Jolene watched as Alex walked back down the room to the room he had claimed from Fist. She was still surprised that someone fresh into tier two had even managed to beat the big oaf. The man hadn’t been all that smart, but his levels weren’t for show. He had definitely earned his place. Something just didn’t add up about the whole fight.
She turned her eyes to the large baskets Jeremy was currently running to their store room. He was definitely a lot stronger than his levels let on if he made all of this. How did he not run out of mana? Even if he was resting in between each one he still really shouldn’t be able to make anything like this.
Two classes across 35 levels. Minor boosts for ascending… His mana should be somewhere around 10-14 thousand points. If it should even be at that, depending on the classes he chose. Very strange overall. Very very strange.
Not that she was going to necessarily complain. He was giving her actual ingredients to work with. Sure she didn’t have any spices, but she could handle that more or less by herself. Onions and peppers added a lot of taste to things.
Well, they did when you were used to the taste of nothing anyway.
“Oi, Jeremy! Leave these last two baskets, I’m going to make use of them.” She yelled as Jeremy returned to grab another basket.
“Aye, ma’am!” He replied slightly out of breath.
Jeremy didn’t have a lot going for him. He was a lower tier than Jolene and barely a foot taller than her. And, as much as Jolene hated to even think it in her mind, Jolene was short. Very short. Jeremy had short-cropped blonde hair and always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow.
But he always had a good attitude whenever he worked and that endeared her to him. Slightly. Not that she would ever admit it.
Jolene gave an almost imperceptible smile. Jeremy was a good man, never complained, and always did his best. Which is all Jolene asked for in her kitchen.
“Go take a break, Jeremy! I want you back in fifteen!” She yelled at him while turning to one of the baskets.
Jeremy smiled a little bit, happy at the thought of getting to take an extra break. “Aye ma’am!” He said with a bit more pep in his voice as he went and relaxed in one of the open chairs near the kitchen.
Jolene focused her attention completely on the stuff she had.
‘Alright, what can I do here with this?’ she thought to herself.
She idly tapped a finger against her cheek as she observed everything. Potatoes, onion, all manner of seasonings that were technically plants, pepper, garlic. Tons more stuff as well. Some she didn’t fully recognize. The onions looked a little strange as did the peppers. Interesting. Regionally variants perhaps?
Jolene ran her eyes over everything. How did she want to go about this? A smile slipped up onto her face. She immediately got some water and poured it into a pot not even bothering to properly measure. Her skills let her know exactly how much water was going in and it was just the amount she wanted.
900 mls of water per pot in a dozen or so pots. She did have to cook for a lot of people after all. She then grabbed a bunch of the potatoes and whipped out a knife from seemingly nowhere and started chopping. She quickly cut each potato into small cubes in the blink of an eye. Two cups of potato for each pot. These potatoes were a little on the small side so she ended up needing to use three per pot. From there she moved to the onion. Cubing that up like the potatoes. Two cups of onion per pot as well. About a decade ago, before she had ever ended up here she managed to get a skill that helped deal with negative effects from ingredients. Crying from cutting onions fell under that purview and she was glad for it.
She dumped the onions in each of the pots with the potatoes. She’d barely been at work for a couple of minutes and had already gone through a couple dozen potatoes and onions by herself. The power of being a third-tier cook, she smirked slightly at her own prowess.
It was fun being good at your job.
Then came the lentils. She didn’t even have to wash them with one of her skills. She just passed her hand over them and any dirt or grime they had disappeared. She measured out a cup of them and placed them in each of the pots with the rest of the ingredients.
She nodded approvingly. Here’s where the hard part came in. She didn’t have a proper substitute for salt. Arguably what she wanted to try and make wouldn’t require the salt, but the other issue was that she didn’t have a bouillon cube.
She turned around and looked around at her ingredients and seasoning. It only took her a moment to come up with a course of action. Her skills guide her hands and her thought process of the most efficient way to do this. She didn’t have bouillon cubes, but she could make a substitute.
She grabbed turmeric, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, and garlic that she set to the side with an onion. Once again she didn’t have salt, but that would be fine. Hopefully. Her skills could hopefully fill in the gaps for her. Surprisingly she did have basic things like flour and yeast though. She grabbed the yeast.
