“…I wish you wouldn’t talk about bowel movements and constipation while we’re eating,” Liscia said.
“It helps expel waste products from the body. Of course, it’s good for your health and beauty.”
“Urkh. When you say that, it sounds tempting, but…”
Well, now that Liscia’s been talked into it, shall we get down to eating? I thought.
This time, I kept it simple. After scraping off the dirt using the back of a knife, I cut the burdock into long, thin shavings, coated it with potato starch, and put it into the pot of oil we had used earlier. Once it was properly fried, I took it out of the pot and split it into two bowls. One of these, I sprinkled salt on, while the other I sprinkled with sugar. With that, the burdock chips (potato chip-style and rusk-style) were complete.
As for everyone’s reactions after eating them…
“Huh, they’re crunchy and delicious.” said Liscia.
“These… would probably go well with beer,” Poncho said.
Liscia and Poncho were munching away at the salted ones like a snack.
“The oil that comes out when you bite into them melts the sugar, and the sweetness spreads through your whole mouth,” said Juna.
“I’d sure like to let both my moms try this,” said Tomoe.
Juna and Tomoe, who were eating the ones with sugar, gave comments that were worth full points as a food critic and a child respectively.
As for Aisha…
“If you eat them together, they’re salty-sweet and delicious!” she announced, munching away at both.
Yeah, sure, I guess it’s okay to eat them that way, too.
The next edible ingredients were red bear’s paw (bear paw), sword tiger’s liver (tiger liver), and whole cooked salamandra (whole cooked giant salamander), but we only went as far as introducing them.
It was true that they weren’t customarily eaten in this country, but rare delicacies that only an adventurer could hope to catch weren’t something I wanted people going out of their way to acquire. If they happened to get their hands on them by some chance, I just wanted them to know to please eat them, not to throw them away. Besides, even I don’t know how to prepare bear paw.
Ah, by the way, at the ingredients selection stage I removed blowfish, poisonous mushrooms, and anything else poisonous from the list. I knew they could be eaten if prepared properly, but if starvation-stricken amateurs were to try their hand at them, it was clear it would only end badly.
Mind you, even the poisonous parts could be eaten if you really wanted to. In Ishikawa Prefecture, there’s “blowfish ovaries pickled in rice-bran paste,” and in Nagano Prefecture, there are regions where they eat the famously poisonous fly amanita mushroom.
…The human appetite sure is something, huh?
Getting back to the story, the next ingredient shocked all of us.
“This here is our next ingredient, yes.”
“““““Th-This is…”””””
This time, all of our eyes went wide.
Inside the box Poncho opened, there was a bluish-green gelatinous object.
“That’s… a gelin, right?” I asked.
It was one of the soft-bodied slime creatures that could be found in fields everywhere. They looked and acted just like the enemy from RPGs. Their defining characteristic was how weak they were. If you cut them, they’d die. If you smashed them, they’d die, too. They attached themselves to living (or dead) creatures and sucked nutrients from them. There was no male or female: they multiplied by division. They were probably what you’d get if you had an amoeba or other single-celled organism grow to a gigantic size.
Huh? We’re eating that? Or, rather, can we even eat that?
Then I noticed Aisha seemed to be cocking her head to the side in confusion.
“Hold on. Is that gelin dead?”
“Yes. This gelin has already been finished off,” Poncho said.
“That can’t be. I’ve never heard of a gelin corpse before.”
“Oh, that’s right. Now that you mention it, it is strange,” Liscia agreed, seeming to have noticed something.
I, on the other hand, didn’t get it. “Liscia, could you just tell me what’s up already?”
“What’s with that tone…? Gelins are weak. They have a thin membrane, and if you cut them just a little, gush, out flows all their bodily fluids. It’s the same if you splatter them with a club. All you have left is a bluish-green puddle.”
“Is that how it is?”
Aisha nodded, as well. “Yes. That’s why such a neatly preserved corpse seems impossible.”
I see… Aisha as a warrior and Liscia as a soldier have experience fighting gelins, so they noticed something was odd here.
“So, what did you have to do to get the slime like this?” I asked.
“Well, you see, there’s a slight trick to it. This is a technique I learned from a tribe that lives far to the west, in the Empire. They use a thin pole-like object to strike the nucleus without breaking the membrane. If you do that, the gelin will maintain its shape in death. In that area, they called it ‘ike-jime for gelins.’”
Ike-jime? Come on, this isn’t like draining blood from fish… But, still, that makes sense now. It looks like I wasn’t wrong to think of them like single-celled organisms.
“The fluids of a gelin gradually lose liquidity and harden once the core is destroyed,” Poncho added.
“Like rigor mortis, I guess,” I said.
“Yes. If you leave it longer, the fluids will evaporate and it will turn into a dry husk, but around two hours after death, while it has hardened somewhat but the flesh is still supple, it is possible to cook it. That would be the state this one is in, yes.”
Hmm… I get that you can cook it, but isn’t that a separate issue from whether you can eat it? As I was thinking that, Poncho took out a knife and began making a vertical cut in the gelin.
“When the gelin is in this state, you can insert the knife vertically and cut it into pieces without the body collapsing. The fibers of the gelin’s body run vertically, so doing it this way gives it the best texture, yes.”
Poncho skillfully cut the gelin into long thin strips, like making ika somen. It was turning into noodles with an udon-like thickness. Poncho took those and put them into a pot of boiling water.
“Now, if we boil them in a pot of water with a little salt, the flesh will firm up more.”
Now it was seriously starting to turn into something like soba or udon. As they were boiling, that vibrant bluish-green color had darkened, starting to look something like green tea soba, too. Then Poncho added things like dried mushrooms and kelp to the pot with the boiling gelin.
Is he boiling those to get broth out of them?
Lastly, after adding more salt to adjust the flavor, he served them to each of us in a bowl of soup.
“Here you go. This is Gelin Udon.”
“He’s even calling it udon!” I exclaimed.
“I–Is something the matter, sire?” Poncho asked.
“Oh, no, nothing.”
I heard this country’s language as Japanese. “Udon” was probably some other word that had gotten translated into that. How confusing. Though, well, setting that aside, what was laid out in front of us looked exactly like Kansai-style green udon in a clear broth.
Red Fox and Green Gelin, is it? I thought. Yeah… Now’s not the time to escape reality by remembering old commercial jingles for instant udon. Huh? Wait, I seriously have to eat this?