Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 20 - Chapter 3.2

2

Several hours later, we finished up all our work and then reunited with the members of the Ruu clan before heading to the Daleim lands.

I gave Lem Dom some coins for the work she had done so that she could purchase dinner from another clan.

Ai Fa had a pensive look on her face the entire time during the trip, but Rimee and Lala Ruu were both in high spirits. They must have really been looking forward to staying over at Dora’s place, and honestly, I felt the same way.

I couldn’t help but be concerned about Ai Fa’s feelings about having to shoulder Lem Dom’s fate, but when she accepted, she must have had just as much resolve in her heart as the two who had been asking. So as a member of the Fa, I intended to support my clan head with all I had.

The wagon kept rolling onward through the twilight, knowing nothing of my thoughts.

In another half an hour, the sun would fully set. The Daleim fields were dyed a purplish-red and looked indescribably idyllic, not to mention beautiful.

“I see. You certainly can’t see anything like this at the forest’s edge,” Ludo Ruu remarked, as this was his first time coming here.

Shin Ruu was riding atop Mim Cha’s back along with Dan Rutim, and he must have felt much the same way. Neither they nor Lala Ruu had accompanied us to the Daleim lands before, so they had never laid eyes on this wide-open cleared space either.

Surrounded by the members of the Ruu clan, Toor Deen looked completely entranced by the twilit scene reflected in her eyes. It was because of my personal intervention that she was able to participate even though she wasn’t on a break period. It might have been a bit presumptuous to say so, but I couldn’t help thinking about her as something like an apprentice.

Reina and Sheera Ruu were somewhat further removed from me and were walking their own paths. They were spending every day at the Ruu settlement diligently practicing together. But Toor Deen’s will was just as strong as theirs despite being only ten years old, so I was always thinking about how I wanted to give her the best possible environment to grow up in.

“I’m still inexperienced myself, so it would be a little arrogant for me to say something like that. And besides, you’ve pulled ahead of me when it comes to sweets.” That was something I had said about my feelings while asking Toor Deen to accompany us, which had ended up making her cry.

“I don’t know how I could possibly repay this debt of having you go so far to look after me...”

“You don’t have to repay anything. Just keep on doing your best to create delicious food.”

Even so, Toor Deen had sobbed for five minutes straight. Even though Ai Fa had scolded me, saying “What in the world are you doing!” I still considered it a good memory.

As I gave myself over to such thoughts, our destination finally came into view.

“Hello there. We’ve been waiting for all of you from the forest’s edge.”

This was our second visit to Dora’s home in the Daleim lands. This time we passed straight through the fields to the house, where Dora greeted us with a smile.

“We’ve been real busy with work too. I’m sorry it took so long to invite you over again.”

“Please don’t apologize. I’m sorry for imposing on you at such a busy time.”

As we exchanged our greetings, Dora guided us into his house.

It was a wooden home that was built a bit differently from the inns in the post town. The roof was straw-thatched, and it was generally more like a log cabin rather than a building made using planks, but it was still a fine two-story structure. The large one-story building next door was a storehouse for vegetables and also provided lodgings for the temporary hires.

When we stepped into the main hall, we found six members of Dora’s family waiting for us. That included his two sons, Tara, his mother, the younger brother of his late father, and his older son’s toddler. Dora’s wife and the wife of his son were busy working on dinner.

“Yay! Welcome, Rimee Ruu!” Tara exclaimed, taking a leap off her wooden chair toward the youngest Ruu daughter. Rimee Ruu hugged Tara tightly with a blissful smile on her face.

“You’re going to cook something for us too, right? We’re all starving, so we’re looking forward to it,” Dora said.

“Sure thing. Okay, we’ll see you all later.”

We had borrowed their kitchen the last time we had visited too. We started walking in that direction after bowing to Dora’s family, who were looking at us with a variety of expressions.

“My, welcome. Thank you for coming all this way from the forest’s edge, everyone,” an older woman who was a little on the slender side said, turning our way with a gentle smile. She was Dora’s wife. We had seen her last time as well. Next to her was a woman who looked just a bit older than me: the wife of Dora’s son.

