The Groundskeeper // Spicy Black Bean Burgers
A stranger started working at the diner after that meteor crash last month.
Before Babette took the diner on, the property stood wild and overgrown for years. Nowadays, the outside looks a lot neater, thanks to the groundskeeper Babette hired, a little sandy-haired fella called Skon. “Like my favorite breakfast pastry,” Babette said when she first introduced him.1 You wouldn’t think that a small independent diner could even supply enough work to keep a full time groundskeeper busy. But ever since Skon came aboard, the grass around the parking lot stays trim and neat, the weeds disappear from the cracks in the pavement, and the spider colony holding the Little Free Library hostage in the shed has been relocated to more desirable basement real estate. The man earns his keep.
Around the same time Skon came to Babette’s, a film crew turned up at the diner, looking to make a video about some meteor that crashed in the woods nearby. Apparently, the impact was so loud it could be heard in the next county. Had anyone at Babette’s seen anything, the film crew asked, and if so were they available for an interview? Babette conferred with her people and came back to say that yes, they all felt the tremors that night, and saw lights in the hills, but they were busy feeding a bus full of tourists, and nobody really had a chance to look into it. The person in charge of the film crew muttered something condescending about locals. Babette quietly began charging him double for coffee.
The Skunk Mountain Lights documentary went viral a month later. Tourists started showing up on the weekends to make videos out in the woods behind the diner. Afterwards they came inside for burgers and cokes and gossip, and Pedro the line cook made up slightly different stories about the lights for everyone who asked. Skon was usually there too, quietly eating his dinner, but no one asked him questions. No one suspected him of knowing anything worth knowing. No one, except for Babette, had seen him the night of the meteor crash, stumbling out of the woods in his silver flight suit, hair singed, dragging the sooty remains of his spaceship behind him. Babette lets him keep it out in the shed, now that it’s possible to do so without displacing the local spider community. Any time he’s not oiling the flap on the gumball machine or weeding Babette’s vegetable plot, he’s bound to be out there, tinkering with his tools and making lists of spaceship parts to back order. Galactic mail takes forever. Skon will probably be a regular face at the diner for awhile.
Today, Babette is serving: The Spicy Black Bean Burger Lunch Special (recipe link)
As a southern cook, Babette knows the power of mixing up some kind of protein with some kind of starch, an onion, an egg, and a lot of seasonings, then rolling it into a ball and flattening it into a disc which you then fry in cast iron. This technique produces everything from hamburgers to tuna croquettes to arepas, and it also makes black bean burgers. Fried up in a cast iron skillet, Babette’s bean burgers have a crunchy, slightly charred outside that yields to a soft, spicy interior. Pepper jack cheese is melted over the crisp bean patty while the buns are toasted in the same skillet. Babette’s special recipe spicy mayo soaks into the crisp bun and keeps the lettuce from wilting. Bacon makes a nice addition, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can watch Babette put her burgers together on her TikTok channel. Yes, Babette’s got a TikTok now. She blames the teenager she hired part time.
Don't forget to take a mint from the dish by the register on your way out. Printed inside the wrapper is a secret message from the kitchen.
Combining flavors is a form of pattern matching.
This resulted in half the diner crew calling him “Skonn” and the other half calling him “Skoan”. Pronunciation style depended mostly on how many hours of televised British baking they watched per week. Skon never introduced himself to anyone, and always appeared equally unimpressed by both versions of his name.