Zoe woke up in the morning and stretched herself out then ate another of her sandwiches. Part of her wanted to just get back to climbing the mountain, but she had to be responsible. Just sitting here eating her sandwich was proof enough of that. If the option was there, she wasn’t going to choose to go cook a meal.

So she left her room and made her way out of the inn. There were two options for preparing her meals, as far as she could see. Make a campfire and cook her food on it, which seemed fun enough to her, though as little inconvenient.

The other option was to find a stove or something she could use. Maybe at an inn or maybe there was some kind of communal cooking area? She wasn’t sure.

But she decided to go make a campfire and cook with all of the equipment she bought. She had bought it years earlier and never ended up using it. Now she had an excuse to, and she decided to take advantage of it. Maybe Joe had a point after all.

She was never going to just go cook something on a campfire when a stove was readily available. But now she had an excuse to do it and was a little excited to go give it a try. Having a reason to do something really did make it just that little bit better.

Cooking on a campfire is something she hadn’t done in a very long time, either. Managing the heat was pretty tricky, she knew. The tripod she had would help keep the food away from the heat, which was good. But should she let the flames just lick the bottom of the pot? Or was it better to just let the flames died down and bring the pot closer to the hot coals?

She wasn’t really sure, but she had lots of portions to try things out at least. What made the most sense to her was letting the flames not quite reach the bottom of the pot, but not quite be left as smouldering coals either. But she could adjust it as she went if things were burning or not cooking properly.

Before she went though, she needed a couple more things. Or, well, not really now that she thought about it. She was going to shop around for a cutting board and a knife but she could make a good knife with her skills and a flat shield would work just fine as a cutting board.

Zoe made her way out to the forest around Gafoda and gathered up a bunch of branches. She wasn’t sure how many portions she would end up cooking but if she did the full hundred, she’d need the fire running for quite a while.

Zoe sat down on a nearby stump and summoned a wide, flat shield and a sharp santoku knife, like the one she had back home. The setup worked pretty well as she cut up the portions of deer meat into smaller more manageable cubes. There wasn’t a very stable place to put the cutting shield, thing. She could sit on the ground and put it on the stump, but she didn’t want to do that and so she just rested it on her legs and fumbled around a bit.

The knife was very sharp and cut through well enough at least, she just had to be careful not to rock her legs too much and have the meat fall off onto the ground. She supposed she could clean it with her Immaculate Enchantments anyway but something about it just felt icky to her.

Her plan was fairly simple. She didn’t have great cooking options out here. Really all she had was a cooking tripod and a medium sized pot that were currently warming up on the fire Zoe had started.

So she couldn’t do anything extravagant. She also didn’t have any seasonings, at all. She smacked herself for not remembering to buy some salt at least. She’d do her best anyway, and hoped it wouldn’t be too bland.

The veggies she had were quite varied. There was quite a bit of Lio, the spicy tie dye spinach that made up the bulk of the sandwiches she had. But there were quite a few other vegetables she recognized as well. Some onions, potatoes. A bunch of the weird blue cucumber banana things. And some furni, which Zoe had taken to quite liking.

She prodded at the blue cucumbers as she wondered how she was supposed to eat them. Were they to be peeled like bananas? Or was the peel eaten, like a cucumber? She scraped a bit of it off with her claws and it was thin, like a cucumber’s skin. The flesh inside was a bright yellow and began to slowly flow out of the hole she made in the skin.

She tasted the blue skin she peeled off and it was quite bitter, with a bit of chew to it. The flesh inside was sweet and tangy, and had a texture like smooth, somewhat dry mashed potatoes.

Frankly, she had no idea how to cook with them and put them back in her storage ring. They tasted nice, but she’d eat them raw, in the peel rather than try to prepare something with them. If she ever found a better setup, she might try making balls out of the flesh and then frying them, but she didn’t even have any oil here so that wasn’t possible.

Zoe chopped up all of the onions, potatoes and half of the deer meat she had purchased. She started by putting some of the deer meat into the pot. The meat sizzled when it hit the hot metal, and Zoe realized she never bought a spatula. She looked through her supplies, the closest thing to a spatula that she had was her knife, and maybe some of her pitons.

A boomerang was kinda like a spatula, in some ways, and she summoned a translucent blue boomerang of ice with her Frozen Arsenal. She had no idea how well it would hold up to the heat from the pot, but it was better than ruining her dagger. If it didn’t work, she’d sacrifice one of her metal pitons.

She let the meat sizzle away as she managed the fire below the pot, trying to keep the flame just a little short from reaching the bottom of the metal. After a couple minutes, she pushed the meat around with her frozen boomerang. It held up to the heat somewhat well but it did melt a little, and the pot cooled down quite a bit. The sizzling of the meat stopped for a moment as the water boiled away and the fire heated everything back up.

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Zoe tossed the boomerang away, and it didn’t fly back to her. How were you supposed to throw a boomerang anyway? It didn’t matter. She grabbed one of her metal pitons and started pushing the meat around with that instead. The sharp edge worked much better for scraping off the burnt bits from the bottom of the pot.

When the meat finished cooking, Zoe tasted one of the pieces and stored the rest away in her bracelet. It was bland. Really bland. It needed salt, it needed some thyme and rosemary. It wasn’t bad, just not nearly as good as it could be. Next time she was back in Flester she was going to buy more salt than she’d ever need.

