“Useless?” Shuuhei questioned.
“You know...” Kyouhei started, reluctant to yell about naked aprons, “wearing the apron like...”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, nodding and pounding a fist into his other hand, “Don’t worry about it, ’twas just my consideration for my uncaring son, there’s no need to thank me.”
“As if I would!” Kyouhei roared, beating Shuuhei with the spring onion.
Obviously, Shuuhei was wearing a highly-padded American football uniform, so he didn’t even flinch.
“You’re going well the wrong way about making me happy!” Kyouhei protested.
“But it’s one of the dreams of a man, isn’t it?”
“You’re a pest!” he yelled as he continued to thrash his father with the vegetable.
As he did so, Pamil stepped into view, having finished changing. “Kyouhei, is this alright?” she asked.
“...Y-Yeah.”
Her outfit consisted of a sweater and an apron atop it, so Kyouhei was more at ease now.
“Oh, you’ve already changed,” Shuuhei said disappointedly.
“It isn’t a shame, old man. And what’s with your outfit?!” Kyouhei asked, gesturing to the sportswear and the mayonnaise.
“You don’t understand, Kyouhei?” Shuuhei questioned, his expression tightening, “You don’t understand?!”
“Wh-What...?”
With a burst of movement, Shuuhei appeared right in front of him, making him falter slightly.
Then...
“Mayo tastes great after a bath!”
Kyouhei surveyed him from head to toe... three times. Then, after about fifteen seconds of looking at him, Kyouhei spoke: “...You’ve just had a bath?”
“Yup!” Shuuhei nodded, sticking the mayonnaise bottle in through a gap in the helmet and eating it directly.
Just watching it made Kyouhei’s mouth taste all claggy.
“...I’ll ignore the outfit, I guess, but what’s with the mayonnaise?! What country has idiots that have a bath and then drink mayo straight?! That’s gonna feel awful; it’ll just put you off! What kind of mayo-maniac are you?!”
“How could you, my son? Mayonnaise is a high-protein, high-calorie food: the perfect energy source for the battlefield.”
“And this ain’t a battlefield!”
As he spoke, Kyouhei thrust the spring onion in through a gap in the helmet. The tip perfectly struck one of Shuuhei’s eyes. “Argh, my eye! My eye!”
Ignoring his father’s cries, like the man was some lolicon colonel, Kyouhei faced Pamil. “The nuisance is dealt with; let’s get cooking.”
● ● ●
And thus, the two were standing wearing aprons over their clothes in the kitchen... or an area of the warehouse with a water supply and a set of cookware.
“Let’s start with the basics,” Kyouhei began.
As far as Shuuhei went, he had removed the football gear, but was still slurping at his mayonnaise tube as he sat at the table, watching them with a grin.
“Right...” Kyouhei hesitated.
He’d worried where to begin teaching her from... He didn’t know exactly what she already knew after all, so he decided to kick things off with something rather clichéd.
“We’ll go for a sunny-side up first,” he told her, holding an egg fresh from the newly-opened pack towards her.
That really was the basics of cooking with heat. All you needed to do was make sure the heat wasn’t high enough to burn the egg, season it with salt, and then you were done. It was one of the simplest dishes with the fewest ways to fail. You could also flip it and fry both sides, cover the pan with a lid and steam it, leaving the yolk half done, and so on; there were a lot of techniques you could use while making it.
Anyway, he’d picked this dish to familiarize her with cooking.
“Sunny-side up?” she asked in confusion. “A side that’s sunny, facing up, and an egg. Oh, I see, you take the top half of whatever this egg hatches into and cook it?!”
“As if! The hell kind of cooking is that?! How’d you even come up with that; it’s scary!”
“Hm?”
“You just break the shell and fry what’s inside. It looks like a sun in the clouds, right? You’ve had it with steak loads of times! You know, the yellow and white—”
“Oh, that flat thing!”
“...What did you think it was before now?” Kyouhei sighed exhaustedly. “Anyway, yeah, sunny-side up.”
Already Kyouhei was uneasy about what the future would hold as he put a frying pan on the stove and put a light under it.
“When you cook, anything you burn can stick to the pan. This is a stainless steel pan, so it shouldn’t stick even if you run out of oil,” he began by telling her, pouring a little oil into the pan and rotating it around with his wrist to coat the entire surface. “The ones at school are cheap, and so it’s easy to burn things, so make sure you add enough oil. Cover the whole thing, like this.”
