Chapter 8:
Let’s Eat Something Delicious!
JUST AS THE FACE POWDER CRISIS WAS BEGINNING to settle down, a huge shipment of books arrived at my workshop—the thank-you gift the queen had promised me. It was filled with rare and expensive Alchemy tomes: cookbooks; encyclopedias of ingredients; various guides to plants, herbs, minerals… It seemed she’d decided if it had any sort of utility, she might as well include it.
“I bet Miina will love the cookbooks and ingredient guides,” I said.
She’d been saving all her wages to spend on cookbooks. She was going to lose it when she saw all these!
“Miina!” I called at the top of my voice.
A few moments later, she scurried into the living room from the kitchen.
“Whoa, that’s a lot of books!” she said. “Where did they come from?” She scanned the volumes laid out on the table and froze when she saw the very books I was thinking of.
“Wait, these are cookbooks! And ingredient guides! And they’re enormous! Oh, I-I want to look at them! Can I, Miss Daisy? Please?” She clasped her hands over her chest, her eyes sparkling with excitement.
“They’re a gift from the queen to thank us for everything we gave the royal family,” I explained. “You can have the cookbooks and ingredient guides, Miina. You’d better use them to make us something delicious!” I piled the thick volumes into her arms, then began to sort through the rest of the books.
“Whoa, they’re so heavy! Are you sure it’s all right for me to accept all this?” Miina looked like she was torn between sheer delight and utter panic.
“Miinaaaa!” Just then, a man’s voice called from outside the shop.
“Oh, I think that’s one of our adventurer regulars. I’ll be right back!” Miina quickly set the books back down and rushed down the stairs.
A short time later, she returned from the bakery carrying a huge cut of meat. She told me it was from a bloodcow—a cow-shaped monster. Unlike the common cuts taken from older dairy cattle, bloodcow meat was considered high-end and prized for its perfect balance of fat and muscle.
“He said it was a gift and, um, he just gave it to me!” She looked totally baffled, which was just as adorable as all her other expressions.
He’s obviously trying to woo our sweet mascot girl!
Well, for whatever reason, we’d been gifted a ridiculously fancy cut of beef, and since we were three growing children, we immediately launched into a spirited debate about how best to prepare it.
“Maybe we should just keep it simple and have steak tonight?” I suggested. The most expensive cuts of meat were best left to shine on their own, after all.
“We could, but since we have that new cookbook, why not try something different?” Miina said, then took the meat downstairs to the kitchen to put in the icebox before coming back up.
“Actually, I’ve had a lot of our male customers asking lately if we could start filling our breads with something heartier,” Miina continued.
I stacked the books onto the new shelf I’d ordered for the living room. Miina sank into a chair by the table, resting her cheek on her palm with a little sigh.
She looked a bit troubled, so I wondered if I should help her with some ideas.
“Why don’t we come up with a new kind of stuffed bread together?” I said. “The customers will get tired of the same offerings all the time, right?” I flashed Miina a smile and her eyes instantly lit up.
She nodded cheerfully, then rummaged through the piles of books and pulled out the big cookbook she’d set aside. “Let’s see if there’s anything in here we can use as inspiration…” She began to flip through the pages and I sat down next to her to help her look.
“Horse and beef tartare,” I read out loud.
“Um, I don’t think raw meat and bread are a good combo,” Miina said.
The page showed a heap of raw minced beef next to some kind of creamy egg-based sauce I’d never seen before.
“Then maybe just cook it instead?” I tried.
“I don’t know why you’d take perfectly good meat, grind it up into scraps, and then cook it.”
My offhand suggestion was shot down in an instant.
“Wait, just hear me out,” I said. “Steak is kind of tough for little kids, right? I remember watching Father and the others eating delicious steaks when I was little and being so jealous.”
Miina thought about it for a moment and nodded. “If we minced it first, then formed it back into a patty and cooked it, even children could eat it easily. Older people with weak teeth might appreciate it too. Should we give it a try?”
We rushed to the kitchen together, feeling excited. We washed our hands and dried them carefully with clean towels.
Miina got right to work slicing the bloodcow beef into small pieces, then started mincing it with two knives. She was very good at this.
“We’ll need salt and pepper at least,” she muttered. She put the minced beef into a bowl, added in salt and pepper, and then started kneading it. Before long, the meat grew sticky, looking like it would hold together nicely.
“All right, let’s try cooking up a little,” she said. She poured oil into a frying pan and put the meat inside. We watched as the meat’s juices began to seep out and sizzle.
“It feels like we’re losing all the flavor,” I said uneasily.
“I know! That fat is the best part,” Miina agreed.
We exchanged uncertain looks.