It was good enough, and the meat wasn’t overcooked or burnt so she finished off the remaining forty nine portions of prepared meat the same way. The pot was only large enough to do about two portions at a time and it was almost three full hours before she was done. But Zoe enjoyed the process of gathering up all the branches she could find to manage the fire. It was a relaxing break from the stress of the previous day.

Next were the veggies. The ones she wanted to cook were the potatoes and onions. The onions she planned to get a nice deep caramel colour on, while the potatoes she had chopped up into small cubes to hopefully make hashbrowns out of. She hadn’t bought any oil, which is another thing she planned to make sure to have next time. But while the venison wasn’t very fatty, she had cooked an awful lot of it.

At the bottom of the pot was a decent layer of fat that rendered out from all of the meat she cooked, and she tossed in about half of the potatoes she had prepared. It filled up the pot a little more than she wanted, but she wasn’t as worried about boiling the potatoes as she was with boiling the meat.

In fact, a bit of water would be quite helpful so she summoned a small ball of frost and dropped it into the pot as well. It melted, and the water popped and sizzled as it boiled away in the layer of fat. Zoe pressed her metal piton along the bottom to scrape off all the burnt bits and then mixed up the potatoes in the saucy mix. They took on a beautiful golden colour as they cooked, and Zoe stored them away in her bracelet.

Unfortunately, almost all the fat she had gotten from the venison was stored away with the hashbrowns. So instead of frying the rest of her potatoes, she was going to make some boiled hashbrowns. If she was careful she could probably keep from mashing them up too much until she ate them and they might be okay.

Zoe filled the pot with ice through her Frost skill and then lowered it closer to the fire as it boiled. She kept filling it up again as the ice melted until she got it to about three quarters full, and then raised it back up away from the fire until it maintained a comfortable simmer.

Then she dumped in her remaining potatoes and stirred them around for a while until they were soft and tender. And then she realized she didn’t have a good way to strain them. So many problems to fix next time she was in town. So many things she just wouldn’t think about until she was actually in the situation having to deal with them. Preparing so much food on a campfire was hard and time consuming.

Her conjuring skills would do nothing to help her here, ice would just melt away as she poured the boiling water through it. And if she let it cool first, which would ruin her potatoes, the water would just freeze anyway. She needed something else.

She started by summoning a large bowl of ice next to her with her Frost skill, and then she dumped out most of the boiling water into it while trying her best to keep the potatoes from falling out. When it got a little low, she pulled her metal helmet out from her bracelet and stuffed it into the pot to hold the potatoes back.

It worked well enough, and she only lost a handful of potatoes. She grabbed them out of the now somewhat melted ice bowl and tossed them back into the still warm pot to melt off the bits of ice that were stuck to them. Then she stored all the boiled hashbrowns into her bracelet, and turned her attention to the onions.

Normally, she’d like to fry them in a bit of oil and add a bit of sugar to help caramelize them. She had neither of those. How well did onions caramelize without any oil anyway?

Zoe started by kicking around the hot coals so the fire died down and then lowered the pot so it rested just above them. Low and slow was the secret to cooking lots of onions at once. If she was cooking just one portion, she could crank up the heat and stir often. But she had maybe twenty-five portions. There was no way she’d be able to manage all that on a higher heat.

When the pot cooled down a little bit, but was still hot enough to cook her onions she dumped all of them into the pot. They sizzled for a moment, and then the pot cooled down and the sizzling stopped. Zoe lowered it down onto the coals for a minute to help it warm back up and as soon as she heard the onions start to boil away she raised it up a little bit and stirred the onions with her piton.

She kept stirring and mixing while she managed the fire and pot’s position. The onions shrank as the water inside them boiled away and when they seemed to stop leaking out water, Zoe started stirring a little more frequently.

Zoe had no idea what temperature the maillard reaction occurred at, but in theory the oil should only help get there more consistently, not be the only way to get there. She kept stirring, and the onions continued to shrink and take on more of a golden colour. Some of the bits she saw as she stirred were black and crumbled with the touch of her piton, but most seemed to be doing okay.

After about an hour of managing the pot, she was satisfied with how they looked and pulled them into her bracelet as well. Then she cleaned up her campfire and put away all of her supplies. That was all the cooking she needed to get done, what was left was to prep the meals and then store them as full meals rather than just components.

She created another large flat shield and summoned a few portions of the ingredients together. Each meal was made up of a lio leaf wrapped around a portion of venison along with some of the onions and potatoes. She tried to keep a split of the fried and boiled potatoes in each wrap.

When she was done, she ended up with about a hundred of the wraps, each one about half of a full meal. Zoe kept two of them out and stored the rest away. They ended up being pretty good, actually. The lio provided a nice spicy crunch, the onions were sweet and soft. The mix of the fried and boiled potatoes actually worked out pretty well and added a lot of heterogeneity to the meal. And the venison, while bland, had a nice meaty flavour and texture that worked well with the sweet and spicy flavours from the veggies.

Not the greatest meal she’d ever had, but for what she had to work with Zoe was quite pleased with herself. She still had another fifty portions of veggies and meat to cook up but decided that could wait for another day. Maybe one when she had some oil and salt, at least.