“Oh dear, this kitchen’s getting a little crowded,” said Mira. “Viola, what are you going to make?”
“Well, I am teaching. Let’s make some of Setrayu’s famous fish cakes.”
“All right, I’ll whip up a meat pie. It’s still nice and cold, so you can have the leftovers for dinner.”
The kitchen seemed so unnecessarily large before, but they were nearly packed in like sardines once the four of them lined up in front of the counter. Mira separated out the ingredients she would use from the piles of food.
“Lushera, do you know how to clean a fish?” asked Viola as she pulled fish after fresh fish wrapped in waterproof paper from her magic bag. They weren’t just filets; they were whole fish. You couldn’t put living things into a magic bag, meaning these fish were definitely dead, but they looked so fresh they might just start swimming if you popped them in some water.
Lushera almost felt like their black beady eyes were staring at her, saying, “Do it, I dare you to try and eat me.”
“I-I can roast fish whole…” she said.
“Haha… Well, since we have the opportunity, why don’t we learn? Kaphal, while we do that, could you chop up these root vegetables? Just a nice chunky dice like this.”
Viola started by showing Kaphal, the least experienced there, how to do a simple task. She took out a cutting board, cut a thin-skinned potato up into bite-size pieces, then handed the knife to Kaphal.
Kaphal stared intently at the cooking knife, and eventually stabbed another potato onto the tip of the knife.
“Hiya!”
She slammed that down, the potato splitting in two and the knife hammering down into the cutting board. The knife couldn’t handle the sheer force of the strike, and the blade snapped off at the handle.
Kaphal stood there, holding nothing but the knife’s handle. Her swing came down all the way to her hips, but the knife blade didn’t make it that far. It flew off and clattered across the floor.
“Damn…that was close…” said Timm. The flying blade had nearly caught him. He dodged it by pulling up close to the wall.
“I-I am so sorry!” said Lushera.
“…Broke…” pouted Kaphal.
“Kitchen knives aren’t meant to cut with force like that,” explained Viola. “You cut just by pushing or pulling, you just keep that in mind. Perhaps I should have started by saying that…”
“I-I didn’t know her fragment form packed that much power…” said Lushera.
“I adjust,” said Kaphal. Viola handed her a new knife, and she started dicing the vegetables. Carefully, this time.
“Lushera, you’re over here,” said Viola. She plopped the fish so bursting with life in front of Lushera. “When you remove the head, you slip the knife under the front fins, yes, just like that. Very good. We’ll take out the guts since we’re only going to use the meat.”
Lushera did as instructed, stabbing the knife in and…it didn’t go too well. The fish’s body, skin and all, slipped and caught on the knife’s blade, but she somehow managed to turn the fish into three filets in the end.
Viola threw the bones into a pot and the meat into a bowl. “We’ll make fish paste out of this,” she explained.
“I think Mom could do that,” said Lushera.
“I do,” said Kaphal. Lushera was a little worried Kaphal might break the bowl, but it seemed she’d learned from her previous mistake and approached the task with an appropriately gentle touch as she took a pestle and mashed up the fish meat, mixing it into a fish paste.
Then they seasoned it and put in a binding agent before rolling a chunk up into a patty, the size just about right. And then they rolled up another. And another, until they had rows of fish cake patties. It made Lushera think back to when she would make mud pies as a child.
“Half are going to go in the soup, and the other half I’m thinking we’ll add a little more flavor and try pan frying,” said Viola.
The vegetables had been stewing in the stock made from the fish bones, and now they plopped in half of the fish cakes. The other half were coated with a sweet and spicy glaze and put in a pan.
“Fry!” said Kaphal.
“Oh, direct flames?” murmured Viola.
“Her fragment form can even produce fire…” said Lushera.
Rather than use the fire from the magic range, Kaphal scorched the fish cakes with her own breath. Even if it wasn’t nearly as much as the breath from her real form, fire containing dragon energy added nutrition to the food it cooked. Maybe. Soon, the room was filled with aromas that made your stomach rumble.
“All righty, it’s done!” announced Viola. “You know, cooking really is its own sort of torture. You have to work, staring at food while you’re hungry.”
“This is done too,” said Mira. “Would’ya listen to this? This oven, you just flip this little lever down and the fire shoots out. Then you flip it back up and it cuts right off. Can you believe that?”
“Wow, that looks delicious!” exclaimed Lushera.
Mira used thick mittens to pull out a heavy cast iron dish from the oven, then took the pie out from the dish. The egg wash resulted in a golden-brown crust with gravy oozing out of the slits cut on top.
And while the pie was in the oven and Mira had some free time, she diced up oranges and mixed them in a syrup. That was dessert.
The men, having been unable to fit in the kitchen, insisted on at least dishing the food and bringing it to the table along with a baguette. While they did that, Lushera and the others put the bowl and pans in to soak, getting ready for the cleanup.
“Lushera, remember beginning?” asked Kaphal.
“Beginning?”
“I cook meat, you eat.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember that!”
If they were talking about cooking, then there was when Kaphal would cook the meat from her hunts and feed it to Lushera, though it was hard to call that cooking. That first started out of pure chance. It felt so long ago.
“What are you talking about?” asked Viola, her glasses and curiosity glimmering.
“This is funny. When Mom first took me in, she tried to feed me raw meat!” said Lushera, telling her about that day. “I was near death and desperate, so I ate it, but I threw it back up.”
“I no know humans well then,” said Kaphal.
“That…sounds like it was rough,” said Timm.
Everyone gave awkward smiles. It was a funny story now, but then…
Then a thought hit Lushera. She would probably be perfectly fine eating raw meat now. Her stomach could likely handle it if she tore into her prey with her teeth like a dragon, feeding on bloody meat.
But she still ate cooked food. The plates of food on the table wafted up columns of steam. This was the kind of thing Lushera thought looked tasty. On the mountain, she’d watched Kaphal lay into the meat of her prey many times like it was the most delicious food in the world, but she never felt like imitating Kaphal in that. She only ever ate meat that was cooked before she got it.
She never questioned that before, but now, she wondered why.