From: li@Data-IO.COM (Phyllis Rostykus) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [MG] A 'Kani Kitchen Indeed Keywords: 'Raelf, Kardia, the lighthouse Date: 8 May 93 00:59:56 GMT [ADMIN: Due to net delays, a note that this piece goes after the post by Kelly Cooper about the First Contact between the Travellers and the Onari. Thanks to both Kelly and Hutch for their patience and feedback, and to Hutch for his part in this post. It was fun... and, Hutch, you're welcome to my kitchen *any* time.] ---- Kardia was getting restless. The three explorers were now huddled talking about interface specifications. The concoction that ar'Elya had given her before the formalities was mostly gone, and she needed to go to the bathroom. She sighed and then blinked as she saw another 'Raelf standing by a hallway that led from the main room. He was motioning to her. She smiled, got up, and the three others didn't even notice her leaving. 'Raelf said, "Little Rat's just gotten herself comfortable in her room. They're gonna be at it for hours, so you wanna help with dinner? I cook a mean asparagus beef." "Chinese? Sure, I'd love to learn." Kardia laughed. "Well, there is a local analog to Earth Chinese food, kind of a halfway japanese halfway-thai slightly korean version. Called Etarusian food. The local restaurant, midway up Merchant's Hill, Yanigazia Purizshita, it's called. I got a lot of the sauces and things in the pantry from them, they work a little better with the local veggies and flavors." "Yeah," said Kardia, "I've been there, love the name, and really nice staff. Do they really have asparagus?" "Close. Cooks a little threadier, so its always chopped in bite-size bits. They have some really wicked smooth mushrooms, like chanterelles from Arkham Earth, but much larger and a less musky taste, has a tendency to be poisonous but I can fix that no sweat." "Hmm... wow." said Kardia, looking a little dubious. "Well, I guess to be safe I'll lay off on those. Never know how they'll work on a biochem like Jameson's." Kardia brightened. As they spoke, 'Raelf led Kardia into the hallway and then to the right. They went through a doorway and turned left immediately on going in. Kardia caught a glimpse of a dinning room to the right. "Uhm... is there a bathroom somewhere?" "Oh, sure. Go back to the hallway, straight across." Kardia walked back across the hallway and pushed open the door and stopped dead in her tracks. A modern, but differently styled bathroom, built for a number of people to use. A hallway into a tile floored and walled shower room. She stared at the showers for a while and then saw a cedar door with a small pane of glass in it along the far wall. She looked into a sauna. Another door led to a sunken whirlpool tub. And there were a number of sinks with shelving and bright chrome faucets. And glycerin soap in a transparent pump-top dispenser. She used the facilties with some wonder and definite longing for a real shower. She satisfied some of her sudden need for cleanliness by washing her hands and face in the sink. She then walked back to the kitchen a little better prepared for what might be there. The lighting in the kitchen was indirect and overhead, with work spots. No windows, but there were some pictures on some of the walls. Kardia grinned at photograph of apples, with one apple cut to show the innards of an orange. She idlely wondered if 'Raelf could grow something like that. There were also a couple rolling carts. At north end of the kitchen were all aluminum/stainless steel appliances. Kardia was rather proud of the fact that it didn't surprise her much after seeing the bathroom. An overhead air cleaning system to draw grease and excess heat away hung over it all, and the wall was lined with three ovens, two grills, a deep fryer and something Kardia puzzled over. 'Raelf noticed her puzzled look and with his hands deep in a bowl, pointed his elbow at them as he named them, "That's a three-tier Pizza oven, a circulating-oven, a large microwave, a bed-of-coals barbecue grill, a flat grill, a deep fryer, and a steamer tank." "Pizza gets made in something like that?" said Kardia in surprise, "Wow." She hadn't ever really thought of how they might be made, before. "Yeah, the pizza oven was something I bought. The rest is all part of the pro-chef package that came bundled with the deluxe environment setups. We hardly ever use it, but it's nice to have." Just south of all that a immensely thick wood table sat in massive repose, and next to that, a work area with an array cleavers and a tray of various seasonings covered by lids with runes on them. The far south end held a washing and a smaller cooking area, including a separate smaller, thick block table, a stack of bowls and pans, a six-burner stove setup with three large woks, a central drain and an overhead water hose for cleanup, a free-standing bamboo steamer unit and a free-standing smoker unit. Next to that area was a door that looked like it slid up into the wall. The east wall was just covered with thick doors. 