Cooking with Wild Game: Volume 26 (eBook)

EDA (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-3450-2 (ISBN)

Infos

The rainy season has arrived at last, and with it, a great deal of change! Asuta has come down with and overcome a serious illness, but now there are new challenges for him and his comrades to deal with, from his business in the post town to the difficulties of hunting in the rain. In the meantime, a group of slaves from Mahyudra have been brought to the forest to clear a path that will eventually run all the way through it.

However, the rainy season isn't even half over yet, meaning there's still plenty left for the people of the forest's edge to face! Many familiar ingredients are no longer available to Asuta and the other chefs, forcing them to learn how to use new ones. An accident occurs at the worksite for the new path through the forest. Plus, the nobles are asking to throw another tea party. And most important of all, Ai Fa's birthday is coming up!

See all this and more in the exciting twenty-sixth volume of Cooking with Wild Game!

Textauszug

After everyone had sampled the stew, Reina Ruu whispered to me, “Um, you said you wanted to have the Ruu clan take full responsibility for selecting and preparing all the soup we sell in town, didn’t you? So are you not planning on selling this dish?”

“Huh? Yeah, that’s right. I came up with this so we could have it for dinner here at the forest’s edge.”

“Then...could we have permission to sell it?”

I was taken aback. “Of course. I don’t mind. But you were finally just about to stop selling myamuu giba so that the only recipes you’d be using would be your own. Are you sure you want to borrow another of mine?”

“I think it would be good to use rainy season vegetables as much as possible during this time of year. Besides, we’re not foolish enough to do something stupid like stubbornly trying to be your rivals,” Reina Ruu remarked with a mature smile. “After all, we still aren’t done taking lessons from you, Asuta. And I don’t think any of us would be able to create such a wonderful dish using traip on our own yet, so yes, I would like to keep borrowing your skills.”

“Then what about the offal hot pot and that original stew you came up with?”

“I’d like to sell those as well, on alternating days. The townsfolk do seem to really enjoy them.”

Well, in that case, I certainly had no objections.

“All right then. I already taught Rimee Ruu the basic method for making it, so why don’t you all keep experimenting with it until you get it to your liking? To be honest, it’s not a dish I’m all that familiar with, so deciding how much traip and other stuff we were going to use was pretty much guesswork on my part.” After saying that, I turned toward Mikel. “Also, there’s something I want to discuss with you, Mikel. Could you teach Reina and Sheera Ruu how to get stock from kimyuus bones?”

“From kimyuus bones? But you already know how to get a fine stock from giba bones, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I get the feeling that kimyuus stock would suit this dish better than giba. Giba bone stock has a pretty quirky flavor to it, so I’m worried that it may ruin the overall taste.”

“Hmm...” Mikel muttered as he thought about my request.

In the meantime, I turned back toward Reina and Sheera Ruu. “Honestly, I’ve been wanting to use kimyuus stock in cream stew for a while now. It should make the dish quite a bit tastier, I think. Even the stew we just had felt incomplete to me.”

“Even that didn’t feel complete to you?” Reina Ruu asked. Neither she nor Sheera Ruu were able to hide their surprise. And then they turned toward Mikel in sync. “Mikel, if you know how to work with kimyuus bones, would you be willing to teach us?”

“Now that I think about it, Myme’s used boiled kimyuus bones in some of her own recipes, hasn’t she? And one of those dishes also uses karon milk, so I’d imagine it shares a lot of similarities with cream stew,” Sheera Ruu noted.

“If you want to make a first-rate stew, it’s only natural to prioritize the stock over what’s on the surface. The reason your stews have turned out so good is the excellent stock you’ve gotten from giba and vegetables,” Mikel replied, patting Myme’s small head with his hand. “If you want to learn how to work with bones, try watching her cook in the morning. If you take a little time to talk with her too, picking up on how it’s done should be no problem for you.”

“Thank you, Mikel!”

“Like I said, I’m just repaying my debt to the Ruu clan,” Mikel replied, still looking as sour as ever. At least for now, that settled things in regard to the traip stew.

Now we only had a few more dishes to show off, all of which were meant for our people to have for dinner, like the onda stir-fry and the simmered traip with minced giba meat. And then, finally, we had the desserts, which had been Toor Deen’s and Yun Sudra’s sole focus during the latter half of our study session. Their experiments with traip had ended up producing quite a few different treats.

Since traip had a strong taste, there were all sorts of ways that it could be used. You could knead it into a fuwano dough base or blend it with karon milk cream. You could also prepare a sweet traip sauce as a topping for chatchi mochi or steamed pudding. It really was every bit as versatile as the cocoa-like gigi leaves.

