LET'S HOPE IT'S A GOOD ONE — cooking

[THEM]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]ooc: obligatory Holiday Gathering thread :pensive:

Since the day he’d moved into town, the outside winds had grown harsher, and the days had steadily shortened. Tanglewood was a coastal town bordered by a stew of swamps and marshland, but the winter was still relentlessly cold in the partially temperate environment; snow seemed to be a rare sight for most, but today it clung to the cracked roads in a thin dusting that quickly turned to an unpleasant sludge, and the noonday sun had yet to melt the frost from the corners of his windows.

Without any form of heat running through his house - the fireplaces were too dirty to use just yet, and he didn’t want to set his place ablaze by fiddling with the gas stove - there was little else he could do but take himself outdoors for a campfire.

The winters back home were fully temperate, mild; it was only after travelling to the Beyond that he’d been exposed to the harsh weather that extended beyond the usual monsoon season. The cold was survivable, at home, with the right supplies, the right skills. Here, he’d seen rouges die in the cold, blue-grey faces half-buried in sheets of snow. Little else kept them alive through the subzero nights on this continent but fires and the press of shared body heat. Kaz pushes a stone closer to the heart of the blossoming fire with a stick, and frowns a little.

(He misses that warmth, sometimes, no matter how desperate it had been.)

He leaves the small fire to return indoors. There were plenty of pots and pans in the kitchen of his house, which was a room he had not yet explored. He naturally sought earthenware for its ability to retain the fire’s heat, and while he couldn’t find anything that had not been cracked or broken, an uncovered iron pot would do the trick. He hoists it up by the handle, drags it out to the fire. He isn’t sure what he’s doing at first, really. The movements are automatic, things he’d done since he was a child, things his mother had taught as she guided his paws. Prepping the small fire, bringing the heat down until only the charcoal smouldered and the stones glowed red - he fills the pot with fresh water, clean snow. Brings it to a low simmer. Prods the burning branches so they cast embers up to the evening sky.

- Thinks of home again.

(Thinks of his mother, her food, her voice singing over the cooking pot - no. He’s getting too old to be dwelling like this. He isn’t a lost child, not anymore.)

It’s only after Kazuhira wanders back to the kitchen to be faced with decades-old, bloating cans of rotting food lining the pantry that he realizes what he’d set out to accomplish. Okofuro no aji - "mother’s cooking", literally, was what this place needed to feel a little more like home. He pulls a face as he inspects a can, tossing it aside before setting off to find ingredients himself. He knows the recipes by heart, remembers gathering herbs and wild vegetables around their den by his mother’s request. There was little else he could look forward to, back then, but the warm stew-pot his mother could prepare to warm a winter’s day, and his foraging skills return easily to the forefront of his mind.

When he goes out to gather vegetables, hoping there are close enough substitutes to mimic the flavors she'd constructed, he's smiling despite himself.

Once the scent of cooking onions and a hint of garlic begins to permeate the air, he settles back on his haunches and allows the pot to bubble for a few minutes longer. He was lucky to find more than just root vegetables at this time of year: scallions, thin-stalked mushrooms, potatoes and carrots give substance to the dish, even if the flavors were a little eclectic compared to the traditional recipes he knew. He'd prefer an egg or two, maybe some noodles, a head of cabbage instead of potatoes. But, frankly, he was lucky to find anything at all. At least the tavern's kitchen was well-stocked with traded spices, frozen meat (chicken, mostly, as the farm was in no short supply), and as he stirred miso into the broth he thought himself a rather good chef given the circumstances. He'd spent the past year or so taking what he could get, bloody prey in his jaws like a wild dog, so to find both time and surplus to prepare a dish by hand was to reacquaint himself with a sense of normalcy.

Kaz stokes the fire again, then lets the flames settle and the boiling broth's heat come back down. He'd return to his kitchen to seek out a bowl and silverware eventually, but for now he was content to soak up the warmth of the flames while they lasted.