'Raelf had his hands in a big bowl of gooey white stuff. "Why don't you start chopping the char siu? Then we can make up a whole batch at once." "A whole batch of what?" asked Kardia as she washed her hands. "Char1 sui1 bao1," said 'Raelf. "Cool!" said Kardia and then wrinkled her nose at him, "What's that? And what do you want me to do with what?" 'Raelf laughed, "You've never had them before?" "Nope." Kardia grinned, "Heck, I've never had real beef in asparagus beef, either." "Bogus! No meat?" "Nope. Meat's real... expensive where I come from. Usually not worth the price. Here it seems to be a part of everyone's diet. I like it, tastes a lot better than the stuff I've had, is all." 'Raelf muttered to himself as he worked the dough in the bowl. "Uhm... what should I do?" "There's chunks of red colored meat in the circulating oven over there." He pointed with an elbow. "Pull it out, watch out for the smoke, and slice it on the butcher block." "Butcher block?" she asked, half laughing. He grinned back and pointed with his elbow at the thick table. "Oh." she said, "How thick?" "'Bout so." he held up thumb and forefinger. "Half a cent?" "Right." Kardia ducked the smoke that was pulled up by the circulation fan, and looked in the oven, there was meat on a rack over a pan that smoked gently in the heat of the oven. She looked around. "You have any potholders?" "Oops." 'Raelf flashed in a spray of lights, and came back with potholders and clean hands. "Thanks." She took them and pulled the pan out of the oven and put it on her butcher block. She pulled a knife from the array of knives and a big, stainless fork to hold the meat down with and started cutting. 'Raelf, in the meantime, got the dough to his liking, and laid a damp cheesecloth on top, then put it on top of one of the ovens and washed his hands of the dough. He stopped to watch Kardia carefully slicing bits of meat from the big piece of pork barbecue with a small knife. "Here, try this." 'Raelf handed her a nasty looking cleaver. "Isn't that a bit... big?" Kardia looked at the wicked blade warily. "Nah. The weight makes the cutting easier. Try it. It'll probably work better than that paring knife." 'Raelf said and Kardia could see he was trying really hard not to laugh. "All right..." Kardia was amazed to find that the job was rather a lot easier with the bigger knife. She just had to place the blade and it's weight did most of the cutting, the amount of force she had to put behind it was nearly nil. 'Raelf was mixing things in a pot over the stove. Various strangely colored liquids from bottles, and spices from the rack. He had a graduated glass measuring cup of clear broth that he eventually added along with a white powder. Kardia finally finished her cutting, and said, "Done!" 'Raelf walked over and neatly picked up the pile by using one hand and the cleaver to scoop it all up. Kardia wondered how he didn't get cut by the knife, but it certainly was a fast way to do it. He dumped the meat in the thick, red-brown sauce he'd been working over that smelled wonderful and stirred until the meat was coated with the sauce. "Okay. Hmm. Normally the bread needs to rise for an hour but I want to do this fast, so ..." He reached up on top of the oven and flickered in a dizzy spray of lights, and pulled a second bowl of dough down from right where the first one was. The dough was risen fully, puffing up around the cheesecloth; it stuck slightly as he pulled the cloth off. "Nasty... It dries out if I don't put a cloth on it, but it always sticks to the cloth. I'd use plastic wrap but it won't recycle." He grinned at Kardia, seeing if she noticed what he'd said. Kardia blinked back at him, "Recycling... goodness, who recycles your stuff?" "The environment engine in the house recycles for me, but it doesn't like the plastics because they don't match the local tech levels, so it whines at me, or it would if I did that." He pulled as much of the dough off the cloth as he could. She laughed softly, studying what he did. "Hmmm... would foil work to seal the moisture in but not stick?" "I guess foil would work, or putting a moisture-field over it. Huh." Kardia grinned at him as he picked up the pot from the stove. "Too hot. Hm. <> That's better, should be cool enough to handle now." He set the pot down on the big butcher block. "Microwave refrigerator," he grinned at her questioning expression. She giggled. He went over to the steamer unit and picked up a stack of the steamers, carrying them over to the table. 