fandomtownies | Community center class: Yes, You Can Actually Cook

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Community center class: Yes, You Can Actually Cook

Eliot met the students outside today, where he had a number of small grills set up on a nice, out of the way patio, along with a table piled high with grilling equipment and food options.

"So this last weekend, some Americans who weren't unexpectedly 20 years older were celebratin' one of our national holidays. One that to many people marks the unofficial beginning of summer. And a hell of a lot of 'em marked it with a cookout.

"Outdoor grilling has been a tradition in America since around the 1950s, when folks started movin' to the suburbs and havin' more leisure time in general. Since then it's become something of a symbol of American prosperity and community spirit. Mostly, though, it's a lot of fun. Outdoor grilling at a party means you can stay in the thick of things, keep up with your guests while still getting the food prep done. You can cook things to order, and if you've got the practice, show off your skills while you're at it.

"We've got both gas and charcoal grills out here, and I'm going to let you pick which one you wanna try out, today. Personally, I'm partial to charcoal. The smoke is part of the experience, and it adds to the flavor of whatever you're cookin'. But it can be temperamental, so any of you suspect you're too likely to set somethin' on fire, go with the gas grill, so I don't have to kill you. I got some basic grilling tips available for y'all to look at, and there's plenty of stuff for you to try makin', too. I'll be workin' with a little bit of everything up here, for anyone who wants a demonstration first. Otherwise, grab some grub and get grillin'."

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Outdoorsy-like

It's a little shorter than usual, and less full of lectures about balanced meals and quality ingredients. Eliot mostly just looks excited to get started.

Perhaps you want to try your hand at crafting your own burger? Or maybe you'd rather go with chicken. Or steak. Or, hey, there's some salmon on hand. And skewers if anyone wants to try out some kabobs! And it wouldn't be summer without some corn on the cob!

Comment on how he only kind of threatened to kill you all, this week.

Now I want some grilled corn on the cob. Damn.

Kanan Jarrus

This was the kind of cooking that Kanan could get behind. Take meat, apply fire? It made a special sort of sense. Hell, it even twinged a little bit of nostalgia, though he'd never admit it. Still, he did pay attention to what Eliot was doing before heading off to get a start on his own grilling. Cooking over fire, he was familiar with. Cooking with actual grills, less so.

Kanan was already good and familiar with burgers, since getting here. For something different, but still not totally unfamiliar, he was going to give the salmon a try. And the corn. Like most things he was coming across these days, it wasn't quite the same as the corn back in his own galaxy, but it was familiar enough that he figured he could fake his way through cooking it.

Just as soon as he figured out whether he was supposed to shuck it, or just grill it in the husk. Earth really needed to come with an instruction manual.

Sparkle

So, Sparkle was fairly confident in his cooking ability in general, but doing anything up on a barbecue (which in Canada was basically a catch-all word for all food cooked outside over a flame, no matter the method) was basically totally new to him. The basic principles of 'take heat, add food' were still more or less the same, he was sure, but he had a whole new world of fun and excitement ahead of him when it came to figuring out the grill itself.

That said, he was totally already planning on making shish-kebab. Yes, please.

Ooookay, so, Sparkle had plenty of experience with fire in ways he wasn't going to make use of today in class, but less experience with this particular sort of cooking setup. Which meant that he was going to be spending plenty of time on food prep itself, putting cubes of beef and veggies onto a skewer and slathering the whole thing in barbecue sauce and just generally going to town there before even really approaching the flame.

He'd picked the gas setup today, because, yeah, for basically the first time in his life he didn't want a raging uncontrollable hellbeast of a fire raising up before him. He just wanted some damn shish-kebab.

John Constantine

Ringo Noyamano

Ringo had worked with charcoal before. But she was a bit surprised by how different American grills were from a proper yakatori grill. For one thing, the America grill was way bigger.

"How were you supposed to put one of these in the middle of the table for everyone to share?" she asked no one in particular.

Steve Rogers

Steve's expertise was in "handing things to Dum-Dum to burn to death over a campfire", so he started out with steak on the theory that unlike chicken it wouldn't kill him if it was too rare.

Given how long it had been sitting on the grill, there was no chance at all it would be too rare.

That poor, poor steak.

Steve had something slightly different to talk to him about.

"...so you served, too?"

"Army Special Forces," Eliot said, nodding. "For most of my twenties. You?"

He hadn't seen enough of Steve's moves to pin down what kind of training the man had. And even if he had, it was old school enough that he'd probably have trouble narrowing it down, anyway. It wasn't like he went up against a whole lot of guys these days who were trained up during WWII.

Steve grinned. "Basically the same thing. European Front."

