One thing ponies lack in Equestria is Taco Bells. With enough hard work from enough ponies, that can change.
One thing ponies lack in Equestria is Taco Bells. With enough hard work from enough ponies, that can change.
Negotiations and raising capital are one way to get an official franchise. Alternately, there’s the Glen Bell method: learn how it’s done, then copy it. Get ponies into every level of production, from the tomato fields to the restaurants, find out who supplies the machines and buy their own.
Is it ethical? That’s a grey area, but it might be the only chance to save 7-Layer Burritos.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: Chapulin Admiral Biscuit
Chapulin hopped out of her Uber and stood in front of the restaurant. It was hard to believe that she was really here, but here she was.
She shifted around in her uniform. Shirt, hat, and pants. According to the sign on the door, customers weren’t required to wear pants; as an employee, she was.
At the door, she paused, checking her reflection in the window. Mane done up in a bun, uniform clean and complete, and on time. On time was important. Nopony—nobody liked an employee who was late to her job.
She tugged the handle on the door and pulled it open, then walked into the restaurant. Her shoes clacked across the tile floor—she didn’t normally wear them, but Taco Bell also required shoes for employees and customers alike. The farrier had charged her extra for short notice and extra for brass, but that was a sacrifice that had to be made.
Heads turned at the counter as she crossed the floor, employees who didn’t know she had a job here. She kept her head up and boldly walked to the ‘employees only’ door. It wasn’t bespelled and she could have opened it even without being an employee, but humans respected signs.
Chapulin had to tell the computer clock that she was present, and that was one of the many difficulties that had occurred during the hiring process. The password was supposed to be the last four digits of her Social Security number, which she didn’t have. Her Q-1 Visa had lots of numbers, and they’d finally decided to use four of those.
Most of the screens in Taco Bell could be touched for input, but didn’t accept hoof-pushes. She’d almost flunked her job interview then and there, until she’d shown them how accurately she could use a special pen on the screen. In fact, there had been a whole litany of skill tests to demonstrate how much she could lift at once, if she could fold a crunchwrap, and if she could pee in a cup. She’d passed all those tests with flying colors, and was now gainfully employed at Taco Bell store number 658.
Back in Equestria, on-the-job training would have consisted of having an experienced pony stand beside her and give her pointers for her first few weeks. Here on Earth, they let a computer teach her in what they called modules, explaining the Taco Bell way and how the cash register worked and how to make tacos. She paid close attention to the last, since that was why she was here in the first place.
In Chapulin’s mind, she was ready to go to the back of the house, ready to make tacos and burritos and chalupas and everything else that Taco Bell had on offer.
Ziri, her manager, had other ideas, and for her very first shift, Chapulin got pressed into front counter duty. She was to be the interface between the people and their food, the face of Taco Bell for eight hours.
The cash register was dumb and American money was dumb. The coins were obvious enough; the bigger the coin the more it was worth with the exception of the dime. Bills were all the same size and color and so she had to pay attention to the portrait and the number. Plastic cards had their own idiosyncrasies; most of them could just be stuffed into the reader but some of them didn’t like that and wanted to be slid instead. A few worked just by tapping them against the machine.
Coupons were paper or digital; the paper ones sometimes had little tiny printing on them explaining when and how they were valid, and it was all very confusing. Sometimes she had to ask Ziri for help and she hated that; she was a smart pony and a graduate of Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and it was just the cash register or the rules that were dumb but she knew better than to say that.
Customers came in clusters, and she quickly learned that if she had time to lean, then she had time to clean. Washcloth in aura, she patrolled the restaurant and wiped down the tables and pushed the chairs back where they belonged—most of the restaurant was booths, so there weren’t all that many free-range chairs. Trays were supposed to be placed atop the garbage cans, but not everyone bothered.
Her lunch break meant food. Taco Bell had lots of ingredients and they didn’t have to be used just to make a menu item. Ramón told her that she could have an enchirito if she wanted, a burrito-enchilada hybrid based on a bean burrito.
That was too much for a first shift, so she instead had a veggie power bowl and a black bean quesarito and watched as her food was made. As learning went, it wasn’t much, but it was a start. A step on her journey.
•••
Days in, some of the bloom had come off the rose. Unicorns didn’t generally get involved in industrialized labor—not least because there wasn’t much of that in Equestria. On one hoof, it was disheartening. Some of her managers were jerks or incompetent or both, and on top of that, her co-workers were wary of her. She wasn’t trusted to make food just yet, and instead got to work the cash register, clean the lobby, take out trash, and restock the various cups and taco wrappers.
Just the same, that was learning and it gave her a chance to see every nook and cranny in the store, to look at the boxes in the cooler and in the storeroom, and to learn every option Taco Bell had when it came to menu items and their customization.
It was hard to remember her goal as she was taking a soggy garbage bag out ot the stinking dumpster while watching to make sure a car wasn’t about to run her over, but she needed to prove to her co-workers that she could correctly do menial tasks before they’d trust her to make tacos. The cartwright wouldn’t have her apprentice start out making a wagon, after all.
On Thursday, Chapulin got to help unload the delivery truck, and besides the stamps and stickers that said what was in the box, there were other stamps and stickers that said other things.
She kept a journal, sometimes writing in it on the job. Chapulin didn’t have to be in the break room to write in her notebook: remote writing was a skill she’d learned at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. She didn’t even need an actual pen, which was for the best. Her fellow employees might have panicked if they’d seen a pen surrounded by a faint aura writing seemingly on its own.
Instead, her notebook stayed secure in the small personal bag she was allowed to bring to work, the pony equivalent of a human purse, and by the end of every shift another page or two was filled with notes and observations.
They could have been more concise, she supposed, but she was working covertly and didn’t always know what her handlers wanted or needed to learn. It was better to include all the little tidbits and let them sort it out.
