Morcster Chef - Chapter 26 (Patreon)

“Don’t hear anything.” Arek made his way out of the rubble of the tree monster, careful to avoid spearing himself on one of the many sharp roots poking out all around the clearing. “That was quite the fight.”

“It was pretty fun,” Ming said, swallowing before giving him a thumbs up. “We killed it good. I have to say I prefer fights where we actually get something, though.”

“There’s always a chance there’s loot buried somewhere around here underneath all the wood,” Malissa said. She chewed her lower lip and grimaced. There was a lot of wood scattered about. “I’m not sure if we’re going to find it anytime soon, though.”

“Again, if it had something worthwhile, it would have used it,” Belmont said. “None of the other monsters we’ve seen so far have dropped anything either. This dungeon looks like its mostly beasts, which means the loot is going to be the materials in the opponents themselves and the other things around us.”

“So bugs and shit,” Ming said with a heavy sigh. “Bo-ring. I’m not even going to ask if a tree is edible.”

“Actually, some are,” Arek mused. “I’ve heard of people eating the bark of certain trees.

Belmont put a hand on Ming’s shoulder, putting just enough pressure to make sure she couldn’t dart away too quickly. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Bah. I don’t want to eat bark,” Ming said, crossing her arms. Her eyes flicked to the tree. “But, hypothetically, do you think this tree was one of those edible ones?”

Arek knelt by the tree and snapped off a piece of the bark. He sniffed at it. It smelled like wood. He wasn’t particularly sure what he had been expecting, but his cheeks colored slightly at Belmont’s raised eyebrow.

“It’s wood.”

“Astute.”

Arek poked it with his tongue. The wood was rough to the touch and tasted like, well, wood. He grimaced and tossed it aside. “Tastes like it too.”

“Damn,” Ming said, scrunching her nose in annoyance. “Letdown. Do you think the real boss will have an actual reward? This dungeon is awful.”

“It’ll probably fall along the pattern of everything else we’ve seen so far,” Arek replied with a sigh. “But it might be edible. Maybe I can make something tasty with it.”

Belmont looked up at the sky. “We’ve still got a little time before it’s dark. Should we camp out here? Or do we want to try to push through the rest of the dungeon today?”

“I vote for camping,” Malissa said. “There’s a lot of cover in the clearing now that we’ve killed the tree, and I doubt any big predators would be trying to compete with it for space. I’m also a little tired, so some rest wouldn’t go astray.”

“Camp it is.” Arek sat down on a nearby trunk and shuffled through his bag, reviewing what ingredients he had. “Ming, what do you have on you? I feel like we deserve a real meal today.”

Ming narrowed her eyes. “You want my snacks?”

“Do you want snacks or a full meal?” Arek asked. “We both know one of them is going to taste better than the other.”

“Take Malissa’s snacks instead.”

It was Malissa’s turn to narrow her eyes. “We all know you’ve got enough food in your bag to feed a small army, Ming. Cough up.”

“Just because I’ve got more shouldn’t mean I have to be the one to share it! You could have just as many snacks in your bag if you didn’t fill it with stupid pointless stuff like daggers and toilet paper.”

“I – wait.” Malissa squinted at Ming. “Do you not carry toilet paper with you? Is that why mine keeps running out so quickly? You little rat.”

“Oh, look at this,” Ming said, pulling a huge pile of food out of her bag. “Food! Food by the dozen, appearing from nowhere, all for Arek to cook with. What a surprise. Truly, Ming is a generous patron.”

She darted to the side as Malissa lunged for her, then dove behind Belmont. Malissa took off after the smaller woman and Arek shook his head with a wry grin as he approached the pile Ming had procured to see what he had to work with.

He knew that Ming carried a ridiculous amount of food with her, but she’d clearly stocked up at some point while they were in Seaside. There were meat pies, pastries of all sorts, several bunches of grapes, a giant tarp bag of corn chips, yogurt – from Malissa’s bag, if Arek’s memory served him right, several jars of pickles, a huge bag of flour, tomatoes, cheese, and half a dozen assorted fruits. Arek let out a slow whistle.

“Malissa wasn’t joking. Ming, how much room does your bag have?”

Malissa, who was currently shaking Ming upside down, paused to let the mage reply.

“As much as I could stuff into my bag of colding,” Ming replied, her voice nasally. “I once tried putting a second bag of colding inside it, but that didn’t fit.”

Belmont’s eye twitched. “You did what? Do you even realize what happens if you put two extradimensional spaces inside each other?”

“You get twice the storage.”

“No!” Belmont grabbed Ming out of Malissa’s hands and paced over to a log. He plopped her down on it and started educating her on the dangers of messing with magic she didn’t understand.

