Waking up early in the morning is a treat to be savored.
There’s A God In My Kitchen Helping Me Cook Empanadas by xexnoncores
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June 12th, 2024
It is 4:39AM when you wake up to find a light in your kitchen above the stove.
Truth be told, it takes you a few good seconds to squint at it. It’s small, and pinpoint, wriggling like it’s caught in a piece of plastic and antsy to melt it. Its pulsating surface shines like a star that refuses to go out; you yawn irregardless, because you know this is the third time in a row you’ve woken up too early and can’t go back to sleep. Surely this thing hasn’t been the cause of that, right?
But that doesn’t particularly seem to matter at this moment. Your heart pulls your body towards the kitchen, towards its old orange lights still plugged in by the counters, and before you can think of anything else you’re thinking of what to make for breakfast, before you’ve got to head to your shift at the Royal Palm Hotel at 9:30AM.
Believing in breakfast is something you’ve only started to do over the past three days. Your new meds have completely flipped your sleep schedule, from falling asleep at 10PM and waking up at 7AM to sleeping at 9PM and waking up at the crack of dawn. This upset you for a little bit, until that first morning you made something simple you hadn’t made in years—a piece of bread toasted in bacon fat. Such was once a dinner time luxury, if you found the energy at all to pull a pan out, but now there’s a calmness in your mind that buoys you up. An energy pushing you to try rearranging things and seeing what happens.
Pulling out the pans and ingredients, you wonder to yourself how you could be so lucky. Medicine is hard to come by legally in Little Havana, psychiatrists even moreso. There’s something of a universal healthcare system, but it’s patchwork at best and paid for in things you don’t understand, even more things you don’t want to.
Having a job with the tourists pays well, but what did you do to deserve such a thing? What did you do to deserve sitting in a shiny doctor’s office where there’s nothing except the knowledge you’ll have your pills by the end of the day?
You suppose you can justify it with a reminder that being a concierge isn’t as easy as it sounds. The monotony definitely gets to you some days.
Your little white light titters as your belief in your ability to prepare breakfast cobbles together like wood being glued into place. Olive oil, onions, a bell pepper, ground beef, some garlic powder (you forgot to buy fresh garlic again), lean ground beef, pitted green olives, and raisins.
Yeah, you have enough time. Let’s make Cuban empanadas for breakfast.
The raisins are a new addition here, something you thought you’d spit out until you tried them. The stall you tasted that first at was run by a nice old lady who used to live in the regular Little Havana out in Miami. When you chatted, you felt a warmth in your heart over how she described waking up every morning to make cafe con leche for her and her husband while her kids stumbled downstairs and out the door with lunchboxes in their grubby hands.
The raisins add a very subtle sweetness that fills in all the right gaps, especially since the Royal Palm serves American breakfasts with pancakes and French toast. You’ve never wanted to admit it, but all of that was actually quite good. (Not good for you though, even if your boss’s boss Mr. Carter was insistent upon it all).
What did that lady feel now that she was retired from the regular world? How on earth did she end up here, in this place whose streets winded as snakes roamed?
Has she seen this little light too?
Empanadas aren’t a typical breakfast for you, because heavens above, they take so much work. Food processors make mincing all the ingredients easier, but ah, the crimping, the crimping!
Never can you get the crimping right, no matter how hard you seem to try. No matter how hard your abuelita tried to teach you, no matter how hard your older hermanas seemed to laugh at you for it. It’s not your fault your hands shake at small things, is it? It’s not your fault your handwriting’s always been bad, that trying to go for the little things always causes you to trip, right?
You sigh as you step back from what you’ve finished, overwhelmed by a cacophony of thoughts and mistakes piling your mind as a pile of vegetables, flour, and minced meat lie haphazardly in different bowls. Your little friend above the stove flickers, and whines, seemingly unable to move, but beckons you back. Back to the early morning hours, to the enjoyment of your food.
…Yeah, you are enjoying this, despite everything.
You are enjoying this, and smile plasters itself across your face as even though at the edges of your mind, there are worries gnawing you away.
You look at the ingredients you’ve prepared. Crazy how you accomplished this all by memory this time without a recipe.
Is that its doing?
Is it the one that makes preparing the dough, with lard and a little bit of cilantro (you add that as your own preference), something that pricks your mind with little rainbow pockets of satisfaction?
Ah, it’s 5AM exactly. Normally, you’d be done with breakfast twenty-one minutes in, as it’s usually just a handful of nuts or some kind of protein bar (that you’ve come to see as acceptable despite tasting like chalk) but here you’re barely getting started.
Okay, time to fry the filling in a pan. The olives are going to taste delicious once they’re done.
God, the piccadillo already smells heavenly. Rich, savory, mildly acidic, with a hint of onion snap to it. It’s hard to resist the urge to just slap it on some white rice, but keep the faith now. You haven’t come all this way just to take the easy route.
Your friend agrees, lighting up as you stir and breathe in deep. Your brain buzzes with the wafting aromas of the kitchen, swelling to soak in between the micro-droplets of steam sticking to old porcelain tiles. Augh, you need to replace those eventually, but your savings aren’t exactly where they need to be…
Done. The filling is cooked. And now for…
The crimping.
You sigh and turn the stove off as you shuffle everything into a bowl. Your friend above chitters, encouraging you wordlessly to go about doing things as you’ve been taught, but your body shivers at the notion.
Why? you think as you look over everything. You’re just lucid now, lucid now from the focus of cooking so much that you actually realize how crazy of an idea it was to make these yourself for breakfast of all things.
I haven’t even made the…
Café con leche, right. You grit your teeth slightly, running a hand over your hair, kicking yourself for that.
Shit, why are you so disorganized? Why didn’t you make that first, so the coffee could soak the milk properly?
Your friend seems to start buzzing when your mind races over that thought.
“What?”
It spins. It spins and totters over some current in the air, as if pointing to the barely rising sun shining over Little Havana’s streets. You always keep your blinds closed during the day, but that never stopped the morning light from sneaking in and dancing wherever it could. What a coy little thing it could be.
And what a beautiful one too. Right now, it cradles the edges of your table and curtains, filtered through dapples of complex architecture winding upwards outside.
The entire display produces a kind of shape you’ve not really…seen before.
It’s…angular, shiny, splashed with different refractive colors of light.
You stare. It’s hard not to, even as you know the ingredients are getting cold.
Your friend is silent. It stares motionlessly behind your back, something you can innately feel as the two of you match wavelengths for just a few precious moments.
The air smells like warmth. The kitchen smells like your abuelita is still alive. It feels like, for a brief second, you aren’t living alone, you aren’t cooking alone, that the scents wafting are of your soul instead of mortal food.
You breathe in.
Your friend nudges you to go back to finishing.
The sunrise will illuminate the food in a way which will pave over your mistakes.
Eventually, you do. You find yourself wandering back to the counter, back to the stove, back to everything.
You crimp the empanadas under your friend’s light, believing in its power and the morning quiet, and fry.
By the time it’s all done, the cafe con leche (which you hastily prepared but is just as delicious) and everything, the sun has fully risen. Your friend is gone.
You don’t know what any of that means, or what just happened, why it even came here, but you’re just happy to believe in something for a single moment.
Belief ties together the little moments and make them worth more their weight in gold.
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