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    The Key Ingredient: A Short Story
    The Key Ingredient: A Short Story
    The Key Ingredient: A Short Story
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    The Key Ingredient: A Short Story

    By Susan Wiggs

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs comes a wonderful short story, and companion tale to her unforgettable novel Family Tree

    Every great love story has a beginning. Annie Rush’s started at a food cart in a vibrant city park. Annie, then a film student, came across a ruggedly handsome, charismatic chef serving up gourmet street food to an ever-growing clientele lining up for his creations. Together, Annie and Martin Harlow conceived The Key Ingredient, a cooking show featuring Martin as the star while Annie handles production.

    As they travel to Annie’s Vermont hometown to film their pilot episode, she realizes that she might want to create more than television magic with Martin. But does he feel the same way? The weather is miserable, their shoot is a disaster, and the maple syrup just isn’t flowing. While Annie tries to cling to her vision for their show, she can’t help but wonder if she could be as unlucky in work as she is in love. Is she always destined to stay behind the scenes?

    Just as some recipes only come together at the last minute with the addition of a key ingredient, sometimes a single moment can change everything—turning Annie’s life into a cornucopia of good fortune, the feast of her dreams.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9780062499066
    The Key Ingredient: A Short Story
    Author

    Susan Wiggs

    Susan Wiggs is the author of many beloved bestsellers, including the popular Lakeshore Chronicles series. She has won many awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America. Visit her website at www.SusanWiggs.com.

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      Book preview

      The Key Ingredient - Susan Wiggs

      cover.jpg33465.png

      Contents

      [Maybe yes, maybe no....]

      An Excerpt from Family Tree

      Also by Susan Wiggs

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      MAYBE YES, MAYBE NO. Martin has been flirting with me this whole trip. I pretend to treat it lightly, but come on. Martin Harlow. He’s like a piece of found art, rough around the edges, but with a form and function that haunts a girl’s dreams. At the moment, I’m not dreaming, although everyone else in the rental van is. I’m the only one awake besides the driver.

      The last leg of the journey is always the hardest. Especially when the journey takes place at the blustery tail end of winter and you’re traveling from the sunny blaze of Los Angeles to the frigid wilds of northern Vermont. After the redeye flight from LA to New York, my production team and I endured a bumpy regional hop to Burlington, followed by a slog in two hired vans to our final destination—­Switchback, Vermont.

      It’s my hometown, but I haven’t lived here since I graduated high school. What is home? Maybe it’s not a place, but a moment in time. When I was safe. Secure. Cared for. Home. It’s more than a point on a map. It’s a sensation. A feeling of comfort—­feet sinking into warm slippers. Hands curling around a mug of fragrant coffee. Sounds of birdsong and breezes stirring the leaves in the maple trees. As my mind wraps around the notion of home, everything else falls away. It simply fades like the ambient noise we deal with on set every day when we’re filming a segment for the show.

      I grew up knowing that the best maple syrup in the world comes from Vermont. And the best syrup in Vermont comes from Rush Mountain. It’s been my family’s business for generations. And now the production is going to set up, literally, in my own backyard—­the family sugarbush on Rush Mountain.

      Many times, I’ve pictured myself coming back one day in triumph, having chased my dream clear to California and back. I suppose you could say that’s what I’m doing now, about to begin filming the pilot episode of a TV series I created.

      When we pitched the show to the network, I was asked how I came up with the name, The Key Ingredient. The truth is, I had the name long before I had the show. It comes from the wisest woman I’ve ever known—­Anastasia Carnaby Rush, my grandmother. Gran used to say each recipe has a key ingredient—­one element that defines it, without which the dish simply wouldn’t be the same, like the vinegar in a red velvet cake, the threads of saffron in paella or the four pods of star anise she used to tuck into the pasta sauce as it simmered on the back burner.

      What she really meant had nothing to do with a recipe you make in the kitchen. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t figure that out sooner.

      I wish Gran were still around for my homecoming, even though it’s for work and the budget only allows us seventy-­two hours for filming. She would have been so happy for me.

      When I was growing up, Gran and I watched hours and hours of PBS cooking shows together. This was in the ’90s, before the food channels that are so ubiquitous these days exploded onto the scene. The older shows were pretty basic—­a well-­equipped kitchen, an island counter, a chopping board and four burners. Yet even the most pared-­down, simple production inspired us if the chef had a great personality. We loved it when the host would talk of his travels and share the stories behind the food, all the while demonstrating kitchen techniques we could practice. I learned to fold, cream, julienne and sauté by watching Martin Yan, Chef Tell and Mario Batali, while Gran wrote down the recipes so we could recreate them at home.

      Even back then, it wasn’t just the cooking techniques that drew me in. I was fascinated by the whole idea of a kitchen rigged with cameras so a talented chef or home cook could share her art. I dreamed of being in the spotlight myself, showing the world how to make egg pasta or maple-­glazed carrots or rosemary lemonade. Our family photo albums are stuffed with snapshots of me giving pretend demos to a rapt audience of dolls, dogs or grandparents. While other kids were building with Legos, I was practicing my knife skills.

      At the age of nine, I got a digital video camcorder for Christmas. When I learned what that big, cumbersome camera could do, it was as if I’d seen the face of God. Not only could I dream up my own shows and episodes, I could film them and play them back.

      Gran was a really good sport about it all. She let me set the camera on its tripod and play unfortunate selections of background music while I interviewed her.

      I was never homesick, she said, talking to me—­not the camera. "This place has always felt more like home to me than the big city. You see, I believe some ­people are born in the place they belong. Others have to go looking for it. That was me. I

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