As for the garlic and onions. She grabbed the garlic and ran it through several skills. She sucked any unneeded moisture out of it and quickly started grinding it up and turning it into a powder before doing the same thing with the onions. Everything else got ground up as well before she mixed it all together. This she took her time with. There were several things her skills could speed the process up on, but it wasn’t always a perfect replacement for skill, and in this matter, Jolene wanted to be absolutely sure this was being handled properly.
After several minutes of perfectly mixing it together, she measured out a perfect amount. This she was having to eyeball roughly since there wasn’t a perfect conversion process for chicken broth or bouillon cubes to her concoction of ingredients. So she was going to have to use her intuition to determine what would be the right amount to use. Which wasn’t all that hard for her.
She dumped it in the pots and then quickly whipped around and found some strange dried-up… something. It had the smell of what she wanted. She quickly ground it up and tasted a small bit of it nodding slightly. It had a peppery taste to it, not too strong but enough to add flavor. She added it in with everything else and then stirred the pots. That had all the pots done. For now.
She had a good feeling about everything so far.
“Kerrigan!” Jolene roared, “Come light a fire under these pots and keep an eye on them while I prepare some more stuff. If you let these boil over I will end your bloodline!” Jolene turned away without waiting for a response but still heard it nonetheless.
“Yes ma’am!” Kerrigan responded. Kerrigan was a good girl. Jolene wasn’t actually worried about anything boiling over, she just had a reputation to maintain and everyone else knew it. They knew she didn’t really mean what she said… Unless you pissed her off, then she would follow through on it.
Jolene planned to be completely done with the next step of her process long before any of the pots got even close to boiling though.
Here’s where things were gonna get kind of rough again for her. She needed a milk substitute. Powdered milk would have been fine, but that was just as, if not more expensive than normal milk. And normal milk was hard to preserve as it was. Jolene sighed slightly as she moved towards the storage area and looked around.
Her eyes fell onto several large bags sitting towards the center of the room. She grits her teeth. Jolene didn’t want to have to commit this atrocity, but in this case, it would be necessary. Her skills should be enough to make it unnoticeable by anyone. Unless you were used to having normal milk in this recipe, and given that this was a new recipe for her she doubted anyone had tasted it before, she’d be surprised if they had.
She opened the bag and inside was rice. She was going to make rice milk. She nearly retched at the thought, but she quickly pushed it down. She didn’t have time to feel that. She needed to be working and making progress.
The longest part of this process actually took her making the rice milk, since it involved a lot of shenanigans with her skills. But she managed to press-squeeze enough for all her pots and mixed a small amount of sugar into it to sweeten the flavor. She was able to thicken the liquid slightly again with a skill to give it more of a milky texture, she would’ve preferred to use a syrup, but she had to make do with what she had. And she had pretty much nothing.
One thing they did have, strangely enough, was butter. She set up another equal number of pots and yanked another person with a fire-starting skill and got them to light all of them up. From there she placed 4 tablespoons of butter in each pot. She mixed each one to make sure it didn’t burn before slowly pouring the milk into each one. It was skilled magic that each one didn’t burn while she was working on it. After that was done she waited for each one to slowly start bubbling a little bit and then placed flour in each one stirring it into each pot. Taking a careful amount of time with each one. A smile slowly crept its way onto Jolene’s face without her noticing.
She never noticed it, but Jeremy always did as he watched from where he was sitting. She always derived such joy from being a successful cook. And for some reason, it made him happy to see. It hadn’t quite been fifteen minutes. But he knew she could use a hand, this seemed to be some delicate work and he wanted to be a part of whatever she had planned.
She snapped to him when he reached the pots and started stirring several of them together.
“I told you fifteen minutes.” She said critically.
“Aye, ma’am,” Jeremy replied with a smug expression.
