Never Mind the Heir, I’ll Focus on Healing — Chapter 166
Never Mind the Heir, I’ll Focus on Healing — Chapter 166
Lion stole glances outside while removing his gloves.
He’d probably keep them on when handling fire later, but bare hands were more comfortable for prepping ingredients.
“Let’s see…”
There was more to do than he’d thought.
Lion washed his hands thoroughly at the sink, then rinsed the rice, reserving the cloudy water in a separate container.
‘There’s nothing like this when you don’t have anchovy stock.’
The milky rice water would serve as a versatile stock base for anything.
He put the washed rice in a pot and let it soak for a while.
Cooking it right away wouldn’t have been a problem, but since he was bothering with pot rice, he decided to put a little extra care into it.
‘These days they say to mix in a little oil…’
He recalled hearing that it made each grain glisten with a glossy sheen.
But what Lion intended to make today was, literally, home cooking, so he resolved to stick to the basics.
Besides…
He hadn’t been a bad cook before, but hadn’t his Cooking Talent made his touch considerably better?
And with ingredients this good, even a modest effort would yield the flavor of skillfully made home cooking.
Gulp!
Lion swallowed the saliva that had pooled in his mouth unbidden.
‘Nothing fills you up like a home-cooked meal, honestly.’
That sense of sturdy satisfaction, packing the emptiness that restaurant food can’t fill into a bowl crammed to the brim.
A spoonful prepared with care, in your own peaceful home, just for you!
Surely everyone’s felt it at least once.
That feeling of leaning back languidly after absolutely stuffing yourself with rice, side dishes, and stew, and thinking, “Ah. I might actually live.”
That sensation of your body melting into warm, almost hot, blissful sluggishness!
The moment when you regain the ease and composure to take a breather from the filthy, petty squalls of society.
Home cooking carried that kind of solid reassurance.
Some might say, what’s so grand about a single meal? But to Lion, at least, it meant a great deal.
And he’d realized it, hadn’t he?
The joy of cooking for someone else.
“…Well, two birds with one stone, anyway.”
Since he was at it, it’d be nicer to eat together, wouldn’t it?
Lion trimmed the fresh green onions and lopped off the roots, placing them beside the reserved rice water.
Then…
“Hmm.”
He stared fixedly at the purple carrot.
It was carrot-shaped, sure, but its color also resembled a beet.
Using this would clearly give the broth a deeper flavor.
‘The problem is, if I use it wrong, the visuals could be a catastrophe.’
Colored vegetables always leach out their pigment when you make stock with them.
If he sliced a generous amount into the pot…
‘We’d get purple soup.’
Of course, bean sprout soup in this world would be unfamiliar whether it was purple or clear, but he still wanted to avoid colors that suppressed appetite.
“First… let’s cut it and give it a taste.”
Lion sliced the clean purple carrot and popped a small piece into his mouth.
Crunch!
A strong saltiness hit him alongside the carrot’s distinctive grassy note. It was like raw carrot sprinkled with seasoned salt.
“Mm…”
Lion made an odd face at the ambiguous taste, neither good nor bad.
As he kept chewing, crunching away…
“Hmm?”
The taste changed!
Where moments ago there was the rawness of eating it uncooked, now an inexplicable savory depth came through.
Lion knew.
Umami, saltiness — and this savory richness — was practically…!
‘Soy sauce?’
Strangely enough, chewing this Salt Carrot for a while brought up the flavor of soy sauce inside his mouth!
At once, Lion’s eyes turned bright and sparkly.
Soy sauce!
‘I was trying to figure out how to build flavor without soy sauce — this is perfect!’
The problem was that the Salt Carrot was purple, but there was an easy fix.
Namely: mince the Salt Carrot and boil it down hard with water!
Purple usually turned brown when boiled, so these carrots should hold the same potential.
Better still, this would blast away the raw grassiness, which made it perfect as a soy sauce substitute.
Lion put the plan into action at once.
First, he put a very shallow amount of water in a pan and set it over the fire.
The shallow water would boil and bubble off quickly, while keeping the carrot from sticking to the pan.
Even so, he stirred it gently with a spatula just in case.
Carrots usually need long cooking, but chopped this fine and treated this roughly, they cooked fast; their rigid form began to break down.
Around the time the water had fully evaporated, leaving only the carrot, he scooped out a bit for a taste.
“…!”
As expected. No — deeper than expected. It tasted like soy sauce from a venerable artisan house.
The grassiness was gone, replaced by surging umami.
And there was even that refreshing cleanness that vegetables can bring…!
“This is insane.”
Lion muttered to himself as he scraped up the carrot, wrapped it in cloth, and squeezed the juice out.
Dark brown liquid plopped through the muslin.
It wasn’t much, but no matter how you looked at it, it was soy sauce itself!
‘First thing I do when I get home: commandeer that Salt Carrot.’
No, since things had come to this, should he get seeds and grow it in the labyrinth?
With that thought, Lion brought out the armful of bean sprouts he’d swept up.
“Whoa. These are in great shape.”
Still, they’d come from Easter’s mart — no, Easter’s warehouse, so of course they’d expected good quality.
He’d even checked when scooping them up.
But now that he was looking to prep them… they were even better!
No sign of the little husks you sometimes see on the heads, and the sprouts themselves were neatly aligned instead of all jumbled…
‘This is going to be so easy to trim.’
Even better, unlike ordinary bean sprouts, these Mugwort Bean Sprouts required completely removing the roots, but he didn’t have to clean them one by one!
All he had to do was grab a suitable handful, and chop — slice the roots right off with a knife.