Eliot blinked a moment at the "European Front" comment, then nodded. "Right, you're like a hundred years old, ain't ya." He and Steve hadn't really talked much before -- other than about Pinkie right after Steve first got here -- but he heard things. "I worked mostly around the Mediterranean, myself. Balkans and the Middle East."

Before, you know, he started freelancing and ended up stationed "globally".

"Ninety and change by the calendar, yeah," Steve said, nodding. "I was mostly in Eastern Europe, but up closer to Poland. Cold as anything."

"Been up that way a time or two myself, yeah," Eliot said. "Though not on any official mission." Nothing about what Eliot did after the Yugoslav Wars was official. "You involved in the camp liberations, then?" Eliot's knowledge of World War II was better than some people's, but it wasn't in any way comprehensive.

Also, his world didn't have Nazi super-science that turned people's heads into bare red skulls.

Steve shook his head, looking regretful. "We were aimed at a mad scientist that might not have existed in your time. Johann Schmidt. Tall, self-aggrandizing...red head?"

"Don't ring a bell, but that doesn't mean much," Eliot said, shrugging. "Mission like that mighta only recently been declassified. You come here straight from active duty, then?" He was assuming Steve had time traveled the traditional way (and wasn't the fact that Fandom had one of those just fun), not that he'd been frozen for the duration. "Still got a unit waiting for ya back home?"

"In a manner of speaking," Steve said. "I crashed a plane full of nuclear missiles heading for New York in '45...woke up in 2012. My unit all grew old without me."

Monday had been tough.

"Damn," Eliot said, wincing sympathetically. "Still, must be nice to know they got to get old, right?"

Steve nodded. "Most of 'em got married, had entirely too many kids or grandkids named after me or Bucky--" He shook his head. "Other guy in the unit who died shortly before I did. So yeah, I'm glad they got to go home after. In the middle, you start thinkin' that maybe this is going to be all there is forever, y'know?"

"Yeah," Eliot said, picturing the bombed out streets of Belgrade. "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. But then it does, and you don't quite know what to do with yourself."

And, if you were Eliot, you joined up with a clandestine wing of the US government that was more than happy to make use of your moral flexibility around killing people, then went rogue when you realized that the money was better on the other side.

Steve nodded. "Lucky for me, I only had about ten days of wondering before aliens invaded," he said dryly.

He was giving Eliot his best "are you kidding me with this" look.

With what, the aliens? Alien attacks didn't make transitioning to civilian life easier.

". . . Wait, was that in Fandom? I thought you showed up the beginnin' of the spring."

They hadn't gotten alien attacks until late spring, this year.

"Nah, that was at home," Steve said. "Here's been almost relaxing in comparison."

"Ah. You're from one of those worlds." Eliot shrugged. "What brought you here, then? Sounds like you coulda still had your work cut out for you, back home."

"I'm consulting for SHIELD in DC," Steve said. "They like that I'm close here, but not feeling too confined by them. They thought this would be a good place to catch up on the last 70 years."

SHIELD had a sense of humor.

Eliot wasn't super sure what SHIELD was, but it sounded like Steve's situation was precisely what he'd spent the last couple of years trying to avoid with Vance. "So you're not so much on active duty as on-call," he reasoned. "That workin' out alright for you?"

"So far, other than the aliens, it's all been PR fluff," Steve said. "I'm assigned to a new team that will hopefully lead to few speeches in dress blues and more things that are actually helpful."

Eliot reminded himself that talking other people into going AWOL was rude, and that Steve's world's army -- or SHIELD or whatever -- wasn't necessarily as ineffectual and manipulative as his had been.

And then he said "You know you could just strike out on your own and get stuff done that way, right?" anyway.

Steve smiled. "I suppose I could," he said, "but it's not so bad having a team again, you know?"

Eliot definitely couldn't disagree with that.

"You could bring 'em with ya."

"Some versions of them are already here," Steve said. "It's totally confusing."

"Jesus," Eliot said. It'd been weird enough learning that other versions of Sophie and Parker had been here. He couldn't wrap his head around them being here with him. "That's gotta mess with ya somethin' fierce."

Jaina Solo

Every single class so far, Jaina more or less knew how to do things. She almost thought that maybe she was okay enough to have skipped this, but then she remembered that everything in her fridge should be cooked in the microwave.

Either way, she was happy to grill some steak, even if it was maybe a little on the rare side. It probably would not kill her.

"It's been a bit of a learning curve," Steve said, nodding. "I'm housemates with a different, slightly less abrasive version of one of them--Tony Stark."

"He's the less abrasive version?" Eliot didn't actually know Tony at all. But it seemed like the thing to say. "How'd all that happen?"

Steve snickered. "Well, he recognized me when I got on the island and wouldn't let me move into the hotel. He's been really helpful trying to adjust to the 21st Century."

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