Dear Diary,

Nat was ecstatic about the flour. I showed her the pasta maker thing Mika made, and she just about started crying. Today we did nothing but make pasta.

Nat knew what other pasta maker shapes were, like the curly things, and the shape to make macaroni. So we spent an hour or so drawing up the parts for that. Next week when I’m back home I’ll ask Mika to build them for us. We don’t want to interrupt her band time, it’s only polite. Besides, we have a ton of things we can do with flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and vanilla extract. I mean, I had vanilla syrup before, but that was like 80% sugar. I didn’t know all the uses for vanilla extract in cooking. It really isn’t a very strong flavor, so if you add it to sweet things it just enhances it. Like seafood. Seafood, plus a drop of vanilla, just brings it to a new level of deliciousness. I wouldn’t put it in everything, since it’s pretty bitter, and it does need sweetness to balance it out, but with an unlimited supply of the stuff we can experiment as much as we want!

Today for lunch we made a kind of creamy salmon linguine, with the salmon from Via’s sushi. It was, if I do say so myself, amazing. Nat says she isn’t an expert in seafood, and neither am I, but together we have enough culinary experience to overcome any obstacle.

…Just about. I’d still kill for garlic and basil.

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Anyways, we made like fifty types of noodles (all out of slightly different recipes), made a sauce out of pizza sauce and cheese, and took it down to the ants for testing. The ants are able to eat insane amounts of food, so we knew they’d be good for testing. Or at least they’d eat it all.

The ants were surprisingly good at taste-testing. They ate like half the plate, gave their opinion on the noodles, and went on to the next one. That way they still had some left if they found a recipe that was too similar to another, so they could taste the difference. As a palate cleanser I made a bucket of water and filled it like a quarter of the way with mint syrup. With a drop of vanilla. They loved it.

I mean, I know that ants and kobolds don’t have the same taste buds. So what they like won’t always be what the kobolds like. But, like, if you taste fifty of the same thing, you’re going to be able to tell what’s good and what’s bad just by default. And the ants did. They tried three different noodles with oregano in them, and could tell which one was best. And they knew when a noodle was too salty. All in all, we refined our list of recipes with incremental differences down from fifty to eight. Eight is a reasonable amount of noodle dishes for a normal person to try. Plus three of those have different herbs in them, so they’ll obviously be used for different things. So really it’s only five noodle dishes for the kobolds to taste test and see which they like best.

Anyways, we don’t want to overwhelm the kobolds with pasta, so tomorrow we’re going to get Via to give us just a boatload of sushi. That way we don’t have to cook for anyone, and can just keep experimenting.

Goodnight, Dungeon!

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