•••
The first time she got tapped for drive-through was disappointing. It was like the front counter except she had to listen to the orders through a scratchy headset and couldn’t see the faces of the people ordering. It was annoying, but it was also a step towards knowing everything, so she did it with the most grace she could muster. The headest wasn’t made for pony ears and the buttons on it weren’t made for hooves and it took her a while to learn how to tap them with her magic, but she did, and by the lunch rush she was taking orders like a pro.
Taco shell preparation was another skill to learn; they had to be put in the basket just so and dropped in the oil. The machine kept track of the time so she didn’t have to; when it beeped, pull them out and stack them in the tray. She made a note of how the frying basket was shaped and how it held the taco shells in the proper shape, how long it had to be in the oil for—the machine counted down in seconds—and how hot the oil had to be. She didn’t figure out what the oil was, but it came in a box that held a jug, both of which had labels on them, and she remotely wrote that down in her journal.
•••
Mostly she took Ubers to and from work, but some days when it was nice she walked to work. There weren’t very many sidewalks and the idea of walking on the busy road with cars rushing by didn’t appeal to her, but there was a clear, straight-line path from her apartment to Taco Bell that ran under power lines. It obviously wasn’t intended to be used as a path, since there were two water crossings without proper bridges.
One had a cobbled-together bridge made out of rocks, tires, and planks; the other had nothing. She’d been smart enough to scout out the route on a day off, eventually finding a cheap rowboat she could ferry herself across in. It was already painted in camouflage, and when it was tucked away in the trees it was nearly impossible to see.
It had taken her a little bit of practice to use her telekinesis to pull herself across the bayou, and it turned out that it was even more difficult to pull the boat back until she thought to buy a big coil of rope, which she could easily lift across the water and then drag the boat to herself by tugging on that.
There was also the railroad crossing to contend with: the embankments were gravel which liked to shift around underhoof, and she had to be alert for trains.
The bayou ran almost to Taco Bell, and she thought about taking the boat the whole way, but decided against it since she would have to bring it back in darkness and she didn’t fully trust human woods or human waterways. There probably weren’t nocturnal monsters in them, but it was impossible to know for sure.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: Grace Manewitz Admiral Biscuit
To humans, a brand headquarters ought to be a glistening tower of glass located in a major city. To ponies, an Antebellum house in Kentucky was a perfectly cromulent headquarters, and as such, Grace Manewitz didn’t find anything unusual about her new place of employment.
Yum! brand foods wanted corporate diversity, and hiring a pony as an executive secretary was diversity. In time, perhaps, she could get promoted, theoretically even rising to the top leadership position like David Gibbs had.
Grace had no intention of rising through the ranks. She’d gotten her job as a secretary to Jason Skala, Chief Operating Officer, and that was where she intended to stay for her tenure at Yum! foods.
She wasn’t familiar with Earth corporate culture, but was well aware that offices generally had a herd-like structure which ran on politics and gossip, and that was a game that she knew how to play. For the most part, it would be less competitive than the Manehattan fashion scene; all she had to do was be good at her job and keep her head down and not kick anybody unless they really deserved it.
Most of the rabble didn’t aspire to the job of executive secretary to the COO, which put her a hoof up on her first day, especially as an outside hire. Most of the rabble weren’t smart when it came to clawing up the corporate ladder; in a week she’d have all sorts of insider knowledge.
She’d wanted to get in as Julie Masino’s secretary, but there weren't any openings in that office. Not yet, anyway; if she played her cards just right, she might manage to wrangle a lateral promotion.
Just the same, she wasn’t a pony who would look a gift horse in the mouth.
•••
Humans had keyboards which had over a hundred buttons, humans had programs for spreadsheets and computer letters and such, humans had complicated telephones and she’d studied them and mastered them. In the name of accessibility she got an Orbitouch keyboard and a touchscreen and a stylus, and by the end of the day she’d mastered all three, and learned lots of gossip ‘for her ears only’ about the other staff in the office. For the most part, that wasn’t what she wanted to learn, but she nodded her head at the right times. Keeping a boss happy was an art form. So was keeping a client happy, but for now that wasn’t exactly her job.
As the secretary to the COO, there wasn’t much she was barred from knowing. Information was filed away, stored for later. On the outside, she was the very picture of an efficient and thoughtful secretary. She got to know the team who worked in their department and praised their good work when the COO didn’t. On another hoof, she covered for him when his three martini lunch turned into four then five then the rest of the day off.
Two weeks in, she had enough of a grasp of the job that she could start to ask questions without it raising an eyebrow, most often when she was entering data into spreadsheets. “Hey, Jason, what’s this Star of the West Milling?”
“Oh,” he replied absently, “That’s where we get flour.”
“Flour.” She made a mental note—that was a subject to be revisited. “For tortillas?”
“Yup.”
Discounting his ‘working lunches,’ he had a complicated schedule, and she had to juggle what meetings were mandatory, which were good for climbing the corporate ladder, and which should be ignored. With or without a good excuse; it depended on the situation. Golf games were also ‘meetings,’ and she shut down anybody who thought otherwise.
“He’s in a meeting, huh?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Skala is in a meeting at the moment.”
“He’s not on the links?”
Grace didn’t let her voice change, even though she knew full well he was. He’d even put on his silly golfing clothes before leaving for the day and instructing her to hold his calls. “Mr. Skala is in a private meeting at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Maybe.” She kept her ears perked, even though there was only the quiet hiss of an open line, and a very faint hum of background conversation. “Listen, you’ve got to keep this on the down-low, okay.”
“Of course, our conversation is confidential.” That wasn’t entirely true; obviously she’d give Jason highlights.
“You’ve heard about the latest cilantro issue?”
She hadn’t. “Go on.”
“It’s a supplier issue, Riverside County.”
Grace scribbled that on a notepad. “Send me an e-mail, and I’ll get it sorted.”
“Probably minor, not on the scale of the Kenosha Beef recall. But there could be a contamination issue, and I thought he’d want to know before he had to do damage control.”
“Uh-huh.” She scribbled down ‘Kenosha Beef.’ “How many stores do you think it could affect?
