The Mid-Autumn Festival (2)
It didn't take Diaochan all that long to finish the hubing.
"My lord. It is finished."
"Oh?"
The hubing made its debut, arranged neatly on a plate. As if to prove no one could call it anything but a traditional Chinese confection, each one had been prettily molded into the round, full-moon shape that comes to mind the moment anyone mentions mooncakes. Apparently there were even smithies that specialized in crafting the molds used for cooking.
I picked up one of the hubing standing in a tidy row and popped it into my mouth.
"...Oh."
The instant it touched my tongue, a sweet, mellow richness spread across it. What surprised me even more was that the filling inside wasn't red bean at all.
Savoring the taste, I swallowed the hubing down and turned to Diaochan.
"You put vegetables in this?"
"Yes. I thought that using nothing but low-moisture ingredients like cake flour might taste a touch heavy on the palate, so..."
"I see."
I nodded. Right—trial and error like this was part of the joy of cooking, wasn't it? In the hands of someone unskilled, such experiments would yield something bizarre, but a talented cook like Diaochan had enough basic sense that whatever she did, something delicious came out the other end. Even a picky child who balked at the mere mention of vegetables would probably gobble this up.
……
Even Lü Bu—whose palate had changed since her pregnancy, leaving her utterly helpless before anything sweet—sidled over and slipped a hubing into her mouth.
"I-it's good..."
"Awoo-ah. Awoo."
Yeo Hwa, nestled in Lü Bu's arms, flailed her little arms as if demanding a share of her own, but you couldn't hand pastry to a baby who hadn't even started on weaning food yet.
Lü Bu, who knew this well enough from all her studying, gave a faint smile.
"Our little girl gets some later. Got it?"
"Abubu..."
Yeo Hwa pulled a sulky face, as if this treatment offended her to her very core, but there was nothing to be done about it.
...The fact that even her sulk looked adorable meant I was thoroughly wrapped around her tiny finger.
Just then, Lü Bu shot up from her seat.
"All right! I've decided!"
"...?"
Just as everyone nearby began to puzzle over her sudden declaration, Lü Bu fixed her eyes squarely on Diaochan and shouted,
"Diaochan! I've got one favor to ask!"
"...And what favor would that be?"
The two of them, having grown reasonably close over their time in the same household, carried on their exchange.
"Teach me how to cook!"
……
At Lü Bu's request, Diaochan looked to me as if asking how to proceed, and I nodded my assent—go ahead and teach her.
Understanding my meaning, Diaochan closed her eyes briefly, then spoke at a measured pace.
"Very well. When would you like to begin practicing?"
"Right this instant!"
……
Well, someone's certainly eager.
Lü Bu's attitude seemed to fluster Diaochan for a heartbeat, though not a trace of it showed on the surface.
Not a flicker of emotion let out. So that was what a true professional looked like.
Suddenly I understood exactly why Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu had been so completely taken in by Diaochan in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
"If that is your wish, then please follow me."
She must have already sorted out how to teach Lü Bu in that brief span.
I watched Lü Bu trot along at Diaochan's heels for a moment, then picked up the plate of hubing.
Might as well use this chance to see how the two of them actually go about cooking.
And so Diaochan made her way to the kitchen to teach Lü Bu, only to be thrown off balance yet again by an unexpected sight.
The reason was very simple.
"I'm ready!"
……
Because standing beside Lü Bu, who had changed into proper cooking attire, was Seo Yeo—blending right in without a hint of incongruity.
One look, and anyone would assume Seo Yeo had asked Diaochan for lessons too.
She hardly ever opened her mouth for anyone but me. In a way, it was quintessentially Seo Yeo.
A homemade meal for the man she loved. Seo Yeo and Lü Bu—both women who threw themselves wholeheartedly into love, so it hadn't taken them long to turn thought into action.
Of course, whenever the mothers were busy, minding the children fell to the father.
With one baby cradled in each arm, I could barely so much as twitch.
...But what could I do? I'd brought this on myself, so I might as well take it in stride.
Babies not long out of the cradle would instinctively burst into wails the moment their backs touched the floor, and in any case, with their eyes wide and bright, neither girl showed the slightest sign of being ready to sleep.
……
"Awoo!"
If there was one silver lining, it was that Seo Hui and Yeo Hua in my arms looked to be in wonderful spirits.
