//------------------------------// // Test Kitchen // Story: Como Salsa para los Tacos // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Test Kitchen Admiral Biscuit 2650 S Hub Drive in Independence, Missouri, was a typical-looking strip mall. A Subway anchored one end; the other had a salon which did not do manes or tails. There was also a dry cleaner’s and a liquor store—the liquor store in particular had no issue selling to ponies. Like most places in an American city, it was easily accessible by automobile and sort of accessible by bus. Routes 302 and 24 picked up by the train station, and route 306 went to the strip mall; the only way to get from one bus to the next was at a transfer station near the farmer’s market. On days it wasn’t open, there were other stores around: visiting ponies got drawn at least once to the Direct Casket Outlet, which offered a full range of funeral merchandise at discount prices. Compared to the buses, some of the caskets were positively luxurious. There were also Ubers and Lyfts and regular taxis and even executive cars available, and it was a flyable distance from the train station for the pegasi. For ground-bound ponies, walking was a poor option. Sidewalks, where they existed, were generally in bad condition. The only advantage to walking was that a quarter-mile deviation off the direct route went past a Taco Bell. The downside with the deviation was having to cross Route 291 twice, which was wide and had little triangular concrete islands where a pony who wasn’t fast enough would have to wait for the signal to change in her favor again as cars and trucks zoomed by on three sides. In short, the location wasn’t great. The rent wasn’t all that cheap, either, but it was the best place they could find on short notice that was reasonably close to a train station and which could handle the electrical needs of a commercial kitchen.  Outside, they had a repurposed bar-b-que truck and trailer to meet their wood stove needs. The rental agent had threatened to tear up their lease if they tried to install wood stoves inside the building, but had grudgingly allowed them to have a food truck on the premises so long as it stayed far enough away that sparks didn’t pose a danger of fire. A bit of searching classified ads had gotten them an antique Chevy P-30 with a flat tire on the left inside dual and a seized motor, along with a trailer in far better condition. Cinnamon Breeze occasionally washed and waxed the truck, while Flowerdew sometimes took out her frustrations on the engine. Nopony was sure if she intended to fix it or completely disassemble it out of spite, and nopony dared ask. One of their closets was filled with a collection of all the parts she’d taken off; thus far none of them had gone back on the engine. Their kitchen predated S.C.S. Livery, and for months they’d been diligently working to reverse-engineer tacos, burritos, and gorditas. The nearby Taco Bell had gotten used to the strangeness of ponies sometimes ordering just a single ingredient on the side, without ever wondering why they might do so. As the espionage efforts cranked up, the recipes got more focused. No longer were they trying to guess ingredients or cooking methods, although none of their research thus far had gone to waste. They’d correctly guessed that human food would be cooked on human machines and outfitted their kitchen with a host of human gadgets, experimenting on them before trying to replicate those results with pony-appropriate appliances. Opinions varied on the ideal endgame. Getting an actual Taco Bell franchise with all its appliances, recipes, and ingredient supplies was one option; Starlight Glimmer was negotiating that. Learning enough to make a faux Taco Bell had been S.C.S. Livery’s main focus, which had shifted their own goals to making Taco Bell food available to anypony with a well-equipped kitchen. Flowerdew envisioned a day where every single eatery the length and breadth of Equestria could offer one or more Taco Bell menu items if they wanted to, which meant that they needed to figure out how to make it, then modify it to be made on non-human equipment. Firenza, their saucier, had her muzzle in a pan of creamy jalapeño sauce. She liked scratching tally marks on the pot after each attempt and would retire it once she finally got it right. Baja sauce was dozens of quartets in, and she was getting close. A quarter of red pepper, two cloves of garlic, a quarter sweet onion, half a jalapeño, sour cream, cumin, vinegar, and a final mystery ingredient she still hadn’t quite figured out. It was likely an oil, but she hadn’t figured out what kind or how much. Each reasonably-close batch got put in little cups for blind samples, along with the real deal, and everypony else in the test kitchen tried them. The best samples were then offered to friends and lovers, while ones that weren’t quite right but still tasted pretty good were earmarked for further experimentation later. Each sacred saucepan sat atop a journal, its pages tallying her culinary journey. Unlike her usual signature recipes, she didn’t write the instructions in personal code. Remarks—her own, and in the case of a recipe good enough to share, taste-testers’—filled in the bottom of the pages. Firenza had a cupboard for her works, and although Flowerdew occasionally eyed it as a future storage spot for engine parts, so far it had stayed sacrosanct. ••• “We need anything that’s not on the list from GFS?” Cinnamon had just finished copying down the current shopping list on a more easily transported sheet of paper, and her clicky pen was floating idly in her aura. “I could use one of those frozen chocolate cream pies they have. Those are tasty.” “They’re completely fake,” Flowerdew objected. “They don’t