“Right, right.”
“Then, all you need to do is break the egg into the pan and fry it.”
He knocked the egg on the rim of the pan before using his fingers to split it apart.
Then, he noticed something.
“Ah... there’s a trick to doing it one-handed, so you should break it into another container and then move it from there to the pan.”
“Right, right.”
Whether she was really taking in what he was saying or not, she nodded along as she watched the egg bubble away in the pan.
There was a nagging discomfort bothering him, but he pressed on ahead: “You just use salt and pepper to season it. You judge by eye, but a light sprinkle should do it. There, now you try,” he told her, gesturing to the pan with his empty hand.
“Right, leave it to me,” she declared with a deep nod, taking an egg.
With terrifyingly smooth movements, she’d taken the egg and broken it, dropping the contents into the pan. One-handed. The movements she’d made were exactly the same as his. She was imitating him flawlessly after having only seen it once.
...Did she copy it?
This kind of thing always made Kyouhei consider that she really might be an android. At the same time, he realized he wasn’t exactly happy about it. At this rate, there wouldn’t be a need for him to teach her for too long.
...Well, it saves me the bother, he told himself before adding to his instructions.
“Right, a big part of cooking is using the right heat. Sunny-side ups need a low hea—”
He only got halfway through his sentence.
“Royal,” Pamil started yelling, drowning him out, “Beeeeaaaaaammm!”
Accompanied by a now very familiar sound, beams shot from Pamil’s eyes and engulfed the pan. Instantly, the spreading egg exploded, like it’d been put in the microwave. Moreover, the beam reflected off the pan and skimmed past his temple before disappearing into the distance... followed by the familiar sound of shattering glass.
In fairness... Pamil had moderated her output. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have bounced off the pan, it would have destroyed the whole stove.
Anyway.
The bit of egg that hit Kyouhei’s face slid slowly over his glasses.
Five seconds passed.
“You moroooooonn!” he yelled, chopping at the back of her head.
Pamil wasn’t bothered, though; she seemed more surprised that the egg had exploded. “Hmm, it exploded.”
“It didn’t just happen! What are you playing at?!”
In a way, it was exactly what he’d expected...
“Well, they’re called fried eggs, so I thought I needed to fry it.”
“Who uses a beam to fry things?! What do you think the pan and stove are for! And I told you to begin with that you wouldn’t need any royal powers for cooking!”
“But, Kyouhei,” she protested, looking at the stove, “this way is more energy-efficient. It doesn’t waste anything, so it’s good for the environment!”
“Worry about how you should be acting before worrying about the environment!”
As Kyouhei ranted, the sound of Shuuhei’s unconcerned guffawing echoed in the background.
With a vein pulsing in his temple, Kyouhei turned to his father and glared. “And you, stop your laughing!” His remonstration finished, so he turned back to Pamil. “Anyway, there’s no point in trying to be energy-efficient and eco-friendly if you blow the egg up!”
“Hmm, I get it, I’ll use less power next time.”
“There shouldn’t be a next time! Leave off with the beam!”
“Hrmm.”
“What do you think we’re practicing for?!” he demanded. “Anyway, do it again!” As he spoke, Kyouhei pointed at the pack of eggs.
He’d thought something like this might happen, so he’d bought a lot. There were nearly three full packs left; nearly 30 eggs.
However...
Kyouhei hadn’t yet realized that this was just the beginning, even if it was a common occurrence.
● ● ●
Hamburg steak—something of a staple for cooking lessons.
It took a fair bit of time and effort, but it was fundamentally rather simple. It would be no exaggeration to call it a beginner’s dish. If you could follow a recipe, you could make it, and it should taste decent at least.
First, you peeled an onion, diced it, and fried it until it became golden-brown. Then, you used a mixing bowl to combine the onion, meat, milk, breadcrumbs, and an egg. Next, you shaped it and fried it carefully to avoid burning it. You could judge when it was done rather easily from the color of the meat juices.
There were several hurdles to making it, but each step was doable. Thus, it was obvious that Kyouhei would choose it for practice.
Especially considering...
“Hamburg steak! That’s what I want!” Pamil exclaimed, picking it out from amongst several options.
Whether she picked it through confidence in herself or because she was fixated on it, he couldn’t tell. Either way, there was nothing wrong with being proactive, but...