Seo Hui, as ever, stared holes through me, while Yeo Hua kept wriggling her tiny little hands.
I stole closer to Diaochan—who was surely panicking on the inside—and whispered in her ear.
"I'm counting on you with both of them."
"...If that is my lord's wish, then of course."
Answering me in her calm voice, Diaochan approached the two women standing there in their respective states and said,
"I shall begin with the most fundamental question."
"Sure! Ask me anything!"
Lü Bu hollered with total confidence, as if daring the questions to come at her.
"Have you ever cooked before?"
……
And that blazing confidence evaporated the instant Diaochan fired off her first question.
"W-well... um... y-yeah, I have!"
After rolling her eyes around for a moment, Lü Bu finally seemed to remember something and answered with gusto,
"I've caught beasts in the mountains and roasted them over a fire!"
I see. Well, I suppose that technically counts as cooking. ...Then again, I've never once seen her do anything of the sort?
……
"It was ages ago! Back before I met you, I lived off catching rabbits and wild boars and stuff!"
Sensing my skeptical gaze, Lü Bu hurriedly added an explanation.
If that was true, it meant Lü Bu had spent her early years living like some wild child of the mountains.
...I'd heard she'd lost her parents and drifted from place to place, but I never realized it went quite that far.
A strange feeling washed over me just then.
There was that time in the Nanman when she'd tried to flay a tiger with her own two hands, too—Lü Bu, for all her temperament, apparently had surprisingly formidable survival skills.
Now this, I could genuinely look forward to. Someone with clumsy hands could never have honed survival skills to begin with.
……
Having heard Lü Bu's answer, Diaochan turned her gaze to Seo Yeo, who held her silence for a moment before—unlike Lü Bu—shaking her head.
Naturally. Until I'd taken her in with my own two hands, that girl had never once set foot outside the slums. If anything, I'd have been the one astonished to hear she'd ever cooked.
"...Very well."
With both answers in hand, Diaochan seemed to have completed her assessment, and she spoke in her level voice.
"Then let us begin with the single most important thing in cooking."
"The most important thing?"
"Yes."
Lü Bu cocked her head at that.
"How to control the flame when cooking, and in what order to add each ingredient—that is where we shall start."
Ahh. Listening in on Diaochan's lecture from a distance, I nodded along.
She had a point—the classic beginner's blunder was cranking the heat to full blast no matter what, and it was just as easy to overlook that every ingredient cooked at its own pace. First you had to keep from burning the food; only then came seasoning. Sprinkling salt over a lump of charcoal wouldn't make it fit for human consumption, after all.
"Now, we begin."
Diaochan summoned the nearby attendants to prepare the ingredients, then cast me a brief glance.
Watching that made me want to try cooking myself.
But with the people around me so fanatically devoted to my safety, setting foot in that kitchen remained a distant dream.
This was a world without even the sexist notion that men don't belong in the kitchen—yet here I was, barred from cooking in the name of 'safety.'
I was certain the people around me thought of me as something along the lines of a sunfish or one of those wafer cookies that shatters if you so much as look at it.
To give you the verdict first: it wasn't half bad.
You know how, in fiction, when a character who can't cook makes a meal, it comes out as some warped hellfire abomination from the netherworld? The kind where a censor's mosaic would be a mercy—where things that absolutely should not move, move?
Thankfully, compared to those horrors, what the two of them produced was downright ordinary.
"As long as one cuts it and grills it, it is quite edible, is it not?"
"No, it isn't."
Somehow, meat had been hacked into chunks bone and all with a perfectly ordinary knife.
"...The food's stuck to the pot. It won't come off."
……
Not that a certain dark substance hadn't made an appearance in the pot.
Still, between their raw physical prowess and all their prior experience dicing up... certain things(?), the one task they were truly phenomenal at was cutting.
"Watch this! Aerial slicing!"
"Whoa."
The sight of Lü Bu tossing a radish into the air and whacking it to pieces mid-flight was genuinely entertaining.
"One must not play with the food."
"...Sorry."
Let's gloss over how the scolding landed before the words had even left her mouth.
In any case, the two dishes completed after all manner of trials and tribulations were—perhaps thanks to having such a superb teacher—more than edible.
……
Seriously, quit staring at me like that.
I couldn't get a single proper bite down under all this pressure.
It felt just like that time at the Imperial Palace, sharing a meal with Her Majesty under the watchful eyes of every last minister.