even have any butter in them like a proper chocolate cream pie would. You could make a better pie yourself.” Firenza shook her head. “No, I can’t. I never had any luck with pies. They always come out too runny or burned . . . besides, sometimes I don’t feel like cooking something for myself after I’ve spent all day cooking, especially if it’s not something I’m good at.” She glanced around the room to ensure there were no prying ears. “A lot of nights, I go home and just eat pasture grasses ‘cause I don’t feel like cooking anything.” “I wouldn’t cook as much if—” Cinnamon shrugged. “I should ask Harper, maybe she doesn’t like cooking at home and just does it because she thinks it makes me happy.” “Wouldn’t that be funny if neither of you wanted to cook at home but both did because you thought your partner liked it?” “It’s fun bonding . . . haven’t either of you wanted to cook to impress a marefriend or stallionfriend?” “That’s how I know I’m bad at making pies. Before we started dating, I’d always just bought them from the bakery, but I thought he’d think it was funny that I was a chef and couldn’t make a pie on my own.” “You still together?” Firenza shook her head. “Kinda glad in hindsight, I don’t think I would have applied for this job if we had been. Either of you leave somepony behind?” Cinnamon shook her head, while Flowerdew nodded.  “Not that unusual for us to be apart. Royal Guard.” “Really?” “I worked in the palace, apprenticing to one of the head chefs, I got dragged around everywhere Princess Celestia went, and there was a lot of experimentation behind the scenes, so I was kind of a natural fit for this.” “Didn’t you get lonely?” “There’s a whole panoply of staff that goes on formal trips, and embassy postings . . . sometimes I wonder how other ponies handle the constant sameness in their life. I like going places and trying new things. Plus, the longer we’re apart, the sweeter the reunion.” “I didn’t know you had a romantic side.” Flowerdew stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry. ••• The next morning, the cheesemelter arrived by Fed-Ex, unaccompanied by Pozole—he’d headed off to Bow, New Hampshire in search of a fryer and a rethermalizer—and the three mares eagerly unpackaged it and then set about assembling it. Flowerdew, who had the most experience with tools, got the honor. They made her wash her hooves and tools before she started: she’d been pulling the gears off the front of the step van’s engine when the Fed-Ex truck arrived. Their kitchen had plenty of work space to set it up on, and the controls were simple. They’d already read through Chapaulin’s notes on what it was used for and how it was used. If they’d completely cracked the mysteries of a Mexican Pizza, they could have cooked one. However, they had not. Dozens of experiments had given them a close approximation of a Mexican Pizza, and now that they had one, it was time to run it through the cheese melter to see if that made it better or not. “Wish that Starlight could just negotiate us an already set-up Taco Bell.” Flowerdew’s perfect world would have them sharing a parking lot with a pony-run Taco Bell, where they’d have access to all the ingredients and machines and could do a more scientific experimentation process. CInnamon shrugged. “We’ve got lots of notes from Chapulin and that’s all we really need.” “Either way we’re gonna be modifying recipes,” Firenza reminded her. “Back in Equestria it isn’t going to be as easy as buying all the equipment and plugging it into the magic receptacle. Human energy doesn’t work on a proper monopolar source, it uses Pixiis. We got them to buy us the equipment so we could compare our methods, not to be lazy and just modify it to work on charge crystals.” Flowerdew had flipped through the manual as the other two had examined the cheese melter and debated what to prepare in it first. “This one doesn’t need Pixiis to work, they’re just there for the timer and the onboard heater. It works on steam, and that’s practically foal stuff.” ••• By the evening, the cheesemaker had been fully set up and they’d put it through its paces, cooking several almost-authentic Mexican Pizzas, Crunchwraps, and Cheesy Gordita Crunches. Each one had been tasted, picked apart, and compared to other methods of cooking the food. “Remind me, we need to see if Chapulin can tell us what the actual size of all the scoops are,” Flowerdew said. “Since humans don’t color-code all their scoops the same.” “She did give some measurements in her first reports.” Cinnamon turned her head towards the stack of notebooks and file folders in the office section of their test kitchen—a stainless steel prep table that they weren’t currently using. “But human measurements are dumb. How many grams are in an ounce? It’s not intuitive.”  “Have you got good enough reach with that horn of yours to grab the scoops out of a Taco Bell? That would be an easy way to solve the problem.” Firenza shook her head. “Steal a chef’s tools, and she’ll kick you half to death. Besides, the actual amount of any of the ingredients is up to the diner anyway. The app lets you order extra or less of anything so you can customize your food the way you want it. It’s not like with the sauces where you can’t just toss extra guacamoles in—you can make a burrito with more beans or less beans or even no beans if you don’t like beans. I think we’re okay with just estimating the quantity of the fillings . . . but if you want a really accurate number, the boffins at S.C.S. bought everything on the menu and measured out all the ingredients. That’s in one of the early reports.” “Is that the one I never read?” Flowerdew asked. “One of the ones you never read,” Firenza reminded her. “I don’t like reading instructions. It hampers creativity.”