“Couple dozen, maybe up to a hundred. Do you have access to shipment info?”
She did have access to that. It had been very useful already. “Yeah, give me a second. What am I looking for?”
He told her, and a few ergonomic keyboard slides later, she had the information he needed. “You ready for a list of store numbers?”
“Go ahead.”
Grace recited off the list, neatly dumping the problem back on his lap. It was still worth a note to the boss, and another note for herself, two more things for further investigation. Who and what was Kenosha Beef, and where exactly did the cilantros come from? She pushed her glasses up her nose and went to work on her computer—now she had a couple more suppliers’ names to explore and see what she could sniff out.
•••
She’d already learned that Taco Bell had its own headquarters in Irvine, California, while the Louisville office she was at housed the higher-ups for the parent company. She didn’t know if there were any other ponies actually working at Taco Bell’s headquarters, but figured that there probably were. Jason hadn’t mentioned it, anyway.
If Grace had been in charge of the operation, there would have been a pony in Irvine, ideally in a mid-level position that gave her access to large parts of the building.
She hadn’t expected to actually get to visit it, until Jason told her that he had several meetings he needed to attend there and he wanted her to fly out there with him.
•••
Yum! had a private jet, so instead of visiting Louisville International Airport again, she’d gotten to ride out to Bowman Field and got first-class treatment and a direct flight to John Wayne Airport, followed by an executive-car ride on Interstate 405 which was hardly enjoyable. She could have trotted along the highway faster than the car was moving.
From outside, the headquarters wasn’t that impressive. A low-slung building with lots of glass and neat rows of planters and strange white-trunked trees out front, it wasn’t nearly as appealing as her office in Louisville, except that it was bigger.
Inside was a different story. The front entrance was lit up with Taco Bell lavender lights, and inside there were signs that showed the restaurant’s timeline, along with other corporate memorabilia that she would have liked to get a better look at, but had to keep up with Jason.
The back conference room where they set up their temporary camp had a view of Interstate 5, which had the same slow-moving traffic as the 405, and the backside of a shopping mall on the other side of a dozen or so lanes of traffic.
“There’s an old airport on the other side of that mall,” Jason said. “They’re turning it into a park and subdivision now . . . I think it was the Marines. And just up the highway is Disneyland.”
“Really?”
“If you want, you can go—after our meetings, I’m gonna spend a day at Tustin Ranch and Strawberry Farms, and unless you want to go golfing . . . I’m sure we can arrange for a car to take you.”
“It’s tempting.” It really was. Keep your mind on the mission, Grace. “I think, though, if you don’t mind, my time might be better spent here. I can learn a lot by walking around and talking to people.”
“Keep thinking like that and you’ll have my job someday.” Jason chuckled. “Now, we’re going to be going over financials first, do you have the printouts?”
She did have the printouts. Stock prices and dividends and the end-of-quarter bonuses were completely boring, but too much of her job involved them.
•••
True to his word, after two days of meetings Jason went off golfing and gave her free rein of the headquarters. She’d already learned where most things were, but hadn’t had a chance to examine them to her satisfaction.
She started with the history, learning about Glen Bell and how he went from selling hot dogs to tacos, how he’d franchised the first restaurant in 1964 and only three years later had a hundred stores. Grace snickered when she found out that one of his early restaurant names had been Taco-Tia—that was a bit of information ponies didn’t know.
From there, Grace visited the social media room. Hundreds of people working at computers, with a big screen showing who was talking about Taco Bell and what they were saying.
More to her interest was the test kitchen, an auditorium-like space with rows of seating and a turned-around Taco Bell prep station. Chief Innovation Chef Matthews was working on double-stacked taco variations, and let her try one made with black beans and rice.
Further on, there was a row of numbered voting booths where people were encouraged to try new menu items. They would be slid through a slot in the wall; unfortunately for her, there weren’t any new items to try.
They also had a small gym with treadmills and just for fun she cantered on that for a few minutes, long enough to work out some of the stress but not long enough to start sweating. By the time she’d finished, she’d attracted a small audience.
For exercising properly, there was an open area just a short ways down the street with white-trunked trees tied to boxes she could gallop around in, and she could shower off in the hotel afterward. Sometimes she attracted an audience there, too, mostly construction workers.
At the end of the day, she took a brief pilgrimage to Taco Bell Numero Uno, which was on a trailer in the parking lot—one of the people in the social media room had told her about it, and how they’d helped save it when it was threatened with being demolished.
It didn’t look like much, certainly not what she associated Taco Bell with, but it was the same restaurant in the black-and-white photos on the timeline.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: Rosella Admiral Biscuit
Rosella had worked in tomato fields before. Plenty of them, starting when she was a filly, in fact. Tomkin was known for its tomatoes. Her family was known for their tomatoes. Her cousins were known for their tomatoes.
Rosella generally wanted little to do with tomatoes, but it seemed that fate conspired in mysterious ways, and like it or not, no matter where she went, tomatoes.
She liked the taste of tomatoes, she liked the shape and smell of tomatoes, but she didn’t like weeding tomatoes or picking tomatoes or de-bugging tomatoes. Tomatoes at the market were tasty, tomatoes at the market came with a story and no effort on her part. Tomatoes on the vine needed coddling and an Earth pony’s care, and she wanted little to do with tomatoes but in Tomkin there weren’t many other ways for a young Earth pony to earn bits.
Besides tomatoes and the cinema, there wasn’t much for a young mare to spend her bits on, so she saved them in a pass-me-down purse, until one day she had enough to go exploring.
The Wide Wide World of Equestria might have been enough for most ponies, but it wasn’t far enough removed from tomatoes for her liking, so she instead embarked on a sightseeing trip to Earth.
Earth also had tomatoes; in fact, humans liked tomatoes a lot. They sliced them and diced them and made them into soups and sauces and sold them in cans or jars or squeeze-bottles or even little packets that you could get for free at some restaurants.
