Page 19 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

Jodie woke up full of the fervour and good intentions that had carried her through the previous afternoon.

And she had a system now. She just had to find Darcy and sit at her feet until she got into the swing of things.

Who was to say she wasn’t an event planner? She was definitely planning an event.

She took her laptop back to the estate office after breakfast but it was empty. A Post-it note stuck to the monitor simply said Gone riding.

Right. Plan B. She made her way to the kitchen, where Bella was sitting at the island, head bent over a notebook. ‘I’ve been thinking about food for the gala,’ she announced almost before Jodie was through the door.

‘Great.’ Food and venue were the next things on Gemma’s plan. ‘So we’ll need a caterer?’

Bella’s face was instantly set like thunder.

Not a caterer then. ‘Sorry. I didn’t know if you’d want to…’

‘I’m not having someone else cook for our first big event, and food’s our, what do you call it, USP, isn’t it? That’s what you said in the interview.’

Jodie added USP to her mental list of Gemma words she needed to google.

‘I’m thinking canapés and then a buffet. We’ll need to hire in heat lamps, or find some second-hand maybe. But it’ll be less serving staff than a sit-down meal, and staff costs on New Year’s Eve are a biggie.’

That all made perfect sense and Jodie wouldn’t have thought of any of it. ‘You’re the food expert,’ she managed.

Bella grinned. ‘I thought we might have a practice run at some of the canapé ideas this morning? So we’re a well-oiled machine for the big night.’

‘You know I’m not much use in the kitchen.’

‘And I told you, you might have to help anyway.’ Bella’s tone was gentle. ‘You’ll be fine. I’ll talk you through it.’ She pushed her notebook towards Jodie. ‘These are my ideas.’

‘What are tattie scones?’

‘They’re sort of…’ She stopped. ‘They’re a Scottish thing. Actually I asked Flinty to come and talk us both through those.’

‘But what are they?’

‘Sort of potatoey scones.’ Bella raised her eyebrow. ‘You know what tatties are. You’ve got neeps and tatties on your plan for the night.’

That was true. Neeps and tatties were absolutely on the plan under food. Jodie just hadn’t got to googling those yet.

‘I guess I didn’t know you could make scones out of them.’

‘Apparently you can.’ Bella started towards the door. ‘Come on. Flinty said if we walked over to the shop, she’d drive us back.’ She paused, her face dropping slightly. ‘I need to say goodbye to Adam.’

Adam was heading to Edinburgh for the rest of the week to focus on his real business – landscape gardening for wealthy city clients – which was the main thing keeping the castle afloat until Jodie worked her highly anticipated magic and transformed Lowbridge into a sought-after events destination.

Bella reappeared a minute later, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper.

‘Ridiculous. He’s back on Saturday and it’s not like I even see him that often when he is here.

I spent half of yesterday morning wandering the grounds looking for him.

’ She took a deep breath in. ‘Stupid. Come on then.’

They walked across the Low Bridge and along the shoreline the length of the village.

‘You probably haven’t had much chance to explore over here?’

Jodie shook her head. ‘I drove through with Pavel when I arrived but I haven’t really left the estate since.’

Along one side of them was the village, but along the other was the sea, and beyond that an island.

‘So that’s Raasay?’ she asked. ‘And Loch Aber Cross?’ She’d got her phone out and pored over the map after her walk up to the top of the headland. Jodie loved maps. She loved the way the world translated down into lines and colours. It made sense of things that weren’t always sensible.

‘Yeah. It’s not a lake loch though. It’s a sea loch. Like an inlet.’

Jodie understood. ‘I love being by the coast.’

‘Me too.’ Bella turned towards the village, pointing out the pub as they walked by.

‘And then up there is the community hall. It’s pretty run-down though.

We keep talking about fundraising to reopen it, but so much goes on at the castle now.

I think it feels less urgent than it did.

’ The pub nestled next to a row of tiny stone cottages.

As they continued along the seashore, the row of older houses thinned out and were replaced by a small estate of newer builds.

Behind the houses the hill rose up into the mountains. It was spectacular.

At the end of the estate Bella stopped and crossed the road towards the buildings. ‘Village shop.’

Jodie stopped. ‘Where?’

Bella laughed. ‘Oh. Yeah. I’ve been here too long. I’ve sort of forgotten what regular shops look like. Come on. You’ll get used to it.’

Jodie remembered very well what normal shops looked like.

They had aisles and shopping trolleys and car parks.

They weren’t what seemed like the entire contents of a big Tesco crammed into a domestic garage.

