It was that time yet again: time to figure out what to feed my ever-starving familiars.
I guess I can’t be too hard on them, really. Their meals are the one thing that those four always look forward to, after all. Might as well make something that’ll live up to their expectations...but what?
I mulled over my options as I looked around the mansion’s kitchen, which was just as over-the-top lavish as the rest of the house. Making a meat dish was a given, but the question was, what sort of meat? I decided to take a look through my Item Box in the hopes that something would inspire me.
Hmm... Oh! I think I can work with this!
I was sort of in the mood for poultry, so I ended up going with cockatrice meat as my protein of choice. With my main ingredient decided on, now I just had to choose a recipe.
What to make with cockatrice meat? Hmm... Poultry... Ah, got it! I’ll cook it like chicken and serve it with a demi-glace sauce! That’ll go great with some bread!
I opened my Online Supermarket to pick up some ingredients I’d need. I bought onions, carrots, garlic, mushrooms—both white and shimeji—and a can of premade demi-glace sauce. Oh, and a carton of heavy cream as well, which I almost forgot! Garnishing the dish with a little cream right at the end both looked nice and would also round out the flavors really well.
“What else, what else...? Oh, butter! I almost forgot I was out,” I said to myself, adding a pack of butter to my cart and then checking out. As usual, all my purchases materialized out of thin air in a cardboard box. I unpacked my ingredients, then started cooking!
I halved the onions, then cut them into slices that were about half a centimeter thick. Next, I sliced the carrots into fairly thin half rounds. I kept the carrots on the thin side so they wouldn’t take forever to cook through—I wanted the dish to be ready relatively quickly. I minced the garlic, broke apart the shimeji mushrooms, and halved the white mushrooms. Finally, I chopped the main ingredient—the cockatrice meat—into pieces that were on the slightly larger end of bite-sized.
That was all the knife work that I had to do, so next, I brought out my usual frying pan. I melted a pat of butter in it, then threw in the minced garlic, which I stirred around until it was fragrant. The cockatrice chunks went in next, skin-side down, and I let them cook until the bottom part was nicely browned. Then I flipped the pieces over to give their opposite sides a little color as well, though since they didn’t need to be fully cooked through at that stage, I moved along pretty quickly. The onions and carrots went in next, at which point I gave everything a quick stir and added some red wine too.
“Oh! Guess I’ll have to stock up on this too,” I said. I’d used the last of the cheap wine that I’d bought to cook with. The dish would’ve worked fine without it, but I’d always felt that a little red wine in Western-style stewed meat dishes gave them a certain depth they really benefited from.
Once the alcohol had cooked out of the wine, I added the canned demi-glace sauce and some water, along with a squirt of ketchup and a bouillon cube. I let all the ingredients stew together a little, then threw in all the mushrooms—which would cook through in no time—right at the very end of the process. Once the mushrooms were done, I tasted the dish, fine-tuned its flavor profile with some salt and pepper, and finally decided that it was ready!
Now I just have to plate this up, then sprinkle on a little cream...
“All right, that looks great!” I said to myself. It was one of my better efforts in recent memory, and I was taking a moment to admire my handiwork when I heard a noise from the entryway.
“Hey! I’m back!” Willem called out.
“Just in time,” I said to myself. “Okay, let’s have dinner!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Hmm. Yes, this does taste thoroughly decent.”
“It’s so strongly flavored, yet so well balanced! You truly do have a talent for cooking, my liege.”
《Yeah, seriously! This stuff’s great! Think it might be one of my favorites!》
《Sui loves it too!》
The demi-glace was a hit. I’d been worried that it might’ve been a little too strong, flavor-wise, but it seemed it had matched my familiars’ tastes perfectly. They gobbled it down without wasting a moment.
“Seconds, now!”
“For me as well, my liege!”
《Same here!》
《Seconds for Sui too!》
“Okay, okay,” I replied. I refilled their dishes as quickly as I could with extra-large helpings, and they started inhaling them just as quickly as they’d gone through their first servings.
“Even having seen them eat before, it’s still hard to believe the appetites your familiars have,” Willem commented.
“Ha ha! Yeah, they more or less live for this,” I replied. “It feels kind of nice to cook for people who never leave leftovers, though. Makes it feel worth the effort, you know?”
“I’m still getting over my shock that they eat food that’s meant for humans, actually.”
“They’re a bunch of gourmands, all right.” By which I mean they’re super picky foodies.
“And I still can’t believe they eat dragon meat on the regular. Do you have any idea how absurd that is?”
“I mean, they’re the ones who hunted the dragons in the first place, so who am I to complain?” Though actually, I guess Gon wasn’t around yet when we ran into the red dragon.
“Not to say that this dish isn’t incredible as well. You’re eating a hell of a lot better than I do, that’s for sure,” Willem said, deflating ever so slightly as he compared his lifestyle to mine.
W-Well, we’re sort of a special case in a bunch of ways, you know? I really wouldn’t let it get to you!
“Here, have some bread, guildmaster,” I said, holding out a basket with slices of Theresa’s signature sourdough in it. “It’s really good if you use it to soak up the sauce, like this! See?”
“Oh?” Willem said. He took a slice of the bread, dipped it in the demi-glace, and took a bite. “No kidding! That’s great!”
“Right?”
Willem must have liked the bread and demi-glace combo even more than he let on. He went back for a second slice of bread before I knew it.
“Oh, right,” Willem said a moment later. “About the plan to have those two put up a barrier and stand guard.”
“Yes?” I said. I hadn’t heard what the guild had said in response to the message he’d delivered to them, now that he mentioned it.
“To make a long story short, they’re all for it.”
Willem explained that the guild had indeed sent out a request for high-ranking adventurers to gather in the capital, but that since so many of the adventurers who would qualify were out on missions, the odds of them being able to gather a sufficient security detail had actually been looking pretty dicey. That was understandable, considering how last-minute the whole plan was.
“That said, the guild can’t just let the two of them handle the whole thing on their own,” Willem continued. “They’ll be keeping the request for high-ranking adventurer guards as is, and put everyone who turns up on guard duty as well.”
“This whole project’s going to be under some really strict security, huh?” I said.
“As if it could ever be any other way. You know exactly what we’ll be working with, so of course it will.”
Hmm. Is it really that obvious? I guess it is a leviathan. Monsters like that tended to be valuable from top to bottom—even their blood, guts, fangs, and bones would all probably be prized materials. Though my party, of course, was only interested in the meat.
“And again, considering what we’re working with, it sounds like they decided they had no choice but to call in an expert in the field to help direct the processing effort. I bet you know who that means.”
“No, actually. Who?”
“The dragon-freak of Dolan, that’s who.”
“Ugh! They called him in?! Seriously?!”
Gon and Dora-chan’s archenemy cometh! I know he’s not a bad guy—or, well, not a bad elf—but he just can’t be trusted to be reasonable when dragons are in the picture!
“I mean, it’s a leviathan,” Willem said with a shrug. “I’m sure you remember how he skipped out on his guild to sneak over to your place a while back, right? Seems they came down on him pretty hard over it, and he’s got a full-time chaperone keeping an eye on him these days. Even after all that, though, they decided that they couldn’t do without his expertise for this.”
“Oh, no. Oooh, no no no...”
If he’s coming, that can only mean one thing...
“And rumor has it that the second he got word, he literally burst into tears of joy. Left Dolan the very same day too. Seems he and his guardian are making their merry little way toward the capital as we speak.”
“Don’t! Stop! Stay home, Elrand! Stay hoooooome!”