[Sterek] Cupboard Love (boyxboy) (complete)

Chapter 7

If this keeps up, Stiles is going to wind up making friends with the fancy butcher. His haul from the grocery store that week includes a small mountain of smoked lardons for the beef bourguignon he's going to make. It's ridiculous that what is essentially smoked bacon is this freaking expensive, but it's Derek's money, so. Of course, he had to get a friend to pick up two bottles of red for him since he wasn't 21 yet, but Stiles wasn't even going to be eating the dish and the alcohol would be cooked off anyway.

Stiles quickly sears the outsides of the beef and sets it aside while he gently cooks carrots and celery, a tender leek, a diced onion, and some shallots and bay leaves in the same pan so they'll absorb some of the juices left behind. The light steam arising from the pan smells heavenly, and he isn't even half done.

Stiles dumps in the lardons and the two bottles of wine from a careful arm's length to avoid the immediate tannin hiss, waits for the alcohol to simmer off and lowers the heat to cook the bourguignon, covered, until the smell fills up the kitchen and all the little spaces. It can stew for most of an hour while he works on the mashed potatoes.

Stiles' mom had taught him to cook, from when he was young enough that mostly "cooking" had meant "picking bits of eggshell out of the bowl" until he was twelve and just getting good. When she got sick, when they had known that she wouldn't be getting better, he spent most of his time after school sitting beside her hospital bed with a notebook, painstakingly taking down recipes her family had never put on paper before.

"I wish I could have shown you all of these," she'd said more than once. "I wish I had the time to help you cook something for someone special. Promise me you won't stop when I'm gone." Her skin had been translucent and thin, her remaining hair tucked and wrapped under a brightly coloured silk scarf he and his dad had picked out from a shop in town.

"I promise, of course I promise." Stiles had stopped saying things like "Don't say that, you'll get better, I know you will" or "Who says you won't be there?" eventually. They'd only made her look sadder and older. When he promised he'd work hard until he didn't have to look at a recipe at all she'd smile instead and tell him about the time dad had tried to impress her with a home cooked meal the night he proposed. They'd wound up ordering in, instead.

He still had the notebook he'd originally written everything down in, but it was tucked away in his room back home, stained and sloppy where he'd spilled on it, or cried on it, blurring some of his careful and awkward seventh grade penmanship.

After she had passed he'd swung between determined and panicked and angry while trying to cook all of her family recipes. The first time he'd made her mashed potatoes he'd almost given up halfway through, impatient and distracted because whole potatoes took so long to boil and seriously, who peeled potatoes after they boiled, anyway? It had taken him a few tries to even manage to handle a hot, soft potato with a clean rag, roughly removing the skin. He'd thought it was ridiculous to press them through a sieve instead of just mashing them by hand until he saw how smooth and fine they came out.

Now Stiles is just glad he has this at all from his mom. There aren't a lot of things a boy can inherit from his mother and keep around that aren't awkward or creepy. He misses her every day, but at least when he cooks he has a piece of her with him: the smell of her cooking when he came home from school, the memories of her careful instructions in that hospital room, the way she'd taught him to handle a knife when he still had to stand on a step-stool to reach the kitchen counters as a kid.

It took him a few years to get over the panic attacks, to settle down into just sad and not actively afraid, to eventually learn to keep living and accept that it was okay to be happy again. When he scrapes the smooth mash into another pot and gets it to steam up a bit first before he adds in the milk and butter he feels happy, remembers her voice walking him through it. One day Stiles will cook her favorite dishes for someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with. For now, he'll cook for his dad and his friends and really anyone who appreciates it.

He'd changed some of the recipes slightly when he realized his dad really had to eat better. When Stiles wants him to get some extra vegetables he sneaks them into the food where they won't be noticed. Instead of thickening the sauce with flour, Stiles carefully adds purèed carrots which taste sweet, balancing out the flavour of the wine and making the whole dish feel heartier and more filling.

Then he stirs in button mushrooms and lets them absorb the flavours of the rest of the dish for a few minutes.

If Stiles had to, he'd guess Derek is a meat and potatoes guy rather than a broccoli and carrots guy. This way he can get both.

He lets everything cool a bit before packing it up into the fancy new tupperware Derek has loaned him. They're bigger, and the lids snap tightly closed. They're not his mom's, but maybe he'll save those for taking home some of the stuff he'll need for Thanksgiving.