There was fresh fruit and veg at the front, and then shelves on shelves on shelves of tins and packets. ‘They’ve got everything in here.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, love.’ Anna popped up from behind a display cabinet. ‘We couldn’t fit everything in here. Non-food stuff’s out the back.’

‘Out the back’ didn’t mean in some unseen storeroom. Following Bella through Anna’s back garden they found tinfoil, bin bags, toiletries and stationery stacked up in the garden shed.

‘This is bonkers.’

‘Needs must, love,’ Anna explained. ‘There used to be a post office and a greengrocer and everything up by the pub but one by one they all went.’ She shrugged. ‘And then the community hall had to close so we couldn’t even have the tea room there any more.’

‘So you opened this?’

‘Well, someone had to. Otherwise the whole place was going to die a death. People can’t drive to Lochcarron every time they need milk.’ She smiled. ‘It wasn’t my retirement plan.’

‘Like you were ever going to retire.’ Flinty’s deadpan voice carried across the garden. ‘Is Bella back there?’

‘Aye.’

‘Came to give her and her shopping a ride back over.’

Jodie followed the other women back into the garage shop.

‘While you’re here, Margaret,’ Anna addressed Flinty. Logically, Flinty couldn’t be her actual name, but she definitely gave off stronger Flinty energy than Margaret . ‘We need to talk about Christmas decorations.’

‘We’ve already had our instructions from Nina. White, gold and silver.’

‘White.’ Anna shook her head.

Flinty shrugged. ‘It’ll be a change.’

‘Exactly.’ Anna offered this single word with the same intonation as a witness in the final scene of a courtroom drama declaring that that was the man who killed their father.

‘White is pretty,’ Jodie suggested. ‘Classy?’

‘White is all very well,’ Anna muttered. ‘But we’ve done red and green for Christmas for the last ten years. People already have the lights.’

Flinty pursed her lips. ‘And at the last meeting we agreed on something different.’

‘We didn’t all agree,’ muttered Anna. ‘And she wants to switch on on twenty-second November.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s too soon. We’re not some big shopping mall that plays Christmas tunes from the middle of September. Decorations go up at the start of December. They always have done.’ Anna folded her arms.

‘I think the earlier switch-on sounds good.’ Bella beamed. ‘We can be festive for longer.’

‘First December is quite long enough.’

‘I think we thought earlier might be better. Make a bit of an event of it.’ Jodie was only half listening, but she caught a change in Flinty’s tone. ‘And we have our own Lowbridge events expert now.’

That sounded good. She wondered who that was.

Jodie was still reeling slightly from that particular penny dropping as Flinty drove them back over to the castle, flinging the Land Rover round the bends with barely a glance at the road.

‘It’s grand that you’re sorting out the Christmas light switch-on.

Hopefully having someone else involved will stop Anna and Nina turning it into World War Three. ’

‘I thought they were friends?’ Bella asked.

‘They are,’ Flinty confirmed. ‘Very good friends. Who also both want to be Queen Bee, and you can’t have two queens in a hive, can you? Don’t worry, Gemma. I’m sure you’ll be able to keep the peace.’

Keeping the peace sounded like a very Gemma thing to do. Her stories from work had always been about how everything was in a mess but she’d managed to sort it out. Her team bickered like schoolkids, she said, but Gemma always saved the day.

Back in the castle kitchen Jodie tried to help put the shopping away, but every time she put something on a shelf either Flinty or Bella – or, on a couple of occasions, both – slid in behind her and moved it. Eventually she gave up and perched herself on a stool at the kitchen island to wait.

Flinty’s tattie-scone lesson started with the basics. ‘So you start off by making your mash.’

‘Great.’ Bella was opening and closing cupboards, grabbing pans and utensils. She dumped a bag of potatoes in front of Jodie. ‘How many do we need?’

‘Couple of decent-sized ones? It’s just a practice batch.’

Jodie looked at the potatoes. She wasn’t sure what they were doing in front of her. Bella handed her a chopping board, knife and peeler. Oh. Right. OK then. Peeling and chopping potatoes. Jodie clapped her hands. ‘I can do this. We did this on Tuesday.’

Flinty stared. ‘You hadn’t chopped a potato before Tuesday?’

‘Of course I had.’ Had she? Chips came from the chip shop and roast potatoes came out of a bag in the freezer or on the plate already on her roast dinner in the pub. Before that… ‘With my mum,’ she murmured.

‘Good. Well, you need to chop them up and pop them to boil with a good bit of salt.’

‘Parboil?’ Jodie asked hopefully, testing out one of Bella’s cooking words from the lesson.