'Raelf rolled out rounds of dough about as big as Kardia's hand, and then showed her how much filling to put in and then the delicate work of pinching the edges closer, closer, and then shut in a flower-like pattern on the top of the bun. She smiled, now this was work she could do. Quickly and delicately, she filled the buns with the salty sweet filling as 'Raelf busied himself with other items on their menu and put them on pieces of wax paper over holes in the steamer layers. "Now what?" asked Kardia as she washed the bits of dough that clung to her hands off. "Well, they're supposed to rise another hour, but I'm getting hungry out there, so I think I'll cheat again and pull them from down-time." He reached, and hefted up the steamer racks from where they sat on the end of the butcher block, leaving them behind while taking them over to the partly-empty steamer unit, then lighting the fire beneath it with a sharply muttered word. Kardia narrowed her eyes. "I thought cooks weren't supposed to take shortcuts. That's what Mother always told the chef." "Hurm. What she didn't know never hurt you. _All_ cooks take shortcuts. Except for apprentices. You have to make apprentices do it the long slow way. Fortunately I was never an apprentice so I got to cheat from the beginning." "Right." Kardia laughed silently to herself. "What's next?" "Hmm... here... you were so good at cutting up the char sui, why don't you work on these? The beef, slice it as thin as you can, the pork should be cut into threads, across the grain of the meat, like this..." A number of deft movements with the knife. "Do that to the sausages, too. This bowl of chicken should be done like this... and these green onions need to be flowered like this. The asparagus should be snapped like this, and then cut into bite size pieces." "Wow! That's pretty neat." said Kardia and got down to work. Occassionally she'd glance up and watch 'Raelf. He busied himself with a huge cast iron pot and an enormous bag of rice. He mixed the rice with water and washed it using a big whisk, and then measured more water in, added a drop of golden oil, and then set it on a big flame from the gas stove. He set up another pot with two kinds of rice and put it away. Kardia, in the meantime, was getting a blister between the big knuckle of her forefinger and her hand, the top edge of the knife rubbed there fairly constantly the way she was holding it for all the meat cutting she had to do. So she switched back to the paring knife, which she washed, to do the green onions. The aparagus was interesting to snap as all the spears snapped in different places, and she grinned when she used the ecleaver to chop it into pieces about four centimeters long. She found that it was actually rather easy to not get cut with the knife as she used the wide, flat blade of it to scoop things back into their bowls. Kardia looked up again, and found 'Raelf pulling plucked birds out of a refrigerator. She blinked, they'd been stuck over the necks of wine bottles. "What's that for?" she asked with bewilderment. "It's to let 'em dry. We could use salt to dry 'em, but I don't like having that much salt on them, so we just let 'em dry in the fridge for a day or two. It makes for a crisper skin." "Oh." Kardia watched curiously as he rubbed what smelled like alcohol on a couple of them and then put them in the oven. The others he put each in their own bowl and put them on layers that went into the steamer stack. Another pot went on the stove with stock and 'Raelf put all sorts of things into it. He moved the smaller butchers block near the stove and started cutting and shredding things almost at a blur and letting them gently plop into the soup. A chime sounded. "The bao should be done, you want to bring some of them out to the others?" "Sure." Kardia hopped over to the steaming unit and carefully pulled it open. Using hot pads, she took the steaming layers of birds off and then the layers that contained the boa. She put the birds back onto the stack. The bao came off of the others into a big bowl. There was one layer that didn't fit. "For the kitchen crew." pronounced 'Raelf with a grin. He peeled the paper off the bottom of one and ate half of it in a mouthful. Kardia peeled one for herself and took a bite, the tender softness of the shell combined with the savory sweet filling had her smiling. "Wow, that's *good*." she said, and polished it off. She took the bowl out to the main room, and got three distracted smiles and thanks. She grinned, walked back to the kitchen, and was greeted with a question. "You know how to de-vein prawns?" "Prawns?" Laughter on both their sides, "Here." The paring knife laid open the top of the small shellfish and a thick