Good eats taste even better with friends

The trees in Maria’s backyard draped the Saturday night sky. We sat outside, enjoying the cool air, grilled meats and strong drinks.

A week and a half ago, we were hyperventilating over our practical exam. All of us passed, and now we were here, full of hamburgers and kebabs. We weren’t in our chef’s jackets. We weren’t frantically plating our dish to be judged on our technique, and we weren’t hot and sweaty.

We recalled how Alejandro passed out from the heat, and we began telling his girlfriend everything we remembered.

“I saved him,” Phil said. “I made sure his head didn’t touch the floor.”

It was the day we were making stocks.

A loud thud interrupted Chef X’s lecture.

“It’s Alejandro!” Phil yelled.

Phil had caught Alejandro after he fainted. But Alejandro hit something when he passed out, and we jerked our heads to that sound. Twenty or so faces looked down at Alejandro on the floor whose head had been propped up by a towel. He looked haggard. His face was very pale and slightly green.

Vicki told Chef D to find some orange juice. (At the time, some of us thought Alejandro was diabetic, although he wasn’t.) Chef D came back with a banana after not being able to find juice.

The men propped Alejandro on a stool and he drank water out of a paper cup. Suddenly, his face turned gray and his tongue went limp.

Chef X and others rushed to Alejandro to catch him. They carried him out of the warm kitchen. Paramedics lifted him on a gurney and took him to the emergency room where his girlfriend saw him there.

Chef continued with his lecture. Later, Phil told us Alejandro was fine and had gone through some tests, but no cause was given.

“That’s never happened to me before,” Alejandro said a couple days after the incident.

His face turned very pale one other time, but he never fainted again.

That lecture in mid-June seemed far away as we languished at Maria's house.

We drank Phil’s concoction of rum, raspberry apple juice, Prosecco, ginger ale, simple syrup and other ingredients. I kept grabbing chips to eat Nicole’s tomatillo salsa. All of Gillian’s cranberry walnut cookies and peanut butter cookies were gone.

John had made the hamburgers with different types of ground meat and spices, and aged them for four days in the refrigerator. Originally from Macedonia, John made ajvar, a roasted red pepper relish. He also brought pindzur, a hot pepper dip that was so spicy Ana thought she was dying when she tried it.

Kathryn made tzatziki to go with the bacon-wrapped chicken kebabs. The yogurt-cucumber dip pretty much went well with anything. We gobbled up Vicki’s bruschetta and vegetable quiche.

Henry had grilled all the meat and made the salad and vinaigrette. He still had the energy to nag me out of my chair to help him make sabayon, a sweet custard, to spoon over strawberries. He whipped the leftover egg whites into meringue.

These were the things we made on our day off---the food we shared with friends.

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