Fusion Cuisine

He'd taken notes. He'd made a shopping list organized by grocery store aisle. He'd even practiced his British accent in the mirror while saying "puff pastry" because Gordon Ramsay made it sound so elegant, and he wanted to impress Adra when he served it.

"It's just beef wrapped in stuff," he told himself, standing in his kitchen at 2 PM, five hours before Adra would arrive for their two-year anniversary dinner. "How hard could it be?"

These would later be recognized as the most dangerous words ever spoken in his apartment, narrowly beating out "I can definitely install this ceiling fan myself" and "That yogurt's probably still good."

The recipe called for beef tenderloin. The butcher at Whole Foods, a man with forearms like ham hocks and a name tag reading "Axel," had looked at Brian with deep suspicion when he asked for one.

"You making Wellington?" Axel asked, his accent thick as stroganoff.

"Yeah, how did you know?"

"Is Saturday. Every Saturday, someone watches cooking show, thinks 'I am chef now.' Monday, they come back, buy ground beef, very quiet."

"That won't be me," Brian said with confidence that would age like milk in the sun.

Axel shrugged and wrapped up a tenderloin that cost more than Brian's monthly streaming subscriptions combined. "You want advice?"

"I've got YouTube."

Axel's laugh followed Brian all the way to the mushroom aisle.

Back in his kitchen, Brian laid out his ingredients like surgical instruments. Beef tenderloin: check. Puff pastry: check (store-bought, because he wasn't completely insane). Mushrooms: check. Pâté de foie gras: check, sort of—the store was out, so he'd bought something called "spreadable meat product" that was probably close enough. Prosciutto: check, though the package said "honey ham" and he figured Italy and America were basically the same thing when it came to cured meats.

Step one: Sear the beef. The videos made this look simple. Heat oil in a pan, brown the meat on all sides, done. Brian heated the oil until it shimmered like a desert mirage. He placed the beef in the pan.

The smoke alarm went off immediately.

Not a polite beep, either, but a shriek that could wake the dead or at least Mrs. Jeong next door, who slept through her grandson's drum practice but somehow heard everything that happened in Brian's kitchen.

He grabbed a dish towel, waving it frantically at the alarm while the beef continued to char in the pan. The towel, which had been dangerously close to the stove, caught fire.

"Oh man, oh man, oh man," Brian chanted, throwing the flaming towel in the sink and turning on the water, which created a cloud of steam that set off the second smoke alarm in the hallway.

Mrs. Jeong's voice came through the wall: "Brian? You okay? You want me to call fire department?"

"I'm fine, Mrs. Jeong! Just cooking!"

"Cooking what? The apartment?"

He finally got the beef out of the pan. It looked less "beautifully seared" and more "survived a volcanic eruption." No matter. The mushroom duxelles would cover it.

Duxelles. Even the word sounded fancy. It was just chopped mushrooms cooked down with shallots and garlic. How hard could it be?

Brian didn't own a food processor, but he did have a blender. Mushrooms were soft, right? They'd blend.

They did not blend.

They bounced. They ricocheted. They formed a mushroom mosh pit in the blender that somehow resulted in the lid flying off and sending fungi shrapnel across his kitchen like botanical buckshot. A piece of shiitake hit the ceiling and stuck there, defying gravity and logic.

Fine. He'd chop them by hand. Very fine. The recipe said "finely chopped," and after thirty minutes of knife work, Brian had achieved something between "coarsely minced" and "gave up." His fingers were cramping, and he'd only processed half the mushrooms. The other half he decided were "rustic."

The duxelles needed to be cooked until dry. The recipe emphasized this: no moisture, or the Wellington would be soggy. Brian cooked the mushroom mixture, stirring constantly. After twenty minutes, it still looked wet. After thirty, it looked like mushroom soup. After forty-five, it had transcended mere food and become a philosophical question about the nature of dryness itself.

His phone rang. Adra.

"Hey babe," she said, and he could hear her smile. "I'm so excited for tonight! What are you making?"

"It's a surprise," Brian said, stirring the mushroom swamp with one hand. "Something special."

"Aww, you didn't have to go to any trouble."

A drop of mushroom liquid chose that moment to splatter onto his shirt with the force of a tiny brown bullet.

"No trouble at all," he lied.

After she hung up, Brian made an executive decision. The mushrooms were dry enough. They had to be. He'd been cooking them so long they'd probably evolved into a new species.

Next: assembling the Wellington. The videos made this look like wrapping a present. Layer the ham (honey ham, whatever), spread the mushrooms, place the beef, roll it in the pastry. Simple.

Brian laid out the ham slices, which immediately tore because apparently honey ham was structurally different from prosciutto in ways that mattered. He patched them together like a pork puzzle. The mushroom mixture, still somehow both too wet and too dry, went on next. It immediately soaked through the ham.

The beef, still bearing its volcanic scarring, went on top. Now to roll it.

The first attempt resulted in the beef shooting out one end like a meat torpedo, landing on the floor where Robert, his cat, immediately claimed it as the spoils of war.