“So tasty! Teach me how to make this!” Rimee Ruu remarked.

In our group of nine, we had three girls with serious sweet tooths, and this was getting them really fired up.

Mikel, on the other hand, was grumbling, “I see. So that’s the girl who’s skilled enough to make a noble want to keep summoning her to the castle town. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get an offer to become their personal chef.”

He must have heard about that from Myme. Of course, his comment made Toor Deen shrink in on herself even more than Rimee Ruu had moments ago.

“By the way, what sort of noble was it? It’s not always a good thing to have someone too high up set their eyes on you.”

“Um, it was the granddaughter of the lord of Genos. She’s still only five or six years old.”

Mikel let out an astounded sigh. Now that I thought about it, Odifia was a direct descendant of the house of the duke. She was the first child of her father Melfried, so the person she married could easily become duke at some point down the line.

“Toor Deen, it sounds like you’ve caught the eye of a future duchess,” I commented tactlessly, causing Toor Deen to both go pale and blush at the same time. “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about it so much. As long as Melfried’s around, Odifia won’t do anything too reckless. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now you’ll be getting called to the castle town every month to make desserts for her.”

The thought of a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Odifia interacting with a twenty-one-year-old Toor Deen was one I really enjoyed.

“P-Please stop,” the young chef said, weakly clinging to my arm.

“Sorry about that. Still, all of these desserts are delicious. I think this baked traip cream sweet is my personal favorite.”

“I love the chatchi mochi! Ah, but the fuwano one was really good too,” Rimee Ruu said.

“I don’t think I could possibly choose between them. Right now, though, what I want most is to show everyone how good they are as soon as I can,” Yun Sudra added.

Then, Reina Ruu turned my way with a cheerful look. “It looks like we’ll be able to make all kinds of delicious meals even during the rainy season with what you three have taught us. Asuta, Mikel, Myme, thank you all so much for today.”

“Yeah. I’d say it turned out real well for our first study session. Now we should be able to have meals we can be satisfied with, even if we can’t use tino or tarapa.”

“Indeed. We have a number of people in our household who were born in the brown month, so I’m glad that we’ll still be able to make better food for them than we used to,” Mia Lea Ruu added with a smile.

“Huh. So, what I’m hearing is, it’s already the twenty-first of the brown month, but you still have a lot of birthdays to celebrate before it’s over. Is that right?”

“Yes. For some reason, they’re all clustered together in the back half of the month. We have five birthday banquets ahead of us—for our clan head, Jiza, Ludo, Vina, and now even Kota.”

It was definitely unusual to have that many in the span of less than ten days.

As I was marveling over that little fact, Rimee Ruu came over and tugged on my sleeve. “By the way, Ai Fa’s birthday is real soon too! Did you know that, Asuta?”

“Oh, I only heard that it was in the red month. Do you know the actual date, Rimee Ruu?”

“Of course! Ai Fa was born on the tenth of the red month!”

The red month was the one that was coming up after the brown. That meant that there were only around twenty days left until my clan head’s birthday.

“We’ll have to have a feast at the Fa house too, then. Thanks, Rimee Ruu.”

“No problem! You have to make sure you celebrate with Ai Fa, though, okay?! By the way, when’s your birthday, Asuta?”

That was a difficult question for me to answer. “Well, the method for keeping track of the date in my home country is different from how you do things on this continent. We didn’t have a thirteenth month every three years, so I doubt it’s even possible to make the calendars match up.”

“Huh?! Then what’re you gonna do? Are you gonna be seventeen forever?”

“No, that doesn’t sound like it would be very workable. I was thinking of making my birthday the day I arrived at the forest’s edge.”

That would mean that my birthday was the twenty-fourth of the yellow month. Fortunately, Ai Fa had made sure to remember the date.

“I see! I was born in the yellow month too, so we match! That makes me kinda happy for some reason!”

“The yellow month comes after the red and vermilion months. Even ignoring the fact that we had a gold month this time, it still hasn’t even been a year since you showed up at the forest’s edge,” Reina Ruu said admiringly. “And yet, you’ve managed to cause so much change in our lives. It makes me...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.12.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Cooking with Wild Game
• Illustrationen: Kochimo
• Übersetzer: Gwendolyn Warner
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: business • cooking • Hunting • Isekai • Light Novel • Romance • Slice of Life
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-3450-8 / 1718334508
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-3450-2 / 9781718334502