Losing Joe's Place by Gordon Korman Page B

the least nutritious items in the store. Maybe this home ec assignment wasn’t so stupid after all. When you buy instant and prepared stuff, it costs a whole lot more than when you buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Plus instant food is full of tons of chemicals. In fact, when I checked all the labels on the stuff we’d been eating the last few weeks, there was monosodium glutamate and polysorbate 60 in every single thing!
    So I got this brilliant idea. Instead of buying microwave chicken nuggets, I’d buy chicken; instead of TV dinners, I’d buy real food. And while saving a dollar or a dollar and a half here and there didn’t seem like much, you’ve got to figure on three people eating three meals a day, each consisting of at least four or five elements — we could save twenty-five bucks a day! Seven hundred and fifty bucks a month! More, if you calculated it against Plotnick’s deli prices! Maybe Jessica was going to get nothing out of her course, but to me it was the answer to our economic prayers.
    Since the cash value was going to be enormous, I didn’t feel bad about spending two hours filling my basket with exactly the right foods according to
The 90s Cookbook for the Woman on the Go
, which I bought, too. In fact, by the time I got all that stuff home, I realized that I’d forgotten to buy the paper. Oh well, at savings of $750 a month, job hunting could certainly wait until tomorrow. And I owed it all to that ingrate, Jessica Lincoln.
    I didn’t want to start off too fancy, so I figured I’d make hamburgers. Wouldn’t you know it — there wasn’t one word in that stupid useless cookbook about hamburgers. So I phoned the publisher. Turns out they wouldn’t refund my money, but the lady talked me through her own recipe. I’d save time by cooking them up now and nuking them in the microwave at dinner. The problem was, I hadn’t had lunch yet. So I ate mine for lunch, and I have to say it was great.
    While I was working on a fourth burger to replace the one I’d eaten, Rootbeer came in and scarfed down the other two. Then I was out of ground beef. So we split the last burger, and I settled on roast chicken for dinner. The book said “Put the chicken in a 325° F oven and forget about it for two hours.” That left me time to make soup. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Ferguson’s and Don’s faces when they got home to find a meal fit for a king waiting for them.
    I was slicing onions, and weeping delicately into a paper towel, when there was a loud buzz behind me. A small model World War I Fokker triplane whizzed past my ear, and landed with a resounding
kerplop
in the soup. I wheeled, and faced Rootbeer. There he stood in the center of the living room, remote control in hand, looking annoyed.
    â€œWhat a place to put soup!”
    â€œSorry.” Here I was, apologizing for preparing dinner in such a ridiculously unexpected location as the stove. Fear of
bad luck
does that to a person.
    Rootbeer fished his plane out of the pot and licked the propeller experimentally. “Not bad. A little oily.”
    I examined the soup. It was a lot oily. “Rootbeer, what —?” I indicated the Red Baron in his hands.
    â€œI’m into model planes now. Stamp collecting isn’t a real hobby. It gives you a headache.”
    I looked over to the corner, where the stamp albums now rested against the tripod, the boxes of Kodak paper, and the developing chemicals. The camera was gone, probably to the pawnshop to finance the
Luftwaffe
.
    Rootbeer placed the plane on the floor and manipulated the remote control. The engine spluttered, then labored, then died. He tried again. This time the propeller spun around a few times, the craft moved forward an inch or two, and
then
died. Try number three didn’t yield a peep.
    Rootbeer shook his head. “You go into something for relaxation, and you end up