After a few such cuts, he put them into a basin of water to rinse off any debris that might be clinging, and that was that.
“Really nice.”
Lion prepped a few more of the remaining ingredients, then set the rice to cook. In a stockpot, he combined the rice water and the green onion roots and brought them to a bubbling boil.
Once the onion flavor had leached into the water, he removed the roots, added the bean sprouts along with a little more water to adjust the consistency.
Then he boiled it vigorously over high heat.
There was a technique of putting the lid on to control any off-smells, but Lion preferred to leave it uncovered.
After all, if you put the lid on and the soup boils over, you have to open it partway through, don’t you?
‘Well, they say it barely makes a difference anyway…’
But they also said that opening and closing the lid midway made the characteristic off-smell worse, so he’d chosen to boil it uncovered the entire time.
He also genuinely needed to check whether the bean sprouts changed color.
Bubble-bubble-!
After a little while, the mugwort-green bean sprouts gradually took on the color of ordinary bean sprouts.
The stalks turned translucent white. The heads began giving off a soft yellow, like boiled egg yolks!
What’s more, whether it was because the color had literally boiled away, the stock in the pot was still proudly milky-white.
‘Phew!’
Lion let out a relieved sigh and seasoned the bean sprout soup.
He added an appropriate amount of salt, then drizzled in the carrot soy sauce he’d made a moment ago.
Next…
“Garlic can’t possibly be left out, of course.”
Lion took the Pungent Fruit out of his inventory.
The garlic they had here would do, but the flesh of this Pungent Fruit tasted a bit better.
He minced the Pungent Fruit and dropped it in with a plop.
The seeds inside, he grated gently into a powder and added with a few taps.
Finally, for a bit of pleasant heat and a clean finish, he sliced a spicy pepper into the pot…
“Ah, this is going to be so good.”
Black pepper, garlic, and chili pepper to boot —
adding the three great appetite stimulants was driving him to distraction.
He wanted to have a proper bowl with rice right then and there… but he restrained himself.
It wasn’t all finished yet.
“First, let the soup keep boiling…”
Lion reduced the soup to a low simmer and brought out a wide pan.
In the meantime, he didn’t forget to adjust the heat under the pot rice.
Soup and rice were more or less ready, but the most important element was still left.
Namely, the side dish.
“Heh heh…”
He knew an incredibly tasty side dish that even people who disliked bean sprouts could eat.
Bean sprout bulgogi.
And as it happened, he’d found superb ingredients in the warehouse’s meat section.
Namely…
“They have a magic tool that slices meat to whatever thickness you want!”
An Automatic Meat Slicer!
Fresh raw meat you could cut into any size you pleased!
What’s more, it even sliced paper-thin.
‘Stir-frying bean sprouts in pork fat is guaranteed delicious.’
And if you didn’t skimp — really loaded in the meat — how incredible wouldn’t that taste?
Even though he’d just eaten a killer brunch a little while ago, his stomach seemed to be rumbling.
Lion moved a bit faster than before.
Actually, making bean sprout bulgogi was fairly simple.
‘Because you just chuck it all in and stir-fry it together.’
It sounds slipshod, in a way, but once you taste it, nobody says that.
First, he heaped a mountain of bean sprouts and meat into a heated pan.
Sizzle — the meat cooked and its fat rendered out.
And the bean sprouts absorbed that fat.
While the two were melding and cooking together, he prepared the seasoning sauce.
He heaped a heavy dose of chili powder into the carrot soy sauce — to the point of seeming excessive.
Without gochujang, using this much chili powder was all right.
…Though, would the Second Prince be all right with it?
‘He handled his liquor fine, so he should handle spicy food fine too.’
Even if he couldn’t, the bean sprout soup would soothe his tongue, so it’d be fine.
Rickshel handled spicy food better than expected anyway.
Lion nodded, then added sugar, minced Pungent Fruit, and Pungent Seeds to bring a sharper kick. Lastly, he mixed in a spoonful of white cooking wine to round it out.
Once the seasoning sauce was ready, he dumped it straight onto the sizzling bulgogi and stir-fried it all together at full blast.
Thanks to the high heat, the bean sprouts and meat unintentionally picked up a fire-kissed wok aroma.
The seasoning, which had been thick and not mixing well, began to meld smoothly the moment the bean sprouts released their moisture.
And then…
“Whoa…”
At some point, a stimulating, magnificent smell rose up through his nose.
That distinctive appetite-exploding aroma of seasoning slightly caramelized by intense heat!
‘I made it myself, but this is absolutely no joke.’
Regulating the heat with a spatula to keep it from burning, Lion added green onion, and just before finishing, he rolled up some catnip leaves, sliced them, and mixed them in for fragrance.
Finally, he took a bite to check if anything was lacking…
“…”
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Yes. This is it.
This is the flavor!
You know that moment, right?
When you cooked it yourself, but it’s so delicious you wonder if a real genius made it.
That’s what this bean sprout bulgogi was like.
The crisp texture of bean sprouts filling his mouth, the chewy give of the meat.
Was that all? The spicy-sweet seasoning poked and prodded his tongue.
The bean sprout soup, intentionally made with a generous amount of water, had reduced to a perfectly ideal flavor while he’d been making the bulgogi. And when he opened the lid on the pot rice, the grains glistened with glossy sheen.
“Perfect.”
Now, time to pack it up!
Why had he chosen bean sprout bulgogi as the side dish?
Because it had to cool slightly for the seasoning to soak in, which doubled the flavor.
This was the moment of completion. He dubbed it ‘Lion’s Home-Cooked Meal Delivery’.