“Well, that’s going to annoy her more than anything I could possibly do,” Malissa said, walking over to join Arek. “What are you thinking?”

“Well, unless we just want to steal her meat pies, what about something fun?” Arek suggested. “Chips go good with cheese.”

“That just sounds like rations with extra steps.”

“Only if you eat them cold,” Arek replied with a laugh. “Luckily, we’ve got a lot of wood to work with here. Ming has such an assortment of ingredients that I think we’ve got a lot we can play around with here. I’ve got some spices in my garden to liven everything up too.”

“Oh, like one of the food trucks back at Seaside?” Malissa asked. “They were selling bowls of chips covered in melted cheese.”

“Yeah, I saw Ming eating one at one point.” Arek took the wheel of cheese and the bag of chips from the pile, setting them aside. “But we could probably go a step further too. It’s fun to experiment.”

“Grapes?” Malissa wondered. “They’re soft and chips are hard. Contrast.”

She considered her own words for a moment, then curled her lip in distaste. “Never mind. That sounds disgusting.”

Arek, who had been about to grab the grapes, cleared his throat and nodded in agreement. It was hard to remind himself that humans didn’t quite have the same tastes he did. Sweet and salty sounded pretty tasty, but the look on Malissa’s face made him suspect it might not have gone over as well as he hoped.

“What about the avocado?” Malissa asked. “It’s mushy, which is still a contrast to the crunchy chips, but it doesn’t seem like it would be disgusting when mixed with cheese.”

“Those are fairly creamy,” Arek said, taking the only two avocados from Ming’s pile and setting them aside. “If we use them, we could probably spice the dish up a little more since they’ll offset it. I’ve got some dried pepper, but we could add in fresh heat if Ming happens to have anything.”

They shuffled through the pile, but it was devoid of any peppers or other spicy foods.

“Ming might have something in her bag. I doubt she actually emptied everything,” Malissa said.

“She’ll probably throw a mutiny if we try to get anything else out of her,” Arek said with a laugh. “Never mind, I should be able to bridge the gap with what I’ve got. Instead of spice, why don’t we just add tomatoes instead? It’ll be on the milder side, but I’m sure it’ll still taste good.”

Malissa grabbed two large tomatoes and added them to their growing pile.

“We’re done raiding your supplies,” Arek called to Ming, standing up with a grunt. The mage darted away from Belmont and started stuffing all her supplies back into her bag, glaring at all of them the entire time.

“Were you pleased with the results of your robbery?”

“Thrilled,” Arek replied. “And I’m sure you will be too, once we make dinner.”

“Oh, right!” Ming exclaimed, her eyes lighting up. “When’s food?”

Arek rolled his eyes. He pressed the center of his medallion, vanishing. Several minutes passed before he popped back into existence, several small bunches of spices clutched in his hands.

While he’d been gone, Malissa had cleared away a small section near the center of the clearing. She’d gathered some smaller pieces of wood and formed them into a campfire which she knelt beside, trying to light by scraping a piece of flint against her dagger.

“The damn wood isn’t catching very well,” Malissa said with a sigh, cupping the sparks in an attempt to protect them from the wind. “This might be the least flammable tree I’ve ever seen.”

“It was a monster,” Belmont said, joining her by the pile and squatting. “Not to worry. I carry emergency firestarter supplies around, and I’m sure the wood will catch once it gets enough flame beneath it.”

He pulled a tiny bundle of dry grass from his bag and put it under the fire. Malissa struck the flint with her dagger once more, and sparks rained down onto Belmont’s firestarter. It took with a catch, going up in flames within seconds.

They blocked it from the wind as best as the could. A minute later, a tiny trail of smoke started to rise from the campfire as the bigger pieces of wood started to catch.

“Hm. The smoke might prove to be a problem,” Belmont said, watching it trail into the sky. “We’re giving our position away.”

“I am not eating rations,” Ming said, crossing her arms. “I’ll just kill anything that shows up.”

Belmont pursed his lips. He raised his wand, pointing it above the campfire. A sharp breath escaped his mouth and the trail of smoke started to curl over, pooling along the top of an invisible sphere.

“I made a spherical shield above it,” Belmont said. “That should catch the smoke for a few minutes. Enough to let you finish cooking, I hope.”

“Should be perfect,” Arek said. “I don’t think this will take us much time at all. Malissa, can you start chopping all the fruit up? I’m going to mix the seasonings.”

“On it,” Malissa said, gathering the tomatoes and avocadoes and bringing them over to a flat piece of wood. She scraped the bark off the top with a clean dagger strike, then set out to peeling them.

Meanwhile, Arek took a bowl from his bag and set it out on the ground. He shook a healthy amount of garlic powder and paprika into it, adding in a dash of salt and black pepper. Several other spices followed their predecessors in and Arek mixed everything up, pausing to take a quick taste.

The seasoning was vibrant and tangy, though not quite as much as it would have been had he had more fresh ingredients to work with. Arek shrugged to himself. Cooking was about doing the best you could with the ingredients you had. A lack of fresh garlic and peppers wasn’t going to be the end of the world.

He set the seasonings aside and chopped the fresh spices he had managed to find in his garden up on a nearby log, then set them aside in another bowl. He took his wok out and dumped the bag of chips into it, much to Ming’s dismay.

“You’re using all of them? I haven’t even gotten a chance to eat one normally yet!”

Arek grabbed a chip from the wok and threw it to her. Ming jumped, biting it out of the air. She spun and gave him a victorious grin that quickly morphed to disappointment. “Oh. It tastes plain.”

“What did you expect?” Belmont asked. “It’s a plain chip, you little goblin. If you just waited until they finished cooking, it wouldn’t be plain.”

Ming turned her nose up and sat down, crossing her arms. “But that involves waiting. I do not like waiting. I do like waiting more than plain chips, though, so I suppose I’ll just have to sit here.”

Arek chuckled, drawing his cleaver and cleaning it off before he set about chopping the cheese into tiny pieces. He didn’t dare shred it too thin given the conditions of where they were cooking.

Once the cheese had been mostly shredded, he poured it in over the chips. He paused, considering trying to find some meat to add to the dish, but decided against it. They were stopping for the day to avoid more trouble. Skipping meat on one meal wouldn’t kill them.

He added the seasonings into the wok and tossed everything together, trying to get it as evenly distributed as possible. Then he set the wok deep in the center of the flaming campfire, molding the hot wood around it to get the wok as buried as possible without dropping ash in on top of it.

“Are we putting the rest of the stuff in after it’s done cooking?” Malissa asked. “I finished cutting the veggies up.”

“Yeah,” Arek replied. “They’ll just turn to mush otherwise. You also lose a lot of flavor when cooking most vegetables – unless it’s for a soup or a stew, but that’s a different topic. We’re better off putting the fresh things in at the end.

Malissa nodded, and the Happy Sunflowers gathered around the campfire, watching their easy meal cook with rapt attention. Smoke gathered in the large bubble shield Belmont had formed above the fire, twisting and swaying gently like an upside-down sea.

The cheese started to melt, mixing with the chips and spices. Arek continued to mix everything around with the end of his cleaver, making sure to avoid letting the wooden handle touch the flame.

As the dish came together, Arek kept a close eye on the chips. They’d already been cooked, and it would have been unfortunate if they started to burn before the meal was done. He wasn’t too concerned, though – cheese melted a lot faster than most things burned.

A few minutes later, the chips were practically swimming in a shallow sea of flavored cheese. Arek pulled the wok out of the flame and nodded to Malissa, who dumped in the diced tomatoes and avocados. Arek mixed everything together once more, then sprinkled in his chopped fresh spices.

“Done,” he proclaimed, setting the wok down beside the flame so everyone could get a good look. The molten orange cheese glimmered in the light of the flame, decorated with spiced specs, avocado, and tomato.

Arek still wished it had some meat in it, but fish almost certainly wouldn’t have gone over well with the other ingredients and he wasn’t too eager to add jerky into an otherwise fresh dish.

“How long until I can eat that without burning the inside of my mouth alive?” Ming asked, watching the wok hungrily.

“For you to ask that means you’ve already tried to do it,” Belmont said. “And probably more than once.”

“I might have,” Ming replied, not taking her eyes off their meal. “A few dozen times. But I remembered this time, right?”

“Just give it a minute or two,” Arek said with a chuckle. He wasn’t concerned with heat himself, so he plucked a cheese-laden chip from the edge of the bowl and popped it into his mouth.

Despite what Ming had said, the chip was far from plain. Whoever had made it had done a good job of bringing out the flavor in the few ingredients within it. The faint smoky flavor of the campfire mixed with the rich, slightly salty cheese. The avocados weren’t the ripest, so while their flavor wasn’t anything to write home about, the texture went perfectly with the rest of the meal.

On top of it all, the fresh slice of the tomato cut along the rest of the ingredients, giving it a sharp tang and helping to offset the heavier cheese.

“Oh, that’s pretty good,” Arek said with a satisfied grin. “Still wish we had meat or some replacement for it, but it’s good.”

“I can’t wait any longer, it’s too much,” Ming proclaimed. She snagged a chip and threw it into her mouth. She immediately opened her mouth and blew out a tiny puff of steam, breathing heavily to try and cool the hot food off.

After a moment, she closed her mouth and chewed, swallowing with a grimace. “I burned my tongue.”

“You deserved it,” Belmont said, rolling his eyes.