Lus spun and looked at the communicator in horror. "Dinner?" he asked.
"Yeah, you know… the meal that we all eat at the end of the day? Like, every single day?" Nippy's voice was short with annoyance.
Lus nodded. "Yes, I know what dinner is. We're having… uh… it's a surprise."
"A surprise?" He asked. Lus couldn't tell if he was angry or shocked, so he blundered on.
"Yep. I got some new recipes on the mission and I'm going to try one out tonight, but I want it to be a surprise for everyone."
The communicator was silent for a moment. "Well then," Nippy answered. "I look forward to it."
The line clicked off and Lus let out a short sigh of relief. Crisis averted… for now. But he had promised something new for dinner, and now his new system expected it to be something miraculous.
Glancing hopefully at the recipe screen, he tapped on the one recipe: [Beginner's Luck Soup].
Instead of the list of ingredients he expected, he found himself staring at a block of text.
"The origins of this soup are found in the rural Human system of…"
He shook his head, then began scrolling down. The text was far longer than he expected, but he finally found the ingredients list near the bottom.
"Flour, egg, salt, kechin meat, elsha oil, onnins, garoots, slerry, kechin broth, pasil, harvic, peppin," he muttered. Biting his lip thoughtfully, he stepped over to the nitrobox and swung open the door.
The nitrobox was large and filled with boxes. There were four boxes of the red gervin meat the Captain favored and two boxes of chopped, frozen vegetables left from the previous cook. There were a few other small packages that he hadn't really looked too closely at yet, but no kechin.
The white meat from small, flightless birds was more expensive than gervin meat and more difficult to prepare, so it made sense that they didn't have any.
Still, he thought, it probably wouldn't mess things up if he used gervin instead, right?
Steeling himself, Lus began pulling out all the stuff on the ingredients list and setting them on the shiny metal counter. Once he had everything out, he scrolled past the ingredients.
"Step 1: Make pasta," he read. He smiled. Pasta was one of his favorite foods and he hadn't had it in ages. Since it was more common in Human cuisine, the former Kremel chef had rarely made it.
The instructions said to pour the flour out onto a flat, clean surface. He frowned at the amount. 700 grams didn't seem like nearly enough flour for the crew.
"How many people is this supposed to feed?" he asked aloud, scrolling back up. He found it just above the ingredients list: 5 people.
"So I just need to… 10 times that? Easy," he said with a sigh of relief. He wasn't bad at math, but he didn't need the pressure of having to multiply everything by 9 when he was already in a time crunch.
He carefully measured out 7000 grams of flour into a huge pile on the counter, then made a small hollow in the center, like a volcano.
Next, he cracked 20 eggs into the hole of the flour volcano. He managed to avoid dropping in any eggshells, which was a true miracle.
Once he had the eggs in, Lus glanced at the recipe, then frowned and sprinkled a generous helping of salt over everything, since he'd forgotten to mix it with the flour beforehand.
Patting his hands in some of the flour at the edges, he took a deep breath and plunged them into the eggs.
He let out a rather unmanly squeak of surprise at the cold gooiness around his hands, then began mixing. The first deep yellow orange egg yolk he caught hold of surprised him. It was firm, almost like a little balloon.
Lus lifted it out of the egg goo and looked at it, passing it back and forth between his hands. It finally broke, covering his already sticky hands in a thick, yellow orange liquid. He gagged a little and plunged his hands back in, quickly squashing the rest of the yolks.
Once he had the eggs somewhat mixed together, he began slowly mixing the flour around them in. It took far more time and effort than he had expected and he had to stop frequently to rest his aching arms.
Finally, he had a giant mound of mostly mixed pasta dough. It was thick and light yellow, with streaks of white where he hadn't quite managed to get the flour mixed in.
Checking the screen, he scrolled to the next step for the pasta and blinked in surprise and dismay. Now he was supposed to apparently roll this giant mound of dough out until it was quite thin, like true noodles.
Lus stretched his aching arms with a sigh and looked around for the heavy, smooth stone rolling pin that he had only used to smash nuts.
Taking the handles, he set it on top of the pile of dough and pressed down. It left a nice divet and he smiled as he watched the dough quickly flatten.
His smile disappeared quickly. After five minutes of strenuous rolling, he still hadn't managed to get it nearly as thin as he wanted. It was still at least a centimeter thick and each roll seemed to do nothing to change that.
A soft beeping sound drew his eyes up to the clock and he gasped. "It's late, oh Watcher it's late!"
He needed to have the meal ready in an hour and he hadn't even gotten to cooking the pasta. With a growl of frustration, he took out a knife and began cutting the dough into thin strips.
"This will work just as well as rolling it thin," he muttered, tossing the strips of pasta dough in a pile next to the stove.
Once he'd finished slicing up the pasta, he grabbed the largest pot he could find and filled it with water. He set it on the stove, wincing a little as it sloshed over the sides and sizzled on the already warming burner.
While he waited for the water to come to a boil, he set to work on the meat. Thankfully, he'd planned to try something with ground gervin meat, so he had 8 kgs thawing in the interbox.
He set the huge box next to the stove and pulled out his largest frying pan. He had too much meat to cook at once, so he quickly pulled out a few handfuls of the mostly thawed meat and plopped them into the pan.
He washed his hands and grabbed a spatula. He had just chopped the meat up and given it a turn when he noticed steam rising from the pot of water. Stepping away from the gervin meat, he hurried to his mountain of noodles.
Boiling water splashed over the sides as he dropped in a huge scoop of noodles. Lus gasped and jumped back, but not before some of it splashed on him. He grabbed his hot, damp shirt and pulled it off, tossing it on the chair at the small desk.
A noise at the door drew his attention up and he found Cewi-Bano watching him with an expression of confusion.