milliways_bar | (no subject)

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((Warning for (non-gory) dead animals!))

Busy day today for Gredya.

First she's in the kitchen, putting up one more freezer bag of meat. That's enough for now, she thinks: she's filled one shelf, a cache for the hardest times of winter. She has another bag, marked again with a note like last time: Ganibal Leckter. You see this before? Gredya. It'll wait for him at one end of the bar if he doesn't happen to show up. Inside--if anyone cares to snoop on Lecter's mail!--is a smallish dog-like creature (deceased) with a forked tail-tip and oddly squared-off ears.

Once she's taken care of that, she heads outside with a stack of books. It's not just her adult-literacy text now. She's expanding her reading material.

(And she's botherable in either location!)

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Gredya had not thought of cooking as an art; more as a way to complicate food. Now she pauses, knife-edge on a tomato. "You like that? Ephemeral?"

"Yes," Lecter says. "It's the art of enjoying that which only shares with us that one moment's pleasure, and then is gone forever."

Gredya stops slicing while she thinks about that. "...I do not like things that say look how easy I break. That kind of--ephemeral. But food is not the same."

"Sometimes, seeing the designated breaking points in a thing, or a person, makes them all the lovelier," Dr. Lecter says. "But no, food is not that kind of ephemeral. It is fleeting, not fragile."

She finishes slicing the tomatoes before answering, frowning in thought. "Children are like that," Gredya says finally. "But they grow fast. They stop being so--" So what? She can't find the words, and shrugs. "You are not so afraid about them."

And with that bit of vulnerability, she puts down the knife, disdaining protection. "Now what? For the marinade?"

"We'll peel and chop the garlic, and cut up the hot peppers," Dr. Lecter says. "And then mix everything together in that bowl."

Gredya nods. Peeling garlic is unfamiliar, but the peppers can't be too different from tomatoes, can they?

"Would you prefer cutting the garlic or the peppers?" Dr. Lecter promptly asks.

"Peppers," she answers just as promptly, and picks one up to inspect. Even sniffing it doesn't tell her much about the hotness--not until it's been cut.

"You might want to put on gloves for that," Dr. Lecter warns her.

Gredya puts it down right away. "It is not safe?"

"It contains a substance that can irritate your skin," Dr. Lecter says. "It's what makes it hot."

...She wipes her hands on her tunic, just in case. "Show me how to make the garlic?" She doesn't want to try the gloves.

He shows her: peeling the garlic, crushing it under a rather large knife, and then chopping it, quickly, with the tip of the knife always on the cutting board so the see-sawing chops fall very fast, and with unerring precision.

That's a lot trickier than tomatoes: show-off. Gredya narrows her eyes a bit. But she'll try it. She'll...grimly, grumpily, slowly and determinedly try it.

The garlic might be a little while.

Dr. Lecter doesn't mind, preparing the peppers while wearing latex gloves.

That's good. Hopefully he likes his garlic conquered and destroyed more than minced.

Finally, Dr. Lecter starts slicing the ginger.

Gredya is discovering the persistent stickiness and smell of garlic juices. She licks her fingers while she watches him slice the ginger, wipes them on her tunic, and eventually resorts to plucking a handful of tall grass to rub between her palms to get some of the stuff off.

"You could wash your hands in the lake, or in the kitchen," Dr. Lecter remarks.

She looks at him somewhat coldly. "After, I will."

"Then we can now combine everything in this bowl," Lecter says, putting in tomatoes, ginger, and salt.

Gredya adds the conquered garlic. "And then, wait a day or two, you said?"

"Yes," he says. "Putting the creature in first, of course."

Of course. Gredya nods briskly. "And it could feed a few people."