black line was pulled deftly out. "Oh. Cool." By the time she was done with that, 'Raelf was wrist deep in dough again. This stuff didn't smell the same way the other did, and he'd poured steaming hot water on flour to make it. He made rounds about as big around as raquet balls and about two cents thick, plastered one of them with shortening and slapped them together. He then rolled out the doubled piece of dough into a round and put it on the flat grill. It puffed up some, and he turned it over to show a lightly browned side, and it puffed up big. When the other side was done, 'Raelf pulled it off the grill and then pulled the two half-as-thin pancakes apart and folded them in quarters before putting them in a bowl in the steamer. "You wanna roll or bake?" "Roll please, I don't think I have abestos fingers..." "Yeah, I cheat. The cooks at my favorite Hong Kong restaurant did the same thing, though, I never did figure out why anyone would want to do this without fireproof fingers." They worked side by side for a while. At first Kardia was concentrating solely on the rolling process, but as she got better at it, she let her attention wander a bit. "'Raelf, where'd you learn how to cook like this?" "Hong Kong, and a little from Dave's mother." "Who's Dave?" "Well, me, sort of." He explained one of the more disturbing features of the 'kani biology, the requirement that they consume a living creature to adapt themselves to the magical qualities of the places they travelled to. Then he told of how he'd gotten to be Dave's friend and what had happened when Dave had flown and fallen and 'Raelf hadn't been able to get to him in time. Kardia listened quietly, just absorbing it, seeing something of how 'Raelf had felt at the foot of that cliff, at the death of a friend. She sighed and looked at him and saw a blonde man with multi-colored eyes, a single lock of his hair reflecting the odd colors. A medium-heavy, balanced build typical of a well practiced martial artist, along with the relaxed posture that went with a very easy-going attitude. Then Kardia looked again, harder, this time consciously looking with the sight that was blinded when he flicked away and back in less than an eyeblink. A feline-humanoid with fur the color of desert sands, wide ears, the wide face of a lynx around those ever changing eyes flipped another pancake with retractable claws. He had exactly the same posture and when she looked under the surface, she saw the lines of traceries of power that flowed through his hands. The edges of the figure blurred, and then she faced something myriad in its being. A boy-child, a flightless bird, an elf with two blades that were as much a part of his balance as his breathing, there were others as well, too numerous for her to note. She dropped out of that other sight to see 'Raelf looking at her. She blinked dazzled eyes at him. She rolled out another pancake, trying to find something to say. Finally, all she could think of was, "Wow." Then, slower, "If I... if you ever find me like that... could..." she grinned crookedly, "could you take me, too? Then you'd have an in to the world I come from." then in a rush, "It's an Awakened world, with more things happening in it than are known of, mysteries hidden beneath concrete and blacktop. Where glass and steel have a magic and life within them as well and the shadows are full of wonder as well as danger." At the surprised look in those multi-colored eyes, she blushed, laughed and then said, "But you'd probably hate it, no meat..." She furiously went back to rolling the pancakes out, wondering what in the world had prompted her to offer that to him. "hem." 'Raelf actually blushed. "I thank you for the offer. Your homeworld sounds intriguing. Do you really know what you're asking?" She looked up at his question and listened with wide eyes to his next words. "To become part of another person, to join the 'kan race as a child of my clan, this is a pretty big thing. You would be a valued and precious addition to any of the clans, you know, and not just because of your skills with the grounding magic." Kardia blushed brighter at the praise and then swallowed to answer his question, "I, um, I'm sure." "I'll give you my promise, then, that should you find your life cut short before you're done living it, and if I or mine are near, that we'll offer you a place among us if we can." She nodded, wordless, then smiled a brilliant smile at him and went back to her work. ----- Hutch (Combinatorial posts are such fun) hutch@ibeam.intel.com -- Liralen Li | "Looking down on empty streets, all she can see are li@inigo.Data-IO.com | the dreams all made solid, are the dreams made real." aka Phyllis Rostykus | - "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel