A Recipe for Disaster
Haa... Looking more closely, they’d managed to burn it absurdly beautifully. I couldn’t tell whether it was a frying pan or an ashtray anymore.
With a face full of mixed feelings, I stared down at the pan. Cheon Sa-yoon, who had drifted over at some point, kept gasping in admiration as if this were all somehow fascinating.
"Then that’s..."
He pointed at the powder scattered across the floor, and a grand answer came back.
"That’s sesame powder."
Why would you scatter it on the floor instead of the food...? I stopped myself before the question even fully formed.
Go Young-in quietly pointed somewhere else.
Inside a glass bowl on the table sat a thick, sticky lump of dark brown abyss.
"That is obviously the sauce."
Looking at the whole disaster, there was only one conclusion to draw.
"Looks like there wasn’t a recipe."
If he’d actually followed a recipe, there was no way something that looked like a slime monster from a cheap horror game would have emerged from the kitchen...
"There was."
"I see..."
This wasn’t going to work. He needed to at least see what recipe this was supposed to be.
When I looked over at the staff, they were all drawing X marks over their heads with desperate speed. So that meant: absolutely do not let Kyeon In-woo cook again.
Manager Kwon Je-won was shaking his head and holding out a tablet.
Go Young-in stepped just outside the camera angle for a moment and took the device.
A NewTube video was already open.
[Can solo dwellers, cooking beginners, babies, and monkeys all make super-easy spicy pork rice bowls with their eyes closed?]
"So it was a spicy pork rice bowl."
"Yeah. It’s delicious."
Kyeon In-woo answered like he was somehow worse than a monkey.
And it looked like he’d even chosen the menu himself.
If the result was this bad, he had to know, at the very least, that his hands were cursed. So why pick something even easier? He could have selected a safer dish.
"Was this the content you’d planned from the start?"
"Yeah."
"...Why?"
Article 28 | The gentle idol leader offers warm words and kind actions to the members.
"I mean, there had to be a reason you suddenly wanted to cook."
"Someone asked me to on Bubble. Said they’d never seen me cook before."
Since when did you listen so well...? No, to be fair, he had seemed weirdly eager to put effort into things lately.
Go Young-in had just about run out of words and was trying to laugh off the awkwardness when the familiar notification sound chimed.
He didn’t even need to look to know what kind of status window it was. Reflexively, he hurried on with the conversation.
"I see. If that’s the case, then you should do it. Yeah."
"Are you still going to make the spicy pork rice bowl? Should we make something else with the ingredients you have left? Something easier. Like kimchi fried rice..."
I wanted him to say no, but when had Kyeon In-woo ever done what I expected?
"If it gets any easier than this, what’s even fun about cooking?"
Did he really think what he’d made so far counted as cooking? I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or completely serious. If he was serious, then it was an insult to food itself.
"Hey, Go Young. Think about it. Failing at an easy dish and failing at a hard dish aren’t the same, right? If it’s hard, then even if you fail, you can still say, 'Well, it was a difficult recipe anyway.'"
...That’s weirdly convincing.
I had no idea how a super-easy recipe had turned into some ultra-hard-mode disaster, but for some reason, his logic was persuasive.
Ah, damn it.
I’d almost been swept along by a half-decent argument.
"But why do you have to frame it as failure in the first place?"
"When did I say I’d fail? If I say it’s a success, then it’s a success. Whatever comes out is fine as long as I’m satisfied with it, right?"
At the very least, shouldn’t he be able to swallow it?
When I stared at him meaningfully, Kyeon In-woo grinned without a shred of shame.
"That’s why I called you. Originally I was just going to have you come in after everything was done so you could watch."
"There’s no guarantee I’ll even make it well, either—"
"Go Young."
"Yeah?"
Kyeon In-woo picked up the wooden spatula lying nearby and put it into Go Young-in’s hand. Then, in a solemn voice, he declared,
"Cooking is about momentum."
"And anyway, what are you going to do if it fails? They said they wanted to watch you cook, not for you to make it well."
"That’s true, but still."
Wouldn’t it be better to show them I could do anything well? What if they were disappointed?
Every now and then, I found myself genuinely curious about where Kyeon In-woo got that confidence from.
"People have different talents. What can you do? I’m good at other things, so it’s fine."
Honestly... he was usually perfectly normal, so why did he only get childish at times like this? Go Young-in stared at the spatula in his hand for a moment, then turned to Cheon Sa-yoon.
"Sa-yoon, don’t you want to try?"
Cheon Sa-yoon, who had been sitting back and adding little reactions here and there, lowered his eyes with a dejected look.
"Hmm. I don’t think I’d be much help. I’m going to be the sort of person who can’t even tell salt from sugar..."
At that pitiful expression, the chat instantly turned into a sea of tears. Then, with almost practiced grace, Cheon Sa-yoon’s eyes curved sweetly.
"So I’ll be your assistant. I want to help, even if it’s only like that."
Disgusting bastard.
Cheon Sa-yoon needed to understand that his face and his name were enormous advantages. Whatever came out of his mouth, people were already primed to like him because of the visual effect alone. He probably knew that and did it anyway.
"And Young-in hyung already knows how to cook. He’s made all sorts of things for us sometimes, too."
Cheon Sa-yoon dragged out the end of the sentence and smiled innocently.
Since when?
Even Cheon Sa-yoon seemed to think it was strange that people who’d lived together for years had never cooked for each other once, so he just started making things up without hesitation.