[wormwood.]

i was born, on the highway, in a train wreck

with a heart, that was beating, out of my chest

Aurum could still remember the cold months of the first year of his existence, still so very young and so very scared with each day that passed with the winds howling for longer, and the sky darkening more quickly. He could still remember trying to turn to his brother for warmth and for help, only to be shooed away by Judith and Aethelwulf, his parents hissing that he could go and find his own way to warm up as they huddled Poet close. Back then, he had considered their abuse natural, right. After all, Poet was the small one, the younger one, the sick one. He surely needed the warmth more than Aurum did, right? Yet still, even then, Aurum had questioned why he couldn't also share in the warmth of his father and mother's large feline bodies. After all, wouldn't it actually be better for Poet to have three others crowded around him, warming him up? Of course, he'd never bring this up, too petrified of being scolded for daring to question his parents' orders. Needless to say, his existence in the winter had been rough and harsh for that first year, curled up into a tight little ball and resisting the urge to sob when the chill of the air reached down through his thick mane, through his brushed down fur, all the way to his very core. For many nights, he had thought that the winter would be the end of him, or one of his limbs would just finally freeze over and shatter, leaving him even more useless than his parents already considered him to be. Still, Aurum had always been stubborn, and determined, and prideful, and he had made it through that first winter with his jaw clenched and his body shaking, refusing to let the cold do him in. Back then, he honestly hadn't been sure if his parents had been glad for his survival, or if they had just viewed it with disdain. Now though, he knew that there had been no gratitude to the gods when he had bounded up to his parents at the beginning of spring, grinning happily.

Four years later, and now the winter was just a natural part of life for Aurum, and not something that he found himself worrying about too much. No longer was he reliant on his parents, or his brother, or his own ruthless stubbornness in order to survive. His mane had grown in more thickly, his fur was long and rich and blocked out the cold, and he knew how to keep himself warm when he needed to. The only part of him that occasionally needed monitoring thanks to the faint chill in the air was his wings, since the cold enjoyed digging smugly into the gaps between his feathers, lingering there and making the large limbs upon his back feel like blocks of solid ice. Thankfully, this was solved by careful grooming and plucking, as well as keeping said limbs pressed firmly into the warmth of his spine. Of course, this wasn't to say that he just completely ignored winter. He knew full well that some of his clanmates suffered more than him as the colder months finally got their iron grip on the group, and he often saw fit to help them, offering them blankets or his own body warmth in order to make sure they didn't freeze. He didn't much appreciate the snow, either. It happened rarely within Tanglewood, but when it did it was overall unpleasant, soaking into his fur and weighing him down before turning the ground even further into sludge and slush, making the muck of the swamp not only sticky and unpleasant, but slippery as well. He solved this mostly by hopping from log to log as he usually did, or just flying over it all, although that proved to grow tiring rather quickly. He also wasn't able to do such a thing when he reached the town, mainly due to the fact that he felt it slightly rude to hover above other people while talking to them.

Aurum was on the ground as he strode into camp that day, shaking out his slightly wet pelt upon his return from a successful border patrol. His intention had been to just retire right away to within his home, curling up underneath some nice warm covers, but he was caught off guard by the scent of something very pleasant reaching his nose. Tail flicking back and forth, the Captain rose his nose into the air and parted his jaws slightly, taking in the warm, mouth-watering scent with a slight grin. Curiosity – and hunger – driving him away from his earlier plans, the winged lion made his way along to where Miller had taken up residence, being especially careful not to step into any of the puddles of snowy sludge that had been shoved to the sides of town for the time being. When he eventually arrived to where Kazuhira was sitting with his fire and his bubbling mixture, Aurum was struck with further interest. He hadn't known that Kaz could cook... perhaps he would keep that in mind for later, when the tavern was having events and Aurum's very paltry and basic cooking skills weren't up to the task. Padding slowly over, Aurum let out a soft and friendly chuff to alert Kaz to his presence, settling nearby and sneaking a glance within the pot inquisitively. He rumbled after a moment, letting his one blue eye move from the cooking meal to the male preparing it, "Hey Miller. I didn't realize you could cook... what are you making? It smells... well, delicious, especially in these temperatures." Truthfully, Aurum didn't have much experience with cooked meals, having subsisted for most of his life on nothing but raw prey that he had managed to catch and wrangle. That wasn't to say that he hadn't been endlessly grateful for every meal he had been able to catch and chow down on immediately, but it wasn't as if he had a Mother cooking delicious meals for him on occasion when he was a cub.

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