“We’re done with our preparations, so please use the kitchen however you please. We’ll go ahead and move this pot.”

Apparently, Dora’s family had said all sorts of harsh things back when he had first started getting close to us. The residents of the Daleim lands probably couldn’t understand why in the world he would want to form bonds with the infamous people of the forest’s edge. But tonight their smiles were just so carefree that it was hard to believe that had once been the case. It was all thanks to Dora and Tara spending so much time persuading them, as well as the fact that the crimes of the Suun clan and house of Turan had been exposed. I naturally had some really warm feelings toward them these days.

“All right, then; we’ll go ahead and borrow your kitchen now.”

As it was the least we could do in return, we were going to make two dishes for dinner ourselves. I would be making a pasta-with-ketchup-style dish, while the Ruu clan were preparing giba meat grilled with herbs.

I cut up some aria, pula, and sausage and heated it all up with a ketchup-like sauce I had prepared at home. Then I just needed to mix in the boiled pasta and sauté everything until the moisture in it had cooked off. I had also finely grated some gyama dried milk to be sprinkled over the top once the dish was divvied up onto separate plates.

As for the meat grilled with herbs, the others had done the prep work at the Ruu settlement and now they just needed to cook it. It had a curry-style flavor made by steeping the meat in three different herbs and was accompanied by aria and nanaar.

“Are you all done? Then let’s carry everything out together.”

With that, we took the plates out to the main hall where everyone was waiting, alongside the food prepared by the wives. Each dish was on its own large plate, which would be divided up and served on smaller plates.

“This is surely the first time we’ve ever had so many guests. I had to borrow the extra chairs and table from my younger brother’s house and pull everything out of storage too. I hope you’ll forgive us if anything’s a bit slanted,” Dora remarked with an even brighter smile than usual. Most of his family were giving us friendly looks. The only ones who seemed to be regarding us with stern expressions were the two older people.

There were two large tables placed together right in the middle of the main hall. The members of Dora’s family were seated on two of the four sides, so we took the remaining two. Rimee Ruu and Tara naturally grabbed two neighboring corner seats, while Ai Fa and Toor Deen sat on either side of me.

The hunters all hung their cloaks along the wall and placed their swords underneath. Then, after apologizing to Dora’s family for keeping their knives on their persons, they all took their seats. Shin Ruu wasn’t used to sitting in a chair and looked a bit uncomfortable, but he unsurprisingly didn’t voice a complaint.

“Well then, let’s dig in! Ah, but at the forest’s edge you have a pre-meal chant you say, don’t you? Please go ahead, and don’t mind us.”

We went ahead and did just that. Perhaps because it was their own house, Dora’s family didn’t say a single word, instead simply offering a brief moment of silent prayer before grabbing their plates.

“This smells just like that curry dish. And it certainly seems tasty.”

For the majority of Dora’s family, this was their second meal with us, so they showed no hesitation about taking some giba cooking. Meanwhile, this was my first time seeing a dinner in the Daleim lands, so I was really interested in the food they had made.

Since it was the night before a holiday, they seemed to have prepared a more extravagant meal than usual. Just at a glance, I saw a soup, a stew, grilled kimyuus meat, tino pickled in salt, baked poitan...all of them, made by Dora’s family.

To start with, I went ahead and had a taste of the soup.

It was a dark brown color and had the aroma of myamuu about it. Judging by the color, it must have included tau oil too. I had already heard that since Dora’s house now had a good deal more money to their name, they had started purchasing tau oil and sugar.

As for the solid ingredients, the soup used aria, nenon, kimyuus meat, and some sort of unfamiliar greens. I couldn’t quite tell if I had seen them anywhere before or not, but I at least knew it wasn’t something offered at Dora’s stall. I bit into some of that first, and a very straightforward greeny flavor with a slight bitterness to it filled my mouth.

“Ah, that’s a nenon leaf. They shrivel up in half a day after you remove them from the stem, so I can’t sell them, but they’re an important ingredient for us here.”

“I see. That sounds like a nice perk.”

When I took another bite of it together with some of the finely sliced kimyuus meat and aria, the texture and hint of bitterness provided a fantastic accent to the dish. The only seasonings used in the soup were salt and tau oil, but it made for a relaxing, simple flavor overall.

And then there was the nenon in the soup. I bit into some without thinking about it, and was caught off guard by the unexpected texture and flavor.

Nenon was a vegetable that was very similar to a carrot. But this one was much more solid and chewy, and had a condensed sweetness too.

The texture was kind of similar to boiled bamboo shoots. When I bit into it, a very un-nenon-like sweetness spread throughout my mouth. Normally, it played an excellent supporting role to draw out the flavors of other ingredients, but here it stood out more than anything else in the soup.

“Um, did you use some sort of special nenon?” I asked without thinking.

Dora’s wife replied with a bashful smile, “No. Those were nenon that were damaged and couldn’t be sold. They go bad quicker than most other vegetables, so we dry them in the sun to better preserve them.”

“Ooh, so this is what happens to nenon when it’s dried out?”

That was a new discovery. If the texture remained like this even after putting them in water, they must have been quite thoroughly dehydrated. That would open up all sorts of options not just for soup, but stir-fries as well.

That’s a vegetable seller’s house for you. Now I’m looking forward to trying the rest even more.

Next up was the stew.

This one contained a small amount of karon leg meat and had chatchi and pula for the vegetables. But the broth was a deep purplish red, and it was giving off a fruity sweet-and-sour smell. It must have come from crushed and boiled arow.

Arow was a fruit that tasted like something between a strawberry and a blueberry. But it had a low sugar content, so when using it in sweets, you would have to add some sugar or honey. Neither were used in this dish, though, so the berries just added a sour flavor.

Still, it wasn’t all that cheap of an ingredient, so it wasn’t like they had used that much of it for the color it added to the dish. When coupled with the saltiness of the meat, it made for quite a unique taste.

Up until not that long ago, they had never used any seasonings beside salt in the Daleim lands. I figured the powerfully flavorful myamuu, arow, and tarapa had been important to them to add some pop to their dishes.

Nobody ever made sweets outside of the castle town either, so is that how fruits like arow and sheel ended up getting used in ordinary dishes like this? I thought to myself.

But then Lala Ruu suddenly shouted, “Ah! Rimee, you little runt! Why did you give me such a big pula?! You know I don’t like that stuff, don’t you?!”

“Huh? Mom said not to be picky about vegetables. Ludo’s eating it, so you should too, Lala.”

“I’ll eat it, but you should’ve made it a smaller one!”

“But I couldn’t find any smaller than that.”

Pula was a vegetable shaped like a thick ginkgo leaf with a taste similar to a bell pepper. It was true that even when cut in half, its size was pretty hefty for a stew.

I was feeling a bit flustered after that overly open exchange between sisters, but Dora’s wife just laughed it off. “My, you don’t like pula? That’s just like Tara.”

However, Tara was wolfing down her own large pula right at that very moment. “The pula in my mom’s cooking isn’t super bitter. You should give it a try, Lala Ruu.”

Lala Ruu looked a bit dejected, but after stealing a glance at Shin Ruu next to her, she worked up her resolve and bit into the thick vegetable.

“Huh...? It really isn’t very bitter at all...”

“Right? The more finely you cut up pula, the more bitter it becomes. I don’t dislike it myself, but young children tend to hate bitter vegetables,” Dora’s wife said.

From what I could recall, the bitterness of green peppers changed a lot based on if you cut them vertically or horizontally. If you cut against the grain of the fibers, it would cause that bitter flavor to grow stronger.

“You aren’t fond of pula, Lala Ruu? That’s strange, considering you aren’t a young child anymore,” Shin Ruu said while furrowing his brow a bit, perhaps earning himself a kick on the leg below the table. “Are you mad...? I wasn’t intending to make you angry.”

“Oh, just be quiet and eat!”

Dora’s son and his wife were chuckling in amusement by this point.

Feeling relieved that Lala Ruu’s frankness hadn’t led to any hard feelings, I turned toward the next big plate. It was the last main dish, the kimyuus meat one.

It was composed of rather thick cuts of kimyuus breast meat stacked up high on the plate. Though they hadn’t pulled any real tricks with the meat itself, it was presented along with a vegetable dip and eaten wrapped in a parboiled tino leaf, which seemed to be the style in the Daleim lands.

Though I called it a dip, it didn’t use any cream. It was made by stirring finely diced vegetables together with a mixture of tau oil, sugar, and sheel juice, creating a thick red and green sauce. The vegetables in question seemed to be tarapa, aria, and nenon. None of them had been cooked, so the sourness from the tarapa and the sharp taste of the aria were quite stimulating.

Had they just used sheel juice before they started purchasing tau oil and sugar? That seemed like it would have been quite lacking in flavor, but what I had just eaten was rather simple and yet also quite flavorful. The kimyuus meat didn’t assert itself all that much, so the delicious flavor of the vegetables came through a lot more clearly.

The tino pickled in salt provided as a side dish also had quite a strong flavor to it. They had included the tough core, but it was just a bit on the soft side with a really nice crispness left in the center. It was rather sour, though, so they must have let it ferment for quite some time. At any rate, it made for a perfect palate cleanser of a side dish.

The baked poitan had boiled aria kneaded into it—julienned rather than finely chopped, so I felt like they stood out a bit too much, but thanks to being well heated through in advance, their sharp taste was completely gone. Following the example set by Dora’s family, I went ahead and tried dipping it into the soup and stew, and it turned out that the aria’s strong presence was a plus in the end.

“These dishes are all delicious. And it’s great that the vegetables are so fresh.”

“You don’t have to worry about being so polite. I can’t imagine you’re all that impressed with anything we were able to make,” Dora said.

“That’s not true at all. It’s really helpful, getting to experience all the little tricks you came up with that I hadn’t thought of.”

“Still, tau oil and sugar sure are tricky to use. It can end up a real mess if you’re careless. I’m always so anxious when using them,” our host’s wife chimed in with a shy smile.

When she heard that, Lala Ruu tilted her head and commented, “Hmm? Then why don’t you just not mix it into the dish and then pour it over the top later? I used to burn things all the time when I tried grilling meat with tau oil, so I flavored my food like that for a while.”

“Ah, that might just do the trick. Tau oil has a strong flavor when used as is, but it should be easy to handle if you water it down and then add it later. And if you mix sugar with minced myamuu, that should create a whole different sort of delicious flavor,” I added.

“I see,” Dora remarked with a broad smile. “If that’s what you all think, I’m sure you’re right! After all, you’ve been able to create so many delicious dishes using our vegetables.”

Apparently, Dora quite enjoyed my pasta with ketchup. His sons had been taught how to eat it as well, and when they awkwardly twisted the pasta around their three-pronged forks and took a bite, their eyes opened wide in surprise.

“This was made using tarapa bought from our place? I almost can’t believe it,” one of them said.

“You make it by mixing together tarapa, aria, myamuu, and chitt seeds and letting them simmer. For seasonings, I added salt, sugar, pico leaves, and mamaria vinegar.”

“Ah, so it’s this delicious because you put that much into it? It’s definitely not something we could imitate, though.”

“Ah, no, as long as you don’t get the amounts wrong, anyone could make it. And it doesn’t use any ingredients more expensive than sugar.” As I was speaking, a flash of inspiration struck me. “If you’d like, I could teach you the proper amounts and the process. Just pouring it over grilled meat or veggies is enough to make something really tasty, and you can also stir-fry with it like I did here. Oh, and it should go well with fried eggs too.”

“Huh? Oh, no, it wouldn’t be right to take so much of your time. The people from the inns pay money for your cooking, don’t they?” Dora replied.

However, I shook my head and answered, “Not for this. Ketchup isn’t a meal. I’d just be showing you how to make a condiment. It would feel pretty overbearing to me if I went into someone else’s home and told them how to cook their own food, but I would be very glad if you could use that condiment to make some delicious dishes.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Also, Yumi’s been making a dish called okonomiyaki at her stall, and I taught her how to make a couple condiments called Worcestershire sauce and mayonnaise to go along with it. They’re both really easy to make and they taste great if you just add them to your finished dishes, so they’re not difficult to work with at all.”

Dora stared at me, the ends of his eyebrows drooping. “It really wouldn’t be any trouble for you, Asuta?”

“Of course not. You always give us priority when it comes to the vegetables you sell, so let me at least do a little something to return the favor.”

And so, I promised that when I came to visit again four days from now, I would teach them how to make ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and mayonnaise. Of course, that still felt like it was far from enough to repay their warm hospitality.

After thanking me for a while, Dora turned toward the seat next to him.

“So, when are you finally going to try the giba meat, mom? Didn’t you already prepare yourself to give it a try?”

“Hmph, I don’t remember doing any such thing,” the older woman who had just been quietly slurping soup responded harshly. She was Dora’s mother and Tara’s grandmother. “Even if all the criminals from the forest’s edge have been captured, that doesn’t change the fact that giba are terrifying beasts. I don’t understand why I should be happy to swallow down the meat of those creatures.”

“Why? Because giba meat is delicious, of course. What other reason could you need?” Dora shot back with a strained smile, then turned toward the other old person who had been sitting at the table, silent and sullen. “Uncle, you have pent up resentment toward giba, don’t you? So why don’t you try wiping some of it away by eating their meat? Use them to fill your stomach, and maybe it’ll make up for all the vegetables they ruined.”

Finally, with great reluctance, the two of them reached for their spoons and skewers, but in the end they had nothing but complaints. “It’s all slippery and hard to eat,” and, “This is too spicy to eat.”

“Ugh, you’re hopeless... Sorry, Asuta, but next time could you prepare something that’ll leave these old bags of bones speechless?”

“Is that any way to talk about your own mother?” his mom murmured with a really stern look on her face.

The older residents of the Daleim lands had especially deep-rooted issues with the people of the forest’s edge and giba. But they had permitted us to sit at the same table as them, and they had at least technically tried to eat our food. I absolutely intended to do everything I could to reach a higher level of mutual understanding with them.

“In that case, you should make giba ribs next time! I can’t imagine anyone disliking those!” Dan Rutim very suddenly interjected with a chuckle.

The elders turned and shot him a suspicious look as he continued.

“Giba are incredibly powerful beasts! And you can gain their indomitable strength by eating them! You guys should build up your strength too, so you can keep growing all these delicious vegetables! After all, no matter how delicious giba meat may be, you can’t live a healthy life without a complete diet!”

“Right. We’re able to look after fields in peace because all of you who live at the forest’s edge risk your lives to hunt down giba. We’ll keep working hard too so we can sit at the same table like this and not be too embarrassed about it.” That reply hadn’t come from Dora, but rather his older son.

From there, the son’s wife started talking with Lala Ruu and Toor Deen, and the younger son struck up a conversation with Shin Ruu. The atmosphere around the dinner table was starting to become more and more energetic.

Then we pulled the cork out of the bottle of fruit wine we had brought as a gift, and things got even more lively. Tara, Rimee Ruu, and Ludo Ruu had been having a friendly chat already, but now even the naturally silent Ai Fa and Dora’s uncle and mother were getting dragged into the conversation. Just like on the night when Dora and the others had come to visit the forest’s edge, the scene really tugged at my heartstrings.

The next time an opportunity like this came up, I really wanted to have Yun Sudra, Reina Ruu, and Yumi participate too. If the bonds that connected all of us could spread and grow deeper like that, the deep-rooted discord between the forest’s edge and Genos could be reduced, at least a little. That was what I kept thinking about as I watched over everyone enjoying themselves around the dinner table.