They even had tomato-based juice and tomato-based cocktails and it was all wonderful because she didn’t have to do anything on the production end. She could go into a grocery store or a restaurant and get as many tomatoes as she wanted, ready to eat.
Or drink, if that was her fancy.
She’d saved a lot of bits, but they had a way of evaporating in a big city and Rosella knew it would be time to go home soon, maybe sooner than she’d expected since she was pretty good at saving bits when there wasn’t anything to spend them on, but not so good at budgeting when there were things to spend her money on.
In fact, if she didn’t leave her hotel room for the rest of her stay on Earth, and only ate canned food—she still wouldn’t have quite enough to make it.
•••
A wise pony knew when she was beaten, so she trudged to the embassy and laid out her tale. She’d tried to get jobs here and there, but most of them weren’t hiring ponies or if they were she needed to have the right kinds of documents, and she didn’t.
At the Equestrian consulate, they were sympathetic to her situation and offered her the choice of early return, or a visa to earn bits in a field that suited her.
She wasn’t ready to give up on her vacation just yet, even if she had to work for some of it, and so she agreed to the second option and several days later she had a shiny new H-2A Visa and a new job as well.
Picking tomatoes.
•••
Admittedly, it was far different than in Tomkin. Here the rows were close and it was bare between them. The fields were bigger than she could have ever imagined, stretching out almost as far as the eye could see with nothing but tomatoes.
She didn’t have to walk the fields and pick them; she got to ride on a fancy cart towed by a fancy tractor. A clever mechanism picked the tomatoes off the vine—it also picked the vine, too, but she tried not to think about that too much—and sorted it onto a short conveyor where her job was to inspect the tomatoes as they rolled past and reject the inferior ones. Then they’d go up another conveyor and be dropped into a second wagon, towed by an even bigger tractor than the one which was towing hers.
She wasn’t alone on the wagon; there was a supervisor and three other tomato-sorters who spoke thickly-accented English and made fun of her the first few hours and then grudgingly accepted her tomato-sorting prowess. By the end of the first day, they were a cohesive herd; mid-week, she’d learned some useful phrases in Spanish and they’d learned some useful phrases in Ponish. By the end of the week, they’d started to teach each other curses in their respective languages, and if that wasn’t bonding, she didn’t know what was.
Rosella had to report to both her direct supervisors and her pony superiors and that was slightly annoying, but that was the deal she’d made. And it really wasn't all that much, mostly questions about tomatoes and how they were sorted and where they went.
She was a curious pony, and most of the farm staff warmed up to her after a week on the job, so it wasn’t all that difficult to find out how the tomatoes got unloaded from the field carts and put in either crates for shipping to grocery stores or if they didn’t look the right way got shipped off instead to make salsa. Bryan, the general foreman, had plenty to teach her about tomato distribution on Earth and some of it was interesting and some of it wasn’t but it all got dutifully reported in her daily and weekly work logs, and once those were sent off she could spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing, or the weekend off seeing what she wanted to see.
Most of the rest of the workers only got one paycheck at the end of the week, but she got two. One from the farm and one from the Embassy and she wasn’t sure why that was. Surely they weren’t paying her for her reports on tomato farming. Lots of ponies knew how to do that.
She wasn’t going to refuse the extra bits, though. She used some of them to buy food and drinks for her co-workers, and saved up the rest for one last trip in her time on Earth.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: S.C.S. Livery Admiral Biscuit
The Powerhouse at Union Station—located across the street from Union Station—was, despite its name, not a powerhouse, although perhaps it had once been. It had a smokestack in back, between the building and interstate 64. It was also conveniently located only two blocks from the Gateway Transportation Center, which had buses and trains.
It also had a 1274 square-foot office for lease on the fourth floor, and a Taco Bell within easy flight distance for Sweet Pepper.
S.C.S. Livery, named for the three ponies who had founded it, had the stated mission of helping ponies get jobs on Earth, which they did. Their unstated mission was industrial espionage, and they were good at that too. They found jobs with access for field agents, as well as for ponies who had no idea they were helping.
Reports were sent in by post or e-mail. Their IT department, such as it was, was totally overwhelmed, and they were scrambling to get more equipment put in. Even after months of operation, they still kept underestimating just how much could or should be done on computers.
On the plus side, they had a big operational purse with bits to burn, so purchasing the equipment wasn’t a problem. The challenge was figuring out just what they needed and finding trustworthy ponies to operate it.
Aside from computers, Creme Brulee dealt with the rest of their office needs. He occasionally clashed with the two mares, since he preferred function over form, and usually bought the cheapest used desks and filing cabinets that would get the job done from the Warehouse of Fixtures.
He also got the daily mail. Besides field reports and other official business, they also got a fair number of unwanted junk mailings; those got shredded and recycled and if they were plain white paper some of the strips got repurposed into a nest for Sweet Pepper. It wasn’t as good as a proper cloud, but it was good enough for morning and afternoon power naps.
They’d split the office into two halves. Up front was the legitimate side of the business; in the back they had their desks as well as a conference room lined with maps, charts, and filing cabinets, which was where the three ponies were gathered along with a special guest.
“So tomatoes are a dead end, nothing new to learn there.” Sweet Pepper tossed a cluster of papers on the table. “We’ll keep Rosella on until her visa expires, of course, but we can go mostly hooves-off.”
“We didn’t learn ‘nothing,’” Creme Brulee objected. “We learned that they use inferior tomatoes for fast food.”
“And steaming and canning and salsaing and juicing and everything else where you don’t see the whole fruit . . . tomatoes are a fruit, aren’t they?”
The other ponies nodded.
“Nothing we needed to know.” Sweet Pepper said. “We already knew the tomato varieties they use, so unless we want to build a human-style harvester. . . .”
Creme Brulee shook his head. “There’d be a riot.”
“What about Grace’s reports?”
“Pure gold, from one end to the other, just like you’d expect. She’s a natural. We got feelers out, ponies in place and others moving in . . . still working on Kenosha Beef, I’ve got some information on the recall but not entirely sure if they’re still a supplier. Sometimes companies get bad blood between them, especially when there’s a lot of money involved. Plus, it’s hard to find a pony who’ll go into an abattoir, even for what we’d pay.”
“You have consulted with griffons, right?”
“Of course,” the pegasus huffed. “No stone unturned and all that.”
“I’d prefer to get a pony into the office end of things; she’d have more access. Rather than a griffon on the, uh, processing line.” Sweetcream Scoops lit her horn and pulled up a stack of papers. “We’ve got good leads on fat/lean ratios and cooking times and the size the beef’s milled to, and we can get exports made to our standards if we want. I am going to get a filming crew into a processing plant, I’m still working on negotiations for that. Moving on, what do we know about McLean Co.?”
“Trucks working for Pepsico, they’re just a delivery service.” Creme Brulee pointed to a flowchart. “Not likely to be fertile ground there, but we can put a truck driver or laborer in place if we think there’s gonna be anything useful. I was on the Matchbox truck logistics team, and shipping isn’t what we really need to know. The products go in a box from the factory, sit for a while in a big barn which they call a warehouse, then go on another truck or boat or train to be shipped to a different distribution barn and eventually a store. From what I can tell, they have the same process with their food distribution.”
“Chapulin’s been sending in good reports. What do we have for follow-up?”
“Let’s see. She gave us another company name and address, probably an intermediate but we’ve got a pony on payroll there starting next week.” Creme Brulee consulted his notes. “Restaurant Supply Chain Solutions LLC; they’ve got an opening in Dallas.
“There’s a lot we knew about the ingredients. They make the hard taco shells out of tortillas in-house, so that’s why we couldn’t find a source on those. Food holding temperatures, cooking times, POS interface—that’s not worth pursuing—machine names.”
“We got anypony on the machines?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I think that they’re all custom-made for Taco Bell, not commercially available. But there have to be companies who build them to spec, and we’ve got feelers out there. Between Grace and Chapulin, I think we’ll get most of the equipment sources in time.”
Starlight Glimmer licked her lips. “How about the sauces?”
Sweetcream Scoops stood up. “Bulk sauces and salsa packets come from two different sources, I think. Their salsa’s proprietary, and we’re working our way up the chain on that one. Kraft sells some kinds in bottles but we’re not sure if it’s exactly the same stuff.
“They’ll usually give you as many little packets as you want at the store and sometimes you can get the other kinds in little cups, so we’ve got plenty to study and maybe reverse-engineer. That’s not actually our operation; we don’t have the space. There’s a test kitchen set up outside of Kansas City.” She pointed a hoof to the west. “The train goes there, so it’s really convenient.
“They’ve got hot and mild mostly figured out, but diablo is proving to be a tougher nut to crack. We haven’t found out where they make them, yet, but we will. Hopefully it’s the same kitchen where they make the bulk sauces, or else we’re gonna have to get more ponies involved.”
“I can get however many you need,” Starlight assured her. “What about the tortillas?”
She shrugged. “We’re working on that. Grace said that some of the flour is milled at Star of the West, we found that, and we’ve got a miller we can get in there once there’s an opening. I’ve been twisting legs on that end. A lot of big companies don’t want too much cross-pollination though, so it’s tougher. She should get in eventually—I padded her resume to make her look more appealing to humans.”
Starlight Glimmer nodded. “Okay, so you’ve got basic logistics, preparation techniques, and some suppliers nailed on and folded over. Flour’s on the to-do list, logistics is a maybe, and you’re working up the sources for machines.”
“And cheese, that’s important too. We haven’t forgotten about that. We’ve got a cheesemaker named Beemster sniffing around in Wisconsin, learning what he can, and when we’ve figured out who supplies Taco Bell, we’ll get him in there.”
Pozole leaned forward in his seat as the Ryder truck exited I-395 and merged onto route 64. He was riding shotgun; Ryder had made him hire a driver with the truck.
As a result, he’d been forced to get more truck than he wanted. Enterprise had vans available that would have been perfect, but Enterprise didn’t have drivers to rent, so he was stuck with a bright yellow box truck that rode like an old unsprung farm wagon.
Just across Bloomingdale Rd. was a Taco Bell, and he decided that on the way back he was going to have a victory taco or two. For now, he needed to stay focused on his mission.
He gazed out the window at the town going past. There were a few subdivisions, some more stores, and then warehouses clustered on either side of the road.
They made a right on Gary Avenue and then another right on Keyhoe Boulevard, and just on the other side of a swampy field was Antunes, a modern-looking white building.
Grace had gotten a copy of Taco Bell’s official equipment catalog, and they’d started tracking down manufacturers. A.J. Antunes was the provider of both the cup dispensing system, which the ponies didn’t care that much about, and the cheesemelters, which they did.
Once the driver had parked the box truck, Pozole opened the door and was about to jump out when he remembered he was sitting nearly two feet higher than he normally did in cars, so he stepped on the floor and then carefully on the fuel tank before hopping to the ground.
The front door of the building was easy enough to find; it was glass like most storefronts. He had been anticipating something more industrial, but then there was a railroad track right behind the building, which was something a big company that supplied machines to thousands of Taco Bells would need.
With the big windows, he’d expected there to be a showroom in the front, someplace where they could display the machines and potential customers could look through the windows at them if the factory was closed. Instead, they had a mostly-empty lobby and a woman sitting at a desk who he correctly deduced was a receptionist.
“Are you looking for somebody?” she asked as he approached.
“A salesperson, I suppose.” Pozole wasn’t entirely sure how humans tended to sell machines. The catalog that Grace had found suggested ordering the equipment through a computer, but they weren’t sure how that would work. Back in St. Louis, ponies were working on it; when he’d left the office they’d been upgrading their computer equipment, since it was becoming increasingly obvious that they needed more than what they had. “I want to buy a cheesemelter.”
“I see.”
“Model TBS-2X.”
“How many are you looking to purchase?”
Pozole frowned. “How many would I need?”
