Dip the Rice Cake I Made While Waiting for the Hunters into Honey and Taste....
Dip the Rice Cake I Made While Waiting for the Hunters into Honey and Taste....
"Time limit is six hours! Hunt your prey and return here within that time! Any objections?"
"None."
"Good! Then Lucas, you wait here! We'll come back with our kills!"
I watched both women.
"Go on. I'll judge this as fairly as I can."
"Good! Then it starts now!"
Veronia kicked off the ground and bolted.
"I will definitely win."
Andrea's face was ablaze with fighting spirit.
Whether she'd been rattled by the "fat" comment or by being dismissed outright, I couldn't tell.
"Do your best. I'll be waiting."
"Yes, boss. Please judge fairly."
Andrea hurried off too.
.......
The moment the elf and the beastkin who'd been making a racket vanished, the restaurant fell quiet all at once.
It'd been a while.
Since the restaurant was this quiet.
"Things have been pretty noisy ever since Andrea showed up."
First it was training her to be a proper employee, and lately we'd been prepping ingredients together.
I sat still in my chair and savored the rare moment of leisure — then realized the two of them had left without doing the dishes.
"That means I have to do the dishes."
No point just sitting there, so I washed the bowls, tidied up the drying racks where the yakgwa were resting, and put the ginger syrup into the refrigerator. I stored the portioned honey in a shaded spot, and that was the cleanup done.
"That went faster than I thought."
The whole thing took less than twenty minutes.
"Maybe I'll make some rice cakes and dip 'em in honey."
I'd been about to put the last honey jar into storage when I caught sight of that golden shimmer and muttered the words aloud.
Mix rice flour with water, steam it, and you get a white rice cake dough.
Keep kneading it and it turns sticky and chewy, the kind of dough that clings to your teeth. Shape it into long cylindrical garaetteok or flat jeolpyeon, brush the surface lightly with sesame oil, and dip the freshly steamed rice cake in honey?
'There's nothing better than that.'
Nothing sticks to your mouth quite like freshly steamed rice cake.
And even day-old rice cake, seared lightly in a pan, turns into grilled rice cake — crispy outside and chewy inside.
'Plus, whatever's left can go into other dishes.'
Rice cake and mandu soup, tteokguk, rice cake ramyun, tteokbokki, rice cakes, rice cakes, rice cakes...
And since I happened to have honey that'd just been harvested, this seemed like a perfect time to make rice cake.
"Cooking by myself in peace is a nice change of pace."
Every now and then I needed this — a session of cooking that felt almost like meditation. You can't always cook in the middle of a racket.
Milling the rice flour was quick.
I channeled mana into the sanitized scabbard of the Butcher's Sword and pulverized the grains at speed. Those rice kernels, tough as they are, turned into fine powder in an instant — a magical method.
'Sure, I could just commission the mill to do it...'
But going all the way there and back is a chore.
Into the flour — ground by a technique no ordinary person could dream of — I mixed water and sugar. The rice flour, crumbly like soboro topping, went into the steamer. While the boiling water below rose as steam and cooked the flour inside the steamer, I greased the cloth I'd use for kneading.
A white plume of steam drifted up from the steamer.
The scent of steaming rice tickled my nose.
It was a little different from the smell of rice cooking.
How to put it... a little more rustic, maybe.
Not that rice cake is only a countryside thing, but the smell gave off that kind of feeling. The kind of smell that makes you think of a hometown far away.
A warm, familiar smell.
When I figured it was properly cooked, I lifted the lid.
The rice dough sat on the cloth, steaming gently in crumbly little clumps. The way the flour had gathered into irregular lumps almost looked like coarsely broken steamed rice. The dough was scorching hot — handling it with bare hands meant a burn for sure.
I put on gloves, gathered the corners of the cloth, and lifted it all at once.
I transferred the dough, cradled in the cloth, onto the greased mat I'd prepared for kneading.
After sprinkling salt water to separate the dough from the cloth, I tipped the dough onto the kneading mat.
Bare hands weren't an option here, so kneading with the mat was the way to go.
'A machine that kneads the dough for me would be nice.'
Too bad there's no Magic Guild or Alchemist Guild around here, though, right?
"Ah, hell. Should've brought it when I moved down here."
The capital had machines for kneading wheat dough for bread.
Supposedly they ran on some magical principle or other — I never really grasped the details — and I'd used one often because it made making rice cakes a breeze.
'The problem is those machines are so huge they're impractical for personal use.'
There were plenty of other magic-powered tools I could use in the capital but couldn't access here. At times like this, I do occasionally miss the capital.
"So many handy gadgets back then."
I let out a sigh and kept kneading. Before long, the pale dough was gleaming — chewy and glossy.
Shape it, form it before it dries out, and you're done!
I rolled the dough long and smooth into round, cylindrical garaetteok.
The feel of it in my hands — soft, yielding, elastic — was wonderfully satisfying.
Not quite on par with the garaetteok you'd get from a proper rice cake mill, but the chewiness was definitely there.
"This should do it."
Finally, I brushed the surface of the finished rice cakes with sesame oil — a measure to keep them from sticking together.
I cut two pieces of freshly made garaetteok, each about a handspan long.
The rest went into an airtight woven sack for storage.
It didn't seal out air as perfectly as modern plastic wrap, but layering the wrapping produced a comparable effect.
While the rice cakes had been steaming, the whole kitchen filled with the scent of them, thick and pervasive.
Breathing in the toasty aroma of steaming grain, I found myself humming.
"Hmm-mm~."
