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enormous menu (there were more than twenty appetizers), being a cook there
     required quite a bit of multitasking. It wasn't unusual for me to be plating a dish with one hand and whisking a dressing
     with another.
    The only problem is that, even though I'm an ex-ballerina, I'm also something of a klutz, prone to minor accidents, spills,
     and such.
    When the time came to send the terrine to Palladin's table, I arranged the salad plates on which I would serve it on my work
     station. I was putting salad on the plates with my left hand, and reaching up for the terrine with my right.
    I didn't have a very firm grip on the terrine mold, so instead of lifting it, I only succeeded in pulling it off the shelf.
     It eluded my slippery fingers and tumbled down past my widening eyes right into the bowl of chocolate sauce, where it bobbed
     for a moment, like a ship with a hull breach taking on water, and then proceeded to sink into the murky depths.
    As I reached in after it, my colleagues rushed over to help me try to save it—a difficult task. Flad the terrine come straight
     from the fridge, it would have been hard and cold, and easy to wipe off. But softened as it was, and warming even more thanks
     to the chocolate, it was beginning to leach out into the sauce. Tan globules were bubbling up to the surface, turning the
     chocolate into a mocha-colored nightmare.
    I gingerly retrieved the unmolded terrine from the sauce and laid it out on my station. The other cooks and I stood over it
     in our chocolate-spattered whites, trying to decide how to save our patient. The first step was to halt the melting and preserve
     its shape, and we worked on it furiously, smoothing it over with spatulas, and our fingers.
    I was panicked beyond words.
    But I also couldn't help recalling, with amusement, those old television commercials for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups I used
     to watch as a kid. In the series of advertisements, two individuals, hurried for no apparent reason—one carrying chocolate
     and one peanut butter—would turn a corner and slam into each other, sending the chocolate into the peanut butter. They'd gasp
     in alarm, but needlessly so, because when they tasted the resulting combination, they realized that they had made the junk-food
     equivalent of discovering penicillin: peanut butter and chocolate, "two great tastes that taste great together."
    Snobs might turn their nose up at this observation, but make no mistake about it: foie gras is the gourmet equivalent of peanut
     butter; insanely rich, it's best complemented by sweet or tart elements. Just as peanut butter goes with jelly, foie gras
     gets on famously with any number of fruit chutneys or compotes, like the sauternes gelee with which it was layered in the
     terrine.
    Along these same lines, it turned out, as we licked our fingers, that foie gras and chocolate—just like the commercials said—were
     two great tastes that tasted great together. I'd be lying if I denied that we were moaning with pleasure as we licked the
     bittersweet chocolate and molten foie gras from our fingers, the rich concoction sticking to the roofs of our mouths like,
     well, like peanut butter.
    Though we saved the terrine from total destruction, we weren't able to totally remove the chocolate, which had fused with
     the foie into a coating that could not be removed without serious risk of destroying the whole thing.
    Making peace with the situation, I continued plating the terrine, racing to finish before Mark could see it. He was anxious
     enough that Jean-Louis was in the house; finding out about the dive the terrine had taken into the chocolate might have put
     him over the edge.
    Finally, I sent out our new special starter: "chocolate-painted foie gras" with a lovely mache salad.
    I was too nervous to look out the kitchen to see how the terrine went over, but it must have been fine because Jean-Louis's
     plates came back clean, and Mark didn't charge through the swinging kitchen doors,