“That’s for you to decide, sir. We have different sales teams for single units or bulk purchases . . . are you planning to buy them by the dozen?”
“No, we won’t need that many.” Not at first.
“Very good, I’ll buzz Greg’s office.”
•••
It wasn’t long before Greg arrived and hesitated, something Pozole was accustomed to. Humans liked shaking hands when they met new people and they were never sure how to do that with a pony. He held out his foreleg and Greg gripped it lightly, then dropped it.
Pozole would have preferred a nuzzle, but most humans didn’t go for those on a first meeting.
Greg’s office wasn’t that far from the receptionist’s desk. His desk was cluttered with papers and pictures and there were several filing cabinets behind him which were painted to match the walls. The ones they had in their office were ugly, dented, mismatched old things, but they got the job done. Still, he’d be embarrassed if a guest who wasn’t working on the project set hoof in there.
“So you’re looking for a cheesemelter.”
“Yes, the TBS-2X.” Pozole wasn’t surprised that the receptionist had told Greg what he was after. It would keep things simple. “Just one for today, I think. We could get more later if we needed them, right?”
“Of course.”
“How much are they?”
Greg told him.
“I don’t have that many bits on me; would you prefer a check or a credit card?”
“We’ll accept either, but we don’t have any here right now,” Greg said. “This is our headquarters, we don’t warehouse equipment here.”
“So I can’t buy one?”
“No, you can . . . most of our customers usually order online or by phone and we have it delivered to their business. We could even ship it here, if you’d rather pick it up in person—er, sorry, that was force of habit.”
“How long does it take to get one?” Blacksmiths could take days or weeks to produce a piece to spec, depending on how many other orders they had in the queue before it. If it was complex, it might take months. Parts had to be forged, folded, fitted—it wasn’t a fast process, and human machines were several levels in complexity beyond anything ponies could produce yet. If they didn’t have any already made, he was going to be waiting a while for his cheesemelter. He’d assumed that Antunes was like all the big stores or even car dealerships that had lots of inventory available at all times.
“If you’re in the continental US, less than a week. We can overnight it, but that costs a lot more. They’re heavy units, and air freight isn’t cheap.”
“I wasn’t planning on spending a night in Carol Stream.” Pozole tapped his hoof on the chair, deep in thought. “I thought that we could load it up and drive back, that’s why I got a big box truck to carry it in. Otherwise I would have come in an Uber.”
Greg shook his head. “I don’t think that there’s much commercial equipment you’d be able to get by driving around and expecting someone to have it stock, not around here. Maybe used. If you need it today, you could try Pierce Equipment. They’re in Countryside, that’s about thirty miles southeast of us. If not, I could next-day a unit to you for a premium, or have it in a week or less with standard shipping. Where would we be shipping it to?”
“St. Louis,” he said.
“And you came all the way to Carol Stream? There must be restaurant supply houses there.”
“We thought it was best to get it direct from the manufacturer, that way we’d know we were getting a proper machine.” He paused. “Plus the service and repair manuals, those are very important.”
“Oh, I can just put those on a USB stick for you,” Greg said, and stuck a small stick in his computer. “Just let me check which warehouses have them in stock . . . mmm, okay, I can do two days on a unit to St. Louis via UPS, but it’s going to be about $150 shipping. Or we can get it shipped here for the same cost, if you’re planning on staying in town for a couple days.”
“You know, I was thinking,” Pozole said, “and if there’s a second unit there, I’d like to have two.” Odds were that the tech boffins were going to want to take it apart and see what was inside, and there’d be all sorts of friction between the chefs and the techs.
“Sure is.”
•••
After the deal was concluded, he shook Greg’s hand and got back into the Ryder truck. The driver was surprised that they were heading back with no cargo, but didn’t ask Pozole about it.
Even the expensive next-day shipping was cheaper than keeping the Ryder truck and driver, so Pozole reluctantly decided on that option. It would have been nice to have had his driver park the bright yellow box truck in front of their command center and triumphantly carry the cheesemelter in, but the only way that that would happen now was if he had the unit shipped to Carol Springs and then drove it, and what was the point of that? It would be more expensive.
The two of them did stop at Taco Bell for a meal, eating in the restaurant instead of the truck, since it wouldn’t fit through the drive-through and it wasn’t safe to eat while driving anyway.
•••
Pozole couldn’t get an airplane back on short notice, so he settled on taking Metra to Union Station and buying a ticket there. There weren’t any night trains; he’d have to wait for a morning train, and he considered riding back to O’Hare and seeing if he could get a morning flight but he was downtown already and didn’t fancy the idea of another trip out to the airport.
There was a Hilton only a few blocks away from the train station, and his room had a good view over the parks, Lake Michigan, and the busy Metra tracks which ran through a trench.
His room also came with a telephone, and while he could boot up his folding computer and type in a report like they preferred, the telephone was easier, because it was less than a dozen numbers to make a connection and then he could talk normally.
“S.C.S. Livery, how can I help?” A mare’s voice cheerfully answered.
“Are any of the bosses still in the office?” Time zones confused him and he was reasonably certain he was in the same one as St. Louis, but not entirely sure.
“Sweet Pepper is, would you like me to transfer your call?”
“Please.”
A moment later a groggy pegasus came on the line. “Yeah?”
“Hey, it’s Pozole.”
“Oh!” There was a moment of silence, then, “Did you get the cheesemelter?”
“Sort of. We found their headquarters, not a store, so they didn’t have any.” He gave her a brief rundown of his interaction with Greg. “I coulda maybe gone to Countryside and gotten one used, but I thought we’d be better off with a couple new ones, so they ought to arrive on a truck sometime on Wednesday.”
“Where’d you send it?”
“I—“ He frowned. “I should have sent it to Kansas City, but I thought of you first, so it’s going to St. Louis. So I guess sometime tomorrow you’re going to get a big heavy box that’s got a cheesemelter in it.”
“When are you going to be back?”
“Also sometime tomorrow. There’s an Amtrak train that leaves at 7 in the morning and gets there around noon, but they usually run late.”
“I’ve never understood that, they don’t have to stop for water or coal. Alright, I’ll let the rest of the team know.”
“Thanks.” Pozole hesitated before placing the receiver back on its base. He should have known to ship it to Kansas City, that was a mistake. Then again, maybe he’d get to take the package there himself, and he’d have his moment of triumph after all.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: Chapulin II Admiral Biscuit
At first some of the other workers at Taco Bell had been wary around Chapulin, but by the end of her first week most of them had warmed up to her. Gómez started calling her Cri-Cri, and that nickname stuck.
“It’s time to learn to make food,” Gómez told her one morning after she’d clocked in for her shift. “Not just for yourself, but for customers.”
Chapulin grinned and started wagging her tail. This was what she’d come for, and she’d proven herself on the cash registers and the drive-through and unloading the food truck and of course cleaning.
“First thing is that you always have to wear gloves on the food line.”
“Gloves? Those are for people. I use magic. I don’t need—”
Gómez stuck a latex glove over her horn, and she shivered at the unexpected touch. “There you go.”
She couldn’t see it. The brim of her hat obscured it, but she could kind of feel it was there. It was a dumb rule, right up there with needing shoes.
Which she’d already had to replace: the brass didn’t have any traction on the slippery tile floors. It wasn’t good for her hooves to get re-shod too often, so after her second day, she’d mail-ordered a set of hoof boots to fit over her shoes. Those hadn’t been cheap, $92 per boot plus shipping, but Easyboot Clouds were the only ones she could get quickly in a pony size. Plus, they claimed that they were good for hard surfaces.
Gómez took a few pictures of her with his phone, then took the glove back off her horn. “You don’t really need that.”
Chapulin stuck her tongue out at him. “Are you going to help me to make tacos?”
“Have you watched all the training videos?”
She nodded. There were a lot of them, and she’d stayed late after several shifts to see them all, sometimes more than once just to make sure she understood.
“Make me a burrito supreme.”
Watching the training videos wasn’t the same as actually doing it. She knew it was a ten-inch tortilla, cooked for five seconds per side on the tortilla warmer. And then refried beans, but there were two different scoops in the bean bin. “Is it the red scoop or the green one?”
“Red.”
“And then the red sauce.”
Gómez nodded.
Seasoned beef was easy; there was only one size scoop in that. And then a single trigger-pull of sour cream, small handfuls of lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and onions, all of that was straightforward.
Until it was time to fold it. Watching the video wasn’t the same as doing it herself; Gómez showed her and then unfolded it to let her try.
On the third attempt, he considered it a success, and she got to fold it into the wrapper which she also got wrong the first time.
The whole afternoon, she struggled on the line while Gómez helped her and encouraged her, reminding her of food cooking times and ingredients or which wrapper to use.
Things in bowls were the easiest to make, as long as she remembered what went in them. There wasn’t any folding or rolling or cutting involved. Hard-shell tacos were easy, too; she just had to be careful not to break them when she wrapped them.
It wasn’t easy to tell that she was getting quicker during her shift. The food orders never ceased, but Gómez wasn’t having to help her out as much, and by the time they were well into Fourthmeal, he wasn’t helping her at all. She didn’t need help any more.
•••
That night she was too tired to write in her journal. She got out of her Uber and staggered up to her apartment, peeled off her Easyboots and flopped down on her bed for a short rest.
She woke up in the middle of the night, uncomfortably sweaty in her uniform clothes. Chapulin undressed herself and tossed the clothes into a pile on the floor, then fell back asleep.
•••
The next morning, she was stiff and sore and her coat was clumped and matted. She staggered to the shower and as the hot water rinsed the dried sweat off her, she started to feel like a proper pony again.
Her apartment had a laundry in the basement, which was a perk she’d never thought she’d use. A week’s worth of Taco Bell clothes—minus the hat, which couldn’t be washed in a machine—went in, and she ate breakfast while watching her clothes spin round and round in the machine.
The soap she used had a lavender scent, which wasn’t powerful enough to mask the Taco Bell smell in her clothes.
She didn’t watch her clothes in the dryer; instead she wrote in her notebook. She’d already written down all the food preparation instructions as she’d learned them from the computer training modules, but now that she’d done it for herself, she could get more specific with tips and tricks that she’d learned on the job.
When she was back upstairs with a basketful of fresh fluffy clothes, she went into her office and scanned the new pages into the computer, then sent them off via e-mail.
Como Salsa para los Tacos: The Sauce Must Flow Admiral Biscuit
Serrano knew that human industry was done on a scale which dwarfed pony industry, but he’d never been able to wrap his mind around it. As a foal, he’d played in the house while his mother patiently chopped up peppers for sauce, and even though it was silly, he couldn’t help but picture a big factory as just being a lot of mares all chopping up peppers.
A few newsreels in Equestria had shown human assembly lines, and he could sort of get an understanding of how many there must be by seeing all the cars on the street or all the goods for sale at Wal-Mart. It didn’t prepare him for his first view of the factory, how big it was, how many cars were sitting idle in the parking lot, how many truck trailers were backed up to the loading docks.
The factory was vastly bigger than any mill or sauciers’ establishment and intellectually that made sense, he could still see in his mind rows of stove and pans and chefs and then when he walked through the door into the factory proper he caught a glance of forklifts moving boxes by the pallet and the bottles on the line blurring by at a breakneck pace to satisfy the needs of millions of consumers.
It was insane. How could there be any kind of quality control? How would anypony know what was in any particular bottle? As far as he could tell, the only people involved were at the very end, stuffing the bottles into cardboard boxes as fast as they could, and the people who were driving the forklifts around to carry the full boxes away, one pallet at a time.
He did know that Taco Bell sauces came in little packets instead of jars, and he’d been told that some of those sauces were made here and put in packets here and if the bottles were filled this fast, how much faster might packets be made? They held far less sauce and Taco Bell gave them out by the half-dozen upon request; they had to have been produced at a furious rate.
