Matt Thomas looked at his phone with scorn. He had, out of habit, opened his mobile banking app, and now the screen was showing him a checking account balance that was healthy but hadn’t increased at all over the past month. He knew that he should be grateful for the financial security that being an NBA player had given him, but his retirement would be a lot more cushy if the coronavirus wasn’t stealing his fat game checks.
His thoughts wandered to his Raptors teammates. He knew most of them were in the same position he was, albeit with much bigger checks being forfeited. There was one exception, though…
Serge.
Serge was perhaps known better for his online cooking show than he was for his career as a sportsman. In a time of social distancing. Serge’s videos on YouTube were certainly raking in more money than ever before. Just for cooking some food and having witty repartee with his guests. Anybody could do that.
Struck with sudden inspiration, Matt went to his contacts and tapped the first name on the list. He stared at the ceiling while he waited for the call to be picked up.
“Hey mom. Yeah, I’m doing fine. No, still no word on playoffs. I was wondering, can you send me some recipes? You know, all my childhood favorites. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Just take pictures of the cookbook. Yep. Yes you do know how to send me pictures, you’ve done it before. Yeah. Thanks mom, love you. Bye.”
—
Standing in his kitchen with various ingredients and utensils arrayed around him, Matt adjusted his iPhone, which was propped up on a makeshift tripod made out of furniture and duct tape. When it was in proper position, he did one last review of his recipes.
The tater tot casserole looked easy. Easy even for somebody who hadn’t cooked food in a kitchen since his seventh-grade home ec class. It was just piling stuff into a dish and baking it. The only hard part was cooking the beef. The fried cheese curds, on the other hand, would be a bit trickier. Matt knew enough about cooking to know that deep-frying was a process not to be taken lightly. Bad things could happen while deep-frying. Especially while drunk. Which Matt was. His on-camera manner would be more glib and spontaneous if he had a couple beers in him.
Matt looked at the package of cheese curds on his counter and thought about putting them back in the fridge, saving that recipe for another time. But what would the debut episode of his Wisconsin-themed online cooking series be without fried cheese curds, the most quintessential dish of his home state? Serge was so successful because he showed ignorant North Americans the culinary traditions of his homeland. Matt had a responsibility to do the same. Not just a responsibility to his legions of new fans, but a responsibility to his bank account.
Ignoring the part of his brain that was reminding him that he didn’t even know how to brown beef on the stove, Matt took another swig of Miller Lite and started the camera. “Hey everybody, welcome to the first episode of my cooking show,” he said while internally chastising himself for not even bothering to give a name to his new venture. “I’ll be, uh, cooking up some, uh, Wisconsin classics for you guys. Yeah. And I play in the NBA too. First off, uh, tater tot casserole. I loved this stuff as a kid.”
Matt tried to narrate the steps he was taking to prepare the casserole while concealing the fact that he had no idea what he was doing. When the 1-pound slab of ground beef sizzled upon hitting the pan on his stovetop, he was relieved to at least have gotten the “turn on the burner” step correct.
But what was he supposed to do with the tater tots? Wanting to seem knowledgeable for his audience, he didn’t bother consulting the recipe, and instead threw the frozen bag in with the beef. The noxious smell of burning plastic quickly hit his nostrils, but Matt ignored it as he checked on the boiling pot of oil on the adjacent burner. It seemed like it was about to overflow, but that’s what boiling oil looked like, right? He backed a safe distance away and started chucking cheese curds into the pot one at a time while joking with his audience about the accuracy of his three-point shot.
Suddenly, the melting tater tot bag caught fire. Matt did the first thing he could think of and pushed the pan off the source of heat, but the pan’s handle hit the pot of oil, which splashed onto the flames. There was a whoosh as his entire stovetop was set ablaze.
“Oh, that’s not good,” he said with a nervous smile at the camera. “Don’t worry folks, I’ve got a fire extinguisher around here somewhere.” That was a lie. All he had were ice cubes, which only seemed to exacerbate things when he dumped a tray of them into the inferno. Writing off the first episode of his cooking show as a lost cause, he ripped his phone out of its duct tape holder and called that familiar number again.
“Mom, I got a little bit of a problem here…”