"Robert, no! That cost forty dollars!"

Robert was already under the couch with his treasure, making sounds that suggested he'd fight to keep it.

Brian retrieved the beef after a brief struggle that left him with three scratches and a profound sense of betrayal. He washed it off. Five-second rule. Or in this case, five-minute rule, but who was counting?

Second attempt. This time he'd be ready. He rolled carefully, slowly, whispering encouragement to the pastry. "Come on, baby, you can do this. We're a team."

The pastry tore.

Brian stared at the tear, which seemed to mock him with its jagged edges. No problem. He had more pastry. He'd just patch it like—like something that gets patched. A tire. A roof. A relationship after someone admits they don't like dogs.

By the time he got the Wellington wrapped—using what could generously be called "creative pastry architecture"—it looked less like the golden, elegant package from the videos and more like something that had been wrapped by someone wearing oven mitts. Which, by that point, he was, because he'd burned his hands twice and prevention was better than more pain.

Into the oven it went. The recipe said 25-30 minutes at 425°F until golden brown. Brian set three timers. He would not mess this up.

Twenty minutes in, the smoke started.

Not alarm-triggering smoke, just a gentle haze that suggested something was not quite right. Brian opened the oven to find the Wellington leaking. Not moisture—that would have been manageable. It was leaking something that looked like mushroom lava, a brown substance that was burning on the oven floor and creating a smell that was unique in the history of smells.

He put a baking sheet on the rack below to catch the drips. Problem solved.

Five minutes later, the doorbell rang.

Brian checked his phone. 5:30. Adra was early. She was never early. In their entire relationship, she'd been on time exactly twice, and one of those was their first date when she'd accidentally gone to the wrong restaurant first.

He looked around his kitchen. It looked like a bomb had gone off. A bomb filled with mushrooms and despair. The ceiling still had that piece of shiitake stuck to it. The sink was full of every pot and pan he owned. His shirt looked like he'd been in a food fight and lost.

The doorbell rang again.

Brian did the only thing he could do. He answered it.

But it wasn't Adra. It was Mrs. Jeong, holding a casserole dish.

"I bring you backup," she said, pushing past him into the apartment. "I smell what you cooking all day. Is not good smell."

"Mrs. Jeong, I appreciate it, but—"

She walked into his kitchen and stopped, surveying the damage like a general reviewing a battlefield.

"What you trying to make?"

"Beef Wellington."

She laughed. Not a polite laugh, but a full-body laugh that made her glasses fog up. "Oh, Brian. Sweet, stupid Brian. You know what my husband try to make for our anniversary? Forty years ago?"

Brian shook his head.

"Peking duck. You know Peking duck? Need special oven, special technique, two days preparation. He try to make in regular oven." She shook her head, still chuckling. "Fire department came. Twice."

"What did you do?"

"We ordered pizza. Been our anniversary tradition ever since." She set her casserole on the one clean spot on the counter. "This is lamb tagine. Is foolproof. I know because my grandson made it, and that boy could burn water."

The timer went off. Brian pulled out the Wellington. It had turned a beautiful golden brown, except for one side which was distinctly charcoal-colored. It had also somehow both shrunk and expanded, creating a shape that defied Euclidean geometry.

"Is not terrible," Mrs. Jeong said, which from her was practically a Michelin star. "You slice, arrange nice on plate, put my tagine next to it, tell girlfriend you made feast. Fusion cuisine."

"That's lying."

"No, is marriage practice. My husband still thinks I make my mother's dumplings from scratch. I buy from place on Mott Street for thirty-seven years."

The doorbell rang. This time it was Adra, holding a bottle of wine and wearing the dress that made Brian forget his own name.

"Something smells... interesting," she said, kissing him.

"I made dinner. Well, Mrs. Jeong helped."

"Thank man," Adra said. "Remember the pasta incident?"

"That was one time."

"You set pasta on fire. Pasta. That's like drowning a fish."

They sat down to eat—the Wellington (which was actually not bad once you got past the texture, temperature inconsistencies, and general threat it posed to dental work), Mrs. Jeong's tagine (which was perfect), and the wine (which helped with everything else).

"You know," Adra said, cutting into her third slice of Wellington, "this is actually kind of good. Like, it's terrible, but good-terrible. It's terminally unique."

"Terminally unique?"

"Yeah, like, I will never have anything like this again in my life, and that makes it special." She smiled at him, that smile that had made him think he could cook in the first place. "Plus, you tried. You spent all day on this disaster. That's love."

"Or stupidity."

"Por que no los dos?"

From next door, Mrs. Jeong's TV turned up louder, but Brian could swear he heard her laughing.

The mushroom never did come off the ceiling. It became a conversation piece, a monument to ambition exceeding ability, and eventually, three years later, the thing Brian pointed to when he proposed to Adra in that same kitchen.

"See that mushroom?" he said, on one knee. "That's the first of many disasters I want to have with you."

She said yes, on the condition that they hire a caterer for the wedding.

They did.