientist, you keep files about all sorts of scientific matters. I keep my files in a shoe box in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with my dried worm collection and the shoe boxes with my dried fungus collection.

  I have a very interesting closet. Though it does smell sort of funny.

  I pulled out my scientific files shoe box and dumped its contents on my bed. There was stuff I’d clipped out of the newspaper and from magazines, like articles about Pluto losing its planet status (totally unfair, in my opinion), and notes I’d taken when I was coming up with ideas for my mold museum (my favorite idea was having the museum in the bathroom, because mold likes humid places, but my mom said no way). There were ads for chemistry sets I wasn’t going to be allowed to get until I was fifty, but I still liked to dream about.

  And then there were my notebooks. I like to get those really little spiral notebooks that you can put in your back pocket. That way, if I get a scientific genius idea or come across some scientifically super-important information, I can write it down right away.

  I started flipping through the articles and my notebooks to see if I could find anything about exploding food. I found something about exploding soda cans, and how to make an exploding cake using dry ice, which sounded way too awesome and too dangerous for any adult to give it the thumbs-up.

  Okay, I said to myself, lying back against my pillow, what are we trying to accomplish here? Aretha wants drama and excitement, but the fact is, she’s really trying to demonstrate something about food science. So what do I know about food science from personal experience?

  I knew about emulsions and colloids. I knew how to curdle milk. I knew that if you didn’t put enough baking powder in your waffle batter, your waffles would fall flat. But.

  But!

  What if you put in too much?

  • • •

  “So you’re saying I should make exploding waffles?” Aretha asked me the next day at recess. We were sitting on the swings, with one empty swing between us so that no one would think we were swinging together.

  I nodded, and Aretha smiled. “I like it,” she said. “I like it a lot. It’s about time someone did something to stir my troop up, and this ought to do the trick.”

  Just then Ben showed up. When Aretha told him about the exploding waffle idea, he got this big grin on his face. “I have a stupendazoid idea. You ought to add food coloring. Imagine it—exploding green waffles. I could film it and put it on YouTube. We’d be famous!”

  “Green is the color of the Girl Scout uniform,” Aretha said. “Plus, it might add a little more pizzazz to the whole project. Let’s do it!”

  At lunch, we went to the library to find a good waffle recipe on the Internet. As it turns out, there are over two million waffle recipes on the Internet, so we just checked out the first five and picked the simplest one. Then we did some research on baking powder so that Aretha understood the science behind the waffle explosion.

  “So baking powder is made by combining baking soda with an acid,” Aretha said, taking notes as she talked. “When you add a liquid like water or milk, the acid and the base interact, and that creates carbon dioxide, which makes the stuff fizz up.”

  She looked up from her notes. “Basically, if our experiment works, the baking powder will produce a whole lot of carbon dioxide.”

  “Which is a kind of gas,” Ben added.

  “Which will make the waffles explode instead of just rise while they’re baking,” I finished up. “At least, that’s our hypothesis.”

  Aretha grinned. “I’m glad we’re doing this at Ben’s house and not mine.”

  Ben was the only one of us with a waffle iron and a mom who wouldn’t go nuts over somebody exploding waffles in her kitchen.

  “So do you think we could explode brownies by putting in too much baking powder?” Ben asked as we walked back to Mrs. Tuttle’s class. “Because our recipe’s due pretty soon, and I’m not feeling all that confident about it.”

  “One, I don’t think exploding brownies will taste all that good,” I told him. “And two, the problem with your recipe is the pepperoni. Bacon is fine, but pepperoni is going too far.”

  Ben thought about this for a minute. “You could be right. Maybe I should take out the pepperoni and add some beef jerky.”

  “Have you ever thought about just making plain brownies?” Aretha asked. “Maybe with chocolate frosting to jazz them up a little bit?”

  Ben and I looked at each other. Plain brownies with chocolate frosting?

  “No way,” Ben said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “No offense or anything,” Ben told Aretha, “but really? I’m trying to win a recipe contest and that’s what you come up with?”

  Aretha shrugged. “Simple is good. Simple works.”

  “Simple’s boring,” I told her. “We need brownies that make a statement. We need life-altering brownies, brownies that pop—” I glanced at Ben, looking for a little backup here, but it was clear that at the moment he was too busy thinking to talk.

  Which is always a dangerous thing.

  “Simple,” Ben muttered. “Simple and to the point. That’s boring, all right, but you know what would make it a lot less boring?”

  “If you sprinkled bacon on top?” I guessed.

  “Exacto-mundo!” Ben exclaimed, back at full volume. “Bacon and chocolate chips! That turns a simple, boring recipe into a classic recipe!” He pounded me on the back. “Mac, you’re a genius!”

  Aretha and I watched as Ben skipped down the hallway.

  “Well, at least you got him to take the pepperoni out,” Aretha said.

  “At least the brownies won’t explode all over the judges,” I said.

  Aretha and I slapped high fives.

  Scientifically speaking, it had been a good day.

  chapter fifteen

  Here are some help
ful hints when it comes to making exploding green waffles:

  1. Spread newspapers over the kitchen counters and the floor. Like, three days’ worth of newspapers. And I mean, put them everywhere. You will be amazed by how far exploding waffle batter can travel.

  2. If you get green food coloring on your hands, you will have green hands for at least three days, even if you wash them a hundred times. Believe me, I know.

  3. The best thing about exploding waffles is watching them explode.

  4. After your waffles explode, you will not be tempted to eat them.

  5. Your supervising adult should be the sort of person who’s very relaxed and easygoing. It might also be good if they’re taking a nap while you’re making the waffles.

  Fortunately, our supervising adult was Mrs. Klausenheimer. After she showed us how to use the waffle iron and warned us approximately six million times not to burn ourselves, she took her usual place on the couch and pulled a copy of Celebrity Dogs and Race Cars from her purse. She yelled, “You kids be careful in there!” every few minutes, but other than that, she pretty much left us alone.

  Waffles, in case you’re wondering, are really easy to make. Actually, one thing I’ve learned from all this cooking stuff? Almost everything is really easy to make. You just have to have good directions, and you have to follow them. I mean, okay, baked Alaska probably isn’t easy, but other stuff? You’d be surprised.

  Anyway, waffle batter is pretty basic: flour, eggs, milk, salt, vegetable oil, and baking powder. Exploding green waffle batter is pretty much the same, only add a bunch of green food coloring and triple the baking powder.

  And then stand back.

  “All right, folks, this is the big moment, what we’ve all been waiting for,” Ben said as he circled me and Aretha with his video camera, and then pulled in for a close-up of the waffle maker. “Mac and Aretha have carefully mixed together the ingredients for the world’s most delicious—and most explosive—waffles. Now watch closely as Aretha carefully pours the batter onto the hot waffle iron. . . . Yes! The batter is on the iron! Aretha slowly pulls down the lid. . . . Now wait for it . . . wait for it . . .”