Jolene just stared at him before giving that infinitesimally small smile and scoffed while turning away. “Suit yourself then. Make sure those don’t burn. Let me know when they start bubbling again, at that time we’ll want to move them into the big pots and stir them together.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Jeremy replied again, focusing his attention on as many pots as he could. He was still only a tier two cook, nowhere near as skilled as Ms. Jolene, but enough to handle what he could. She knew what he was capable of and would be sure to pick up his slack. She was a good boss like that.
Jolene took a step back observing everything. This would be a good soup. But it was missing something. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to go with the soup. She could just make some bread, but that felt… bland. She needed something else, something that fit this meal that was beyond anything else she had been able to mix with the paltry level of ingredients she had received during her time here.
At that moment Alex came back around the corner from his room at a brisk walk and his eyes snapped immediately to the kitchen. Jolene saw it happen, his room realistically wasn’t that far away from the kitchen. Mainly because David had initially wanted Fist close by in case he needed him.
Alex made his way into the kitchen and hopped over the counter ignoring the alarm from all the cooks in the room. One of them started to make their way over to him, probably to tell him to get out. Jolene stopped him, shaking her head.
“I want to see what’s got him acting up now.”
Alex had seemed determined and focused. He still had been completely non-verbal like earlier. But his attitude was a lot different than the depression it had been. This time it was an intense focus. One she rarely got to see from her cooks when they were working in the kitchen, but usually right before they had a stroke of genius.
His face melted into an indescribable level of emotion as he saw the contents of the pots. And for a moment Jolene panicked, was there something wrong with it? She quickly walked over and looked at the pot, but she couldn’t see anything particularly wrong with it. In fact, her skills were telling her it would turn out better than she had initially thought it would.
So what was the issue?
Alex placed the lid back on the pot and looked around the kitchen, but he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. He strode off to the storage area and walked inside. Jolene followed behind him, interested in seeing where this was going.
He found cornmeal, flour, sugar, and baking powder. He looked around before grabbing some baking soda as well and then left the room. And placed everything onto a counter, he snatched up a bowl, and started slowly measuring ingredients. Painfully slowly for his supposed speed and for Jolene's preferences.
But she stomached it. She could see what he was making though, some kind of bread? But it wasn’t the same thing. Sugar felt a little strange to place inside of it.
He placed everything into the bowl before turning to Jolene.
“Salt?” He asked, his voice slightly thick with emotion.
She looked at him for a moment, trying to decipher his thoughts and feelings. But she couldn’t figure it out.
She just shook her head, “We don’t have dairy products or salt. My skills allow me to mold substitutes to taste like the things they’re replacing though.”
He nodded before stepping away from the bowl and gesturing to it. “Salt, eggs, milk, and cooking oil are all that’s missing.”
So that’s why he has both powder and soda. No eggs, so he needed something to replace them. He was making bread though. But it had no yeast. Interesting. Very interesting.
Jolene nodded, stepped forward, and got to work. She slammed down several other bowls and quickly filled them out with identical measurements to what Alex had done. It didn’t take her long and eventually, she was mixing everything together. Alex stood back and watched intently. A lot different from his inattentive attitude from earlier.
“I wasn’t aware you knew anything about cooking,” Jolene said, sparing him a slight glance. He didn’t respond at all though. Not even a nod of his head. Just watching, observing. Jolene didn’t focus on it.
“Moving the pots over, ma’am!” Jeremy yelled at her.
“Good! Make sure they get mixed in properly and allow them to simmer up to a boil!” Jolene yelled back.
“Aye, ma’am!”
Jolene quickly finished measuring everything out and mixing it together and then turned to Alex.
He stepped over and looked at it, nodding. “Circular baking dishes.” He whispered, Jolene more understanding him from reading his lips rather than being able to hear him. It was hard over all the noise in the kitchen, people mostly had to yell to communicate in here.
Jolene nodded in reply and placed them in the specified type of dish. Thankfully they had just enough to work for it. She didn’t need his instruction on baking bread at this point and he seemed to understand that as he made his way back around the counter and sat down.
Jolene observed him. He seemed to recognize the dish somehow. Had he made something similar at one point in his life? She’d have to work it out of him when she could.
***
It didn’t take long for everything to finish cooking. Jeremy helped with getting all the bread out of the oven. She grabbed a serving of it in a bowl and a single slice of the bread and placed it down in front of Alex. She was interested in seeing his reaction.
***
I stared at the soup for a long time. I had been able to smell the initial parts of it from my room and thought it had just been part of my dream, but when I had opened my eyes and still kept smelling it I realized it wasn’t just a dream.
I was terrified to try any. It was already hard enough being reminded, what if… I didn’t even know what if. What if ‘what’? I was so painfully confused and afraid and I didn’t even fully understand why I felt that way.
I slowly picked up the spoon, painfully aware of Jolene watching my every move, and scooped up a bit of the soup and brought it to my mouth. And I ate it.
And it was enough to push me over the edge. Tears streamed down my face as I sat there, unsure of how to process my emotions.
Jolene made a sound of surprise and sat down next to me, “What’s wrong, is there something wrong with the soup?” She asked in a slight panic.
I barely managed to shake my head.
“Is good,” I whispered, sniffing slightly.
She sat there as I continued to eat it along with the cornbread. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it at all.
“It’s perfect,” I said to her.
“I di-” I hiccuped slightly as I kept eating, trying desperately, to no avail, to wipe away my tears. “I didn’t think I would ever get to eat my mom's cooking again.”
Mentioning my mother brought forth a whole level of raw emotion in my chest that I wasn’t prepared for. It hurt like nothing I had ever felt before.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed my family ‘till this moment, but eating the favorite meal she had made for me really brought it home to me. I missed them, more than anything right now.
Jolene let out a soft sigh and placed a hand on my back, patting me gently as I continued eating.
“It tastes like home,” I whispered to her.
***
MasterEnvi Btw this is an actual recipe. It is actually my favorite meal that my mom makes. It’s one of the few things I actually know how to make myself because I like it so much. We call it potato lentil soup and we usually serve it with cornbread. Although it’s a bit more like a corncake since we put a little bit of extra sugar with it. The corncake part of the recipe is my grandma’s special recipe. She passed away a while ago though, but I’m glad she was able to leave something behind for us to remember her by. It’s really really good, I love it a lot. :)
Jolene watched as Alex walked back down the room to the room he had claimed from Fist. She was still surprised that someone fresh into tier two had even managed to beat the big oaf. The man hadn’t been all that smart, but his levels weren’t for show. He had definitely earned his place. Something just didn’t add up about the whole fight.
She turned her eyes to the large baskets Jeremy was currently running to their store room. He was definitely a lot stronger than his levels let on if he made all of this. How did he not run out of mana? Even if he was resting in between each one he still really shouldn’t be able to make anything like this.
Two classes across 35 levels. Minor boosts for ascending… His mana should be somewhere around 10-14 thousand points. If it should even be at that, depending on the classes he chose. Very strange overall. Very very strange.
Not that she was going to necessarily complain. He was giving her actual ingredients to work with. Sure she didn’t have any spices, but she could handle that more or less by herself. Onions and peppers added a lot of taste to things.
Well, they did when you were used to the taste of nothing anyway.
“Oi, Jeremy! Leave these last two baskets, I’m going to make use of them.” She yelled as Jeremy returned to grab another basket.
“Aye, ma’am!” He replied slightly out of breath.
Jeremy didn’t have a lot going for him. He was a lower tier than Jolene and barely a foot taller than her. And, as much as Jolene hated to even think it in her mind, Jolene was short. Very short. Jeremy had short-cropped blonde hair and always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow.
But he always had a good attitude whenever he worked and that endeared her to him. Slightly. Not that she would ever admit it.
Jolene gave an almost imperceptible smile. Jeremy was a good man, never complained, and always did his best. Which is all Jolene asked for in her kitchen.
“Go take a break, Jeremy! I want you back in fifteen!” She yelled at him while turning to one of the baskets.
Jeremy smiled a little bit, happy at the thought of getting to take an extra break. “Aye ma’am!” He said with a bit more pep in his voice as he went and relaxed in one of the open chairs near the kitchen.
Jolene focused her attention completely on the stuff she had.
‘Alright, what can I do here with this?’ she thought to herself.
She idly tapped a finger against her cheek as she observed everything. Potatoes, onion, all manner of seasonings that were technically plants, pepper, garlic. Tons more stuff as well. Some she didn’t fully recognize. The onions looked a little strange as did the peppers. Interesting. Regionally variants perhaps?
Jolene ran her eyes over everything. How did she want to go about this? A smile slipped up onto her face. She immediately got some water and poured it into a pot not even bothering to properly measure. Her skills let her know exactly how much water was going in and it was just the amount she wanted.
900 mls of water per pot in a dozen or so pots. She did have to cook for a lot of people after all. She then grabbed a bunch of the potatoes and whipped out a knife from seemingly nowhere and started chopping. She quickly cut each potato into small cubes in the blink of an eye. Two cups of potato for each pot. These potatoes were a little on the small side so she ended up needing to use three per pot. From there she moved to the onion. Cubing that up like the potatoes. Two cups of onion per pot as well. About a decade ago, before she had ever ended up here she managed to get a skill that helped deal with negative effects from ingredients. Crying from cutting onions fell under that purview and she was glad for it.
She dumped the onions in each of the pots with the potatoes. She’d barely been at work for a couple of minutes and had already gone through a couple dozen potatoes and onions by herself. The power of being a third-tier cook, she smirked slightly at her own prowess.
It was fun being good at your job.
Then came the lentils. She didn’t even have to wash them with one of her skills. She just passed her hand over them and any dirt or grime they had disappeared. She measured out a cup of them and placed them in each of the pots with the rest of the ingredients.
She nodded approvingly. Here’s where the hard part came in. She didn’t have a proper substitute for salt. Arguably what she wanted to try and make wouldn’t require the salt, but the other issue was that she didn’t have a bouillon cube.
She turned around and looked around at her ingredients and seasoning. It only took her a moment to come up with a course of action. Her skills guide her hands and her thought process of the most efficient way to do this. She didn’t have bouillon cubes, but she could make a substitute.
She grabbed turmeric, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, and garlic that she set to the side with an onion. Once again she didn’t have salt, but that would be fine. Hopefully. Her skills could hopefully fill in the gaps for her. Surprisingly she did have basic things like flour and yeast though. She grabbed the yeast.
As for the garlic and onions. She grabbed the garlic and ran it through several skills. She sucked any unneeded moisture out of it and quickly started grinding it up and turning it into a powder before doing the same thing with the onions. Everything else got ground up as well before she mixed it all together. This she took her time with. There were several things her skills could speed the process up on, but it wasn’t always a perfect replacement for skill, and in this matter, Jolene wanted to be absolutely sure this was being handled properly.
After several minutes of perfectly mixing it together, she measured out a perfect amount. This she was having to eyeball roughly since there wasn’t a perfect conversion process for chicken broth or bouillon cubes to her concoction of ingredients. So she was going to have to use her intuition to determine what would be the right amount to use. Which wasn’t all that hard for her.
She dumped it in the pots and then quickly whipped around and found some strange dried-up… something. It had the smell of what she wanted. She quickly ground it up and tasted a small bit of it nodding slightly. It had a peppery taste to it, not too strong but enough to add flavor. She added it in with everything else and then stirred the pots. That had all the pots done. For now.
She had a good feeling about everything so far.
“Kerrigan!” Jolene roared, “Come light a fire under these pots and keep an eye on them while I prepare some more stuff. If you let these boil over I will end your bloodline!” Jolene turned away without waiting for a response but still heard it nonetheless.
“Yes ma’am!” Kerrigan responded. Kerrigan was a good girl. Jolene wasn’t actually worried about anything boiling over, she just had a reputation to maintain and everyone else knew it. They knew she didn’t really mean what she said… Unless you pissed her off, then she would follow through on it.
Jolene planned to be completely done with the next step of her process long before any of the pots got even close to boiling though.
Here’s where things were gonna get kind of rough again for her. She needed a milk substitute. Powdered milk would have been fine, but that was just as, if not more expensive than normal milk. And normal milk was hard to preserve as it was. Jolene sighed slightly as she moved towards the storage area and looked around.
Her eyes fell onto several large bags sitting towards the center of the room. She grits her teeth. Jolene didn’t want to have to commit this atrocity, but in this case, it would be necessary. Her skills should be enough to make it unnoticeable by anyone. Unless you were used to having normal milk in this recipe, and given that this was a new recipe for her she doubted anyone had tasted it before, she’d be surprised if they had.
She opened the bag and inside was rice. She was going to make rice milk. She nearly retched at the thought, but she quickly pushed it down. She didn’t have time to feel that. She needed to be working and making progress.
The longest part of this process actually took her making the rice milk, since it involved a lot of shenanigans with her skills. But she managed to press-squeeze enough for all her pots and mixed a small amount of sugar into it to sweeten the flavor. She was able to thicken the liquid slightly again with a skill to give it more of a milky texture, she would’ve preferred to use a syrup, but she had to make do with what she had. And she had pretty much nothing.
One thing they did have, strangely enough, was butter. She set up another equal number of pots and yanked another person with a fire-starting skill and got them to light all of them up. From there she placed 4 tablespoons of butter in each pot. She mixed each one to make sure it didn’t burn before slowly pouring the milk into each one. It was skilled magic that each one didn’t burn while she was working on it. After that was done she waited for each one to slowly start bubbling a little bit and then placed flour in each one stirring it into each pot. Taking a careful amount of time with each one. A smile slowly crept its way onto Jolene’s face without her noticing.
She never noticed it, but Jeremy always did as he watched from where he was sitting. She always derived such joy from being a successful cook. And for some reason, it made him happy to see. It hadn’t quite been fifteen minutes. But he knew she could use a hand, this seemed to be some delicate work and he wanted to be a part of whatever she had planned.
She snapped to him when he reached the pots and started stirring several of them together.
“I told you fifteen minutes.” She said critically.
“Aye, ma’am,” Jeremy replied with a smug expression.
Jolene just stared at him before giving that infinitesimally small smile and scoffed while turning away. “Suit yourself then. Make sure those don’t burn. Let me know when they start bubbling again, at that time we’ll want to move them into the big pots and stir them together.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Jeremy replied again, focusing his attention on as many pots as he could. He was still only a tier two cook, nowhere near as skilled as Ms. Jolene, but enough to handle what he could. She knew what he was capable of and would be sure to pick up his slack. She was a good boss like that.
Jolene took a step back observing everything. This would be a good soup. But it was missing something. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to go with the soup. She could just make some bread, but that felt… bland. She needed something else, something that fit this meal that was beyond anything else she had been able to mix with the paltry level of ingredients she had received during her time here.
At that moment Alex came back around the corner from his room at a brisk walk and his eyes snapped immediately to the kitchen. Jolene saw it happen, his room realistically wasn’t that far away from the kitchen. Mainly because David had initially wanted Fist close by in case he needed him.
Alex made his way into the kitchen and hopped over the counter ignoring the alarm from all the cooks in the room. One of them started to make their way over to him, probably to tell him to get out. Jolene stopped him, shaking her head.
“I want to see what’s got him acting up now.”
Alex had seemed determined and focused. He still had been completely non-verbal like earlier. But his attitude was a lot different than the depression it had been. This time it was an intense focus. One she rarely got to see from her cooks when they were working in the kitchen, but usually right before they had a stroke of genius.
His face melted into an indescribable level of emotion as he saw the contents of the pots. And for a moment Jolene panicked, was there something wrong with it? She quickly walked over and looked at the pot, but she couldn’t see anything particularly wrong with it. In fact, her skills were telling her it would turn out better than she had initially thought it would.
So what was the issue?
Alex placed the lid back on the pot and looked around the kitchen, but he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. He strode off to the storage area and walked inside. Jolene followed behind him, interested in seeing where this was going.
He found cornmeal, flour, sugar, and baking powder. He looked around before grabbing some baking soda as well and then left the room. And placed everything onto a counter, he snatched up a bowl, and started slowly measuring ingredients. Painfully slowly for his supposed speed and for Jolene's preferences.
But she stomached it. She could see what he was making though, some kind of bread? But it wasn’t the same thing. Sugar felt a little strange to place inside of it.
He placed everything into the bowl before turning to Jolene.
“Salt?” He asked, his voice slightly thick with emotion.
She looked at him for a moment, trying to decipher his thoughts and feelings. But she couldn’t figure it out.
She just shook her head, “We don’t have dairy products or salt. My skills allow me to mold substitutes to taste like the things they’re replacing though.”
He nodded before stepping away from the bowl and gesturing to it. “Salt, eggs, milk, and cooking oil are all that’s missing.”
So that’s why he has both powder and soda. No eggs, so he needed something to replace them. He was making bread though. But it had no yeast. Interesting. Very interesting.
Jolene nodded, stepped forward, and got to work. She slammed down several other bowls and quickly filled them out with identical measurements to what Alex had done. It didn’t take her long and eventually, she was mixing everything together. Alex stood back and watched intently. A lot different from his inattentive attitude from earlier.
“I wasn’t aware you knew anything about cooking,” Jolene said, sparing him a slight glance. He didn’t respond at all though. Not even a nod of his head. Just watching, observing. Jolene didn’t focus on it.
“Moving the pots over, ma’am!” Jeremy yelled at her.
“Good! Make sure they get mixed in properly and allow them to simmer up to a boil!” Jolene yelled back.
“Aye, ma’am!”
Jolene quickly finished measuring everything out and mixing it together and then turned to Alex.
He stepped over and looked at it, nodding. “Circular baking dishes.” He whispered, Jolene more understanding him from reading his lips rather than being able to hear him. It was hard over all the noise in the kitchen, people mostly had to yell to communicate in here.
Jolene nodded in reply and placed them in the specified type of dish. Thankfully they had just enough to work for it. She didn’t need his instruction on baking bread at this point and he seemed to understand that as he made his way back around the counter and sat down.
Jolene observed him. He seemed to recognize the dish somehow. Had he made something similar at one point in his life? She’d have to work it out of him when she could.
***
It didn’t take long for everything to finish cooking. Jeremy helped with getting all the bread out of the oven. She grabbed a serving of it in a bowl and a single slice of the bread and placed it down in front of Alex. She was interested in seeing his reaction.
***
I stared at the soup for a long time. I had been able to smell the initial parts of it from my room and thought it had just been part of my dream, but when I had opened my eyes and still kept smelling it I realized it wasn’t just a dream.
I was terrified to try any. It was already hard enough being reminded, what if… I didn’t even know what if. What if ‘what’? I was so painfully confused and afraid and I didn’t even fully understand why I felt that way.
I slowly picked up the spoon, painfully aware of Jolene watching my every move, and scooped up a bit of the soup and brought it to my mouth. And I ate it.
And it was enough to push me over the edge. Tears streamed down my face as I sat there, unsure of how to process my emotions.
Jolene made a sound of surprise and sat down next to me, “What’s wrong, is there something wrong with the soup?” She asked in a slight panic.
I barely managed to shake my head.
“Is good,” I whispered, sniffing slightly.
She sat there as I continued to eat it along with the cornbread. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it at all.
“It’s perfect,” I said to her.
“I di-” I hiccuped slightly as I kept eating, trying desperately, to no avail, to wipe away my tears. “I didn’t think I would ever get to eat my mom's cooking again.”
Mentioning my mother brought forth a whole level of raw emotion in my chest that I wasn’t prepared for. It hurt like nothing I had ever felt before.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed my family ‘till this moment, but eating the favorite meal she had made for me really brought it home to me. I missed them, more than anything right now.
Jolene let out a soft sigh and placed a hand on my back, patting me gently as I continued eating.
“It tastes like home,” I whispered to her.
***
MasterEnvi Btw this is an actual recipe. It is actually my favorite meal that my mom makes. It’s one of the few things I actually know how to make myself because I like it so much. We call it potato lentil soup and we usually serve it with cornbread. Although it’s a bit more like a corncake since we put a little bit of extra sugar with it. The corncake part of the recipe is my grandma’s special recipe. She passed away a while ago though, but I’m glad she was able to leave something behind for us to remember her by. It’s really really good, I love it a lot. :)