As if he’d ever told the truth.
"It was good, right?"
"What? When did you guys eat together?"
I don’t even know. What the hell.
Kyeon In-woo had never once trusted a single word out of Cheon Sa-yoon’s mouth, so why was he suddenly falling for something this obviously fake? It was unfair.
Go Young-in steadied his rattled mind and spoke as calmly as he could.
There was no point denying it now; all that would do was make the atmosphere even weirder.
"I’m not actually that good either. I’ve only made simple dishes, and if there isn’t a recipe, it gets difficult..."
For now, he piled cushion after cushion beneath the words, lowering expectations before they had a chance to rise.
He had no intention of hearing, You were showing off like you were good at cooking and all you did was make garbage.
Truthfully, his cooking was very ordinary. If the dish wasn’t difficult and there was a recipe, he could just barely follow it exactly. That was about the extent of it. The taste was plain, too.
"Then should we just eat this?"
Cheon Sa-yoon lifted the glass bowl containing the slime monster and held it up to eye level.
"Exactly. Go Young, you don’t want to get sick, do you?"
That bastard Kyeon In-woo was the one who’d made it, and now he was laughing about it.
"Hyung, I haven’t eaten a single meal yet."
"I only made it too. I’m still running on empty myself."
Those idiots only managed to match each other like this at times like this. Haa... even now, the visual was shocking. The moment that thing went into someone’s mouth, it felt like it would force out every secret base that didn’t even exist.
Cooking, huh... This was the first time he’d ever shown it directly to someone. It wasn’t exactly an essential idol skill, so they probably wouldn’t warn him for being bad at it, right...?
Every time he tried something new, his heart pounded for more reasons than one.
I don’t know either. As long as it doesn’t taste so bad that I have to spit it out again, I guess it’s fine.
"...All right. I’ll make it."
He took off his bracelet and rings in case someone tried to start something over hygiene, then tied on the apron the staff had prepared — the apron Kyeon In-woo had ignored completely.
After Go Young-in finished cleaning up everything, he stood in front of the portable burner.
Once he’d taken over the cooking, Kyeon In-woo declared that he was bored and volunteered to handle reading the recipe.
Go Young-in had originally planned to just glance at it while cooking, but Kyeon In-woo had insisted that this was his role and no one was allowed to steal it, so he couldn’t even argue.
Kyeon In-woo muted the tablet and read the captions by scrolling back and forth through the video.
"Ah, what the hell. We were supposed to heat the pan first? No wonder it looked weird. Right. There’s no way the vegetables could’ve fallen apart that easily."
No, it seemed like the green onion turning into ash powder had been caused by some other secondary problem. Of course, Kyeon In-woo wasn’t discouraged.
"We were supposed to drain the pork first and then cut it? It says to make the sauce before slicing it."
His trustworthiness was still painfully lacking, but Go Young-in didn’t know enough to contradict him, so he just did what Kyeon In-woo said.
He went looking for a knife to cut the pork with. The only blade visible on the cutting board was jammed in without a handle.
At this rate, he was about to end up slicing raw meat with scissors.
"Any other knife left?"
"There should be one in the drawer."
Wait. Kyeon In-woo opened the drawer and pulled out a kitchen knife.
Why is he holding it like that?
This guy’s grip on a knife was wrong from the start. I’d told him to cut the meat, not stab it.
Go Young-in, seeing Kyeon In-woo holding the blade in reverse, quietly reached out to take it away.
"Hey."
Kyeon In-woo dodged, pulling his arm back and scoffing.
"In-woo, be careful. That’s dangerous."
"It’s got a sheath on it."
"Even so."
"If you say, 'In-woo hyung, please give it to me,' then I’ll hand it over. Go on, try it, and—"
"In-woo hyung, please give it to me."
"Ah. Lame."
Watching him grin mischievously and then complain because the joke didn’t go his way, he was nothing but a child through and through.
Fortunately, it seemed the knife had been sharpened properly, so there was no disaster where it failed to cut cleanly.
As Go Young-in positioned the pork he’d blotted dry with paper towels, ready to cut it, advice started flying in from both sides.
"Hey, Go Young. Cut it into big pieces."
"Young-in hyung, please cut it thin."
"Meat is all about the chew. It should be bigger."
"Hyung, you just missed the cut."
"No, no... a little bigger than that."
"Hyung. I think you made a mistake just now. If you want it thin, the knife shouldn’t go in that direction."
What a goddamn racket. Those two didn’t really have conversations; they just shouted whatever they felt like saying.
They kept buzzing at him from both sides, so it was impossible to concentrate. Didn’t they know you had to be careful with a knife in the kitchen, those idiots?
"Watch the knife."
"Stab it?"
"Stab it?"
"What the...?"
Go Young-in looked back and forth between the two of them with a stunned expression.
He’d meant they should back off because it was dangerous, but apparently these two had heard something entirely different.
So they do know they’re getting on my nerves, huh?
Ignoring the shredded meat that had been battered into submission by their competing opinions, Go Young-in started looking for the next ingredient.
"Where are the vegetables?"
"Huh? Those are the vegetables over there."
On the plate Kyeon In-woo pointed at, chopped scallions, onions, and carrots were piled up in tiny bits, as if someone had cut construction paper with scissors.
He’d hacked every vegetable into pieces, so there was nothing left over.
The visual had already died right there.
"Is it really okay to leave them like that..."
"What’s the problem?"
Forget it.
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