Chrissy Teigen's Culinary School for Wayward Models (Cravings fic) COMPLETE

Chapter 01: Fried Chicken Wings with Spicy Honey Butter

Chrissy Teigen was sitting in her office, staring at the glowing screen of her laptop in utter horror and disbelief. And for once, it had nothing to do with people being complete idiots on Twitter.

This time it was something much worse, something even more emotionally draining and horrifying to comprehend: a spreadsheet.

Chrissy's groaned in frustration as she slid her Oliver Peoples eyeglasses back up on her nose. She had a Muji Gel Pen clenched between her teeth, and two more pens holding her hair back in a loose bun. There may have been more pens stuck in other places, who even knew. She'd been staring at her laptop for HOURS (OK, minutes, but it FELT like hours), trying to make sense of the rows and columns of numbers on her screen, and time and all life and everything around her had become meaningless.

Opening a culinary school had felt like such an easy, excellent, obvious idea. Her first recipe book, Cravings, had been released to wide success and her career as a celebrity chef had taken off. She'd released other books, building her brand and sending her insane yet amazing and delicious culinary ideas out into the world like models stomping down the runway at a Rodarte show.

But was that it? Was she just going to release cookbook after cookbook in between Twitter arguments for the rest of her life?

Chrissy had always had the sense that she would love to cook full-time, but she also knew that she definitely did not want to open a restaurant. She wanted to cook for herself always, first and foremost. And her incredibly handsome husband, John Legend. And her friends. And her parents. But not, like, randos.

So a cooking school had seemed like a weird yet weirdly brilliant idea. But then, because she can't just have ONE idea (why stop at ONE dash of Cholula when you use TEN) she took it further: What if she could help other people, like her? Young women (and men? maybe? sure.) who were models but maybe in career transition. You can't be a model forever, unfortunately. Life and photographs and muscle tone and skin blemishes don't work like that. You need something to fall back to, eventually. You need something to help you get to whatever's next, to help you become whatever you're meant to be, when you can no longer be whatever it is you already are. Chrissy knew that better than almost anyone.

And so, Chrissy Teigen's Culinary School for Wayward Models was born.

It would be like grad school for people who'd barely graduated high school. KIDDING, relax. It would be like a vocational program. A safe place for models, or soon-to-be-former models, to refocus the energies and learn some new skills and re-enter society, with a new normal, a new sense of self, a new purpose.

And it was good. Great, even!

Mostly.

Sometimes.

Kinda.

Kiiiinda.

The school sometimes gave her time to focus on exploring her own creativity in the kitchen, although not as much as she'd hoped. There never ever seemed to be enough time, now that she had all these models to care for.

But she enjoyed the mentorship, helping them learn about what they could do, helping them tap into first, their basic (VERY BASIC) cooking skills, seriously half these chicks could barely boil an egg, and then, their creativity. Their true power. Helping them become who they are. It was even better than she'd imagined, more rewarding than she could have guessed.

EXCEPT FOR THE PART ABOUT PAPERWORK AND SPREADSHEETS.

Because at the end of the day, the school was a business, and owning a business, it turns out, requires you to do all kinds of ~business. And business, frankly, blows goats.

Some days she spent so much time dealing with vendors and suppliers and kitchen fires and broken plumbing because someone decided to pour a ruined recipe down the toilet (???) that she barely had any time to research new ideas. Much less lounge by the pool while John ate chicken wings off her thighs.

Mmmm, wings and thighs.

Chrissy absentmindedly reached for the plate of cinnamon toast with shaved dark chocolate she'd been nibbling on while she worked. Her fingers did a double-take when they found only crumbs. WHO ate her entire TRAY of cinnamon toast with shaved dark chocolate??? Unbelievable.

Well OK now Chrissy was starving. Well tbf she was always starving but she was extremely starving-er now that she was thinking about chicken wings.

There were two key details to Chrissy's fried chicken wings. (OK TECHNICALLY they were John's recipe, but marriage is about equality, meaning they split everything, including credit for the wings.) You can't just bread and fry the chicken, you have to brine it first. Let it bathe luxuriously in a pot of water and Lawry's Seasoning Salt (Lawry Da Gawd) and cayenne. And then, after it's been soaking for hours, after you bread it in flour and MORE Lawry's (bless up) and cayenne, after you just gently slide those wings into the hot oil and fry them up beautiful, then you coat them in another beautiful bath, this time of melted butter, the bad bitch Cholula, honey, and salt.

Chrissy was practically weeping thinking about how good they were. Maybe she would work on a batch of them tonight. With the 2nd-year students, there were waaaay too many steps in the recipe for the 1st-years to handle. And then maybe she could bring a plate of wings out to the pool with John. And maybe this time she could eat them off him. Preferably while he was wearing next to nothing. Again: marriages, equality, etc.

Chrissy was broken from her reverie by a noise--yelling, dishes being smashed, something muffled and vaguely not-good-sounding, from downstairs in the kitchen. Eh, someone would handle it. Some of these models went ballistic when their pancakes burned.

But then she heard footsteps coming —nope, running— up the stairs, towards her. And then her office door burst open and there, with a forced smile that did nothing to hide her clear panic, was Jenna Dewan Tatum.

Jenna was one of Chrissy's best friends, one of her most trusted confidents, and also effectively her second-in-command at the culinary school.

Chrissy regarded Jenna quietly, waiting, afraid of what news Jenna was about to deliver.

"There's been...an incident," Jenna said. "It's bad."

"Hgh cghm imfmtns rgh rhwys bghd?" Chrissy said.

Jenna opened her mouth to respond, then closed it when no words came, and then narrowed her eyes. "I... do not understand what you're saying."

Chrissy spat the Muji pen out of her mouth onto the desk. "How come incidents are always bad? You never hear about good incidents. Hey Chrissy there's been an incident of me accidentally pouring too much bourbon into my bread mix and inventing alcoholic bread." Chrissy perked her head up, hearing the words come out of her mouth. "Wait. Could that be a thing?"

From down the hallway behind Jenna there was more screaming and more dishes breaking. Jenna flinched and closed her eyes at the noise.

"It's Kendall Jenner, isn't it," Chrissy said.

Jenna nodded.

Chrissy dropped her glasses on the desk and stood, shaking the pens out of her hair.

"Leggo," Chrissy said, stalking quickly out of her office with Jenna following close behind.

~*~*~*~

OK HI HELLO THANK YOU AND WELCOME TO CHRISSY TEIGEN'S CULINARY SCHOOL FOR WAYWARD MODELS. I love Chrissy Teigen and I love, love, love, her cookbook Cravings and I thought there should be more fanfiction based on cookbooks in the world, so here we are.

The recipe for John's Fried Wings with Spicy Honey Butter can be found on page 143 of Cravings. The recipe for cinnamon toast with shaved dark chocolate can be found on page 156. There's also a pancake recipe but we'll talk more about that in a later chapter, if everything goes according to plan.

I hope you like the story so far, I'll try to update weekly. Please vote and post a comment if you think I am insane and should stop writing this book. I do not know what I'm doing with my life.