I spooned a little honey into a small dish.
"Come to think of it, I couldn't really enjoy the lunchbox thanks to Veronia, and I only had one yakgwa."
It felt like I'd eaten a lot, but I was still hungry.
And moving around had worked my appetite right back up.
Enjoying the pleasant scent of rice cake, I picked up a piece in one hand.
"Ah, hot-."
My fingers jolted with the sting and I nearly dropped it. The rice cake was still throwing off heat, steam curling faintly off it.
Even with the sesame oil, the cake still tried to stick to my fingers a little.
"Nice and sticky."
Which means it was good rice.
I waited until it had cooled enough to handle, then picked it up again.
A pleasant warmth met my fingers. The yielding texture put a smile on my face without me even meaning to.
I took the long, white stick of garaetteok and dipped it into the golden honey.
Thick, glossy liquid clung to the soft white stick and dripped slowly.
It was, frankly, a sacred sight.
Before the honey could drip any further, I bit off a mouthful of the honey-coated rice cake.
"Mmm-hmm~~!!!"
Rice cake is divine, and honey is invincible.
That dense, springy chew and the deep sweetness slammed into my mouth in an instant. The more I chewed, the softer the texture became, and at the same time the nuttiness of the grain and sesame oil asserted itself through the sweetness.
Chew, chew.
"This turned out way better than I expected."
How should I put it.
The savory depth was more pronounced.
Honestly, tastier than when I'd made it by machine.
Was it because I'd ground the flour with the mana-charged scabbard?
Back in the capital, when I used to steam rice cakes, I always had the mill grind the rice for me. And I'd modified a bread-dough machine to knead the rice cake dough.
'Is this the touch of the hand?'
A little more effort, but it really was better.
"The original natural seasoning, I suppose...."
The powder starting with M was a fine seasoning too, but there was no denying that adding mana brought out the deeper flavor.
"Delicious. Really delicious."
I savored the chewy rice cake and dipped it into the honey once more.
drip-drip-drip.
Transparent golden honey trailed down in fine strings.
"So good."
I loved the harmony of sweet and nutty. Even without the honey, the rice cake's own depth of flavor made it addictive — I kept going back for more.
And didn't they teach us in science class that carbohydrates taste sweet when you chew them long enough?
Amylase... or was it amylase?
One of those facts that stuck from school.
"It's fun how you get this faint sweetness even eating it plain."
I was enjoying the pleasant texture when the door slammed open.
"I have returned! Mwahahaha!"
Veronia burst through the door.
"That was faster than I expected. It's only been five hours."
"I caught an especially huge one!"
At that I stepped outside.
"...A tuu?"
She'd taken down a tuu?
No wonder they called her the greatest fighter around.
"How about that! The finest prey I've ever hunted! This is my gift to you, Lucas, in return for the delicious food you've given me! Ha ha ha!"
Veronia folded her arms and laughed heartily.
'Andrea's in trouble here.'
"But Lucas, what is this?"
"It's garaetteok. Want to try some?"
I snipped off a piece with scissors and handed it over.
"Ohh! What is this? The texture is unusual!"
"Try dipping it in honey. You'll like it."
"This texture and this flavor — incredible! How did you make this?"
"It might bore you."
"It's fine! I've got nothing to do while we wait anyway, so I'll enjoy hearing it!"
"First, you take soaked rice and make flour from short-grain rice. Then..."
I got caught up explaining the process to her, and the time flew by.
Thirty minutes later, Andrea arrived, hauling her kill over her shoulder.
She'd brought a wild pog.
A creature pretty close to what I'd call a boar back in my world.
A wild pog versus a tuu.
"Hmm, seems to me I've won."
On the face of it, anyone would call it Veronia's victory. A wild pog was a challenging animal, sure — but it wasn't in the same league as a tuu.
A tuu was a monster often mentioned in the same breath as ogres and trolls.
I thought the same as Veronia. Looking at the size and sheer threat of the prey, I didn't see any element Andrea could win on.
Yeah.
That's what it looked like on the surface.
"No, it's too early to call it."
Andrea, who'd been biting her lip with a pained expression, and Veronia, already sure of her win — both looked at me at once.
"Lucas, what do you mean by that?"
"......."
"A hunter who only hunts doesn't prove much, right?"
"What are you getting at?"
"Isn't the whole reason for hunting to eat the animal in the end?"
"...True."
"Then we need to check how each of you handled the prey you brought back."
Veronia protested, refusing to accept that.
"But if we consider the size and difficulty of the hunt, I—"
"We clearly agreed to bring back fine prey. Didn't we?"
"...Yes. We did."
"If you hunted it but it's inedible, then it's not fine prey, is it?"
"...That's also true."
A light of hope bloomed on Andrea's face.
"Veronia gets bonus points for the size, weight, and difficulty of the prey she brought in. So if the taste and handling of the prey end up tied, Veronia wins. Agreed?"
She nodded, a little grudgingly.
"I suggested you as judge, so I'll accept it. Giving your employee a morale boost is fine, but your evaluation better be fair!"
"I won't pull any tricks. Don't worry."
And I didn't want to.
"The cooking test is simple. We'll cut the ribs — bone and meat together — so we can judge both at once, then grill and sample them. Any objections?"
"I agree!"
"No objection."
With both of them on board, I stepped up to the carcasses.
Wild pog and tuu.
Meat I'd butchered more times than I could count.
I drew the Butcher's Sword for the first time in a while.
"Hoo."
Lancelot, I'll take this meat apart in your honor.
shing.