Serrano didn’t get to find out right away. There was a brief orientation meeting and a safety meeting for all new employees and a reminder that he had to wear his food-suit and mane-net and muzzle-cover at all times, lest a stray hair wind up in the finished product.
Back in Equestria, a stray hair was proof that the pony who’d said she made the salsa really did. Humans didn’t like that though; the size and scale of the factory made him finally realize that humans generally had no idea where their food had come from. Commercials showed chefs in kitchens, not factories full of pipes and bottles on conveyors. No one opened a sauce packet at Taco Bell and thought of this factory, or the people who worked in it.
•••
After his brief training, he was sent to the head end of the salsa line. That gave him a brief opportunity to check out the tail end of the sachet line as he walked past—a constant barrage of pneumatic noise, a giant roll of unfilled sauce packets feeding like newsprint into a machine, and with each ca-chunk another dozen now-full packets got sliced off the sheet and into a holding bucket, which dumped them out by the hundreds into a box below.
One man watched that end of the line, occasionally pulling defective sachets out of the bucket and tossing them into a waste basket.
The unformed packets were fed into the machine on a roll; the salsa arrived in a hose and that bothered him. Sauce wasn’t supposed to be in a pipe.
•••
His job was at the other end of the pipe, feeding raw ingredients into the maw of the demanding machine.
When his mother made food, if it was something she hadn’t grown and picked herself, she inspected it at the market stand and again when she got it home. She carefully trimmed it, keeping the best parts for the food and the worst parts for the compost heap or for stew. Then came dicing, and another inspection before the vegetable was worthy to go in the pot.
Here, the incoming vegetables got a quick look as they were emptied onto the conveyor; people picked out the tomatoes that weren’t all the way ripe and picked off the stems and leaves and then they got fed into a giant machine which diced them and unceremoniously dumped them into a bin big enough to fit several ponies. Onions and cilantro met a similar fate.
From there, they all got measured by weight and then dumped into a giant cooking pot. Until he’d set hoof in the factory, the biggest mixing bowl he’d seen had been the one on a pony-drawn cement mixer. This one dwarfed that, and was made all of shiny stainless steel besides.
His job was demanding, but not skilled. Inspect as quickly as possible the ingredients going in to each cooking pot, make sure that nothing that didn’t belong went in, make sure his protective gear was always on. There were a few levers and latches he had to use, but for the most part it was buttons to push and then a machine would do the work from there.
By lunchtime, Serrano was more than ready for a break. The pungent aroma of salsa had somewhat faded in his nose, but he’d been hungry all day. Such was the price of working in a food factory.
The lunchroom didn’t have anything fresh, just a machine with processed brand-name food and another with Coke. Some people brought their own lunch, some of them ate vending machine food, and some of them didn’t eat anything, just played on their phones.
Some of the defective sauce packets made their way into the lunchroom, ready to spice up a person—or a pony’s—lunch. He’d brought a sack of stone-ground oats, and the Taco Bell fire sauce gave it an extra zing.
•••
Serrano didn’t gain his equilibrium until after lunch break. Between the size of the machines and the removal from any type of cooking he knew, he was off-balance for the entire morning, not only trying to learn a new job, but also trying to wrap his head around the scale of it, the process of it. Kettles and pipes and conveyors, the constant beeping from machines that wanted attention and from forklifts to warn people before they got run over, paper logbooks that had to be filled out even though a machine could have done that, too.
The scale of the factory was beyond anything that ponies could build—was beyond the scale of a factory that ponies should build. But the recipe at the front end of the line was what he was here to learn, the ratio of tomatoes to onions to cilantros, what kind of spices got put in . . . humans might have lost their way when it came to the care with which they produced their food, but ponies could fix it, could scale the line back until it was a mare or two dicing vegetables and cooking them in a sauce pot instead of a hogshead.
•••
If he concentrated on remembering the ratios, he got behind, and then he got yelled at by his co-worker, a heavyset man named Dan. If he didn’t quite focus on them, he could keep up, and hope that he remembered them at the end of the day.
Dan wasn’t keen on having a pony co-worker to train, and Serrano wasn’t enthused about Dan either, but the two of them both understood their role and the necessity of getting along well enough to keep production moving, and by the end of the shift they’d reached an uneasy truce. Ponies could sometimes be won over by food, and while after a shift at the factory Dan probably didn’t want anything to do with home-cooked salsa, Serrano also knew how to make three-milk cakes, and everypony liked those. Especially if they had strawberries on top.
As much as it pained him, he wrote out everything about the factory before starting in on the cake. The lack of attention given to the ingredients—most tomatoes weren’t even touched after they were dumped out of their crates, except to move them in bulk to another process—to the insane size of the mixing and cooking bowls and the relentless pace of the line. The machine that indifferently packaged salsa from a hose into packets with inspirational messages printed on them, only to be dumped into a big box which ultimately got carried off by a forklift to who knew where.
Was everything on Earth made that way? Did all the products for sale at Wal-Mart rush down some kind of conveyor with minimal human interaction only to be stuffed into boxes or plastic-sealed to cardboard at the end of it? What about bigger things? Were all the cars that crowded the road made that way, on giant conveyor belts with no proper craftsponies involved, only workers like Dan who knew how to follow instructions?
Serrano didn’t send the email, he kept it as a draft and went into the kitchen and made a 3-milk cake, working on the whipped cream topping as it cooked.
When the cake came out of the oven, it was like he’d completed his absolution, and he reviewed his email as it cooled. There were a few spots where he could have been more diplomatic, and to be honest human industry had its advantages—for example, he could set his oven at a specific temperature and trust that it stayed at what it said it was. With salsa by the ton, consistency must be very important, especially since nobody could check every single packet to make sure it was good. Sometimes when the oven wasn’t hot enough or was too hot his cakes came out wrong.
He sent the email and frosted his cake, then ate a slice to check for quality, and then he went to bed because he was exhausted.
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.”
