Trigger- Drabbles and Thoughts: Food

                If there was one thing for which he was grateful about his last job, it would have been introducing him to a world of food he’d probably never have tried. Or considered trying. His fondness for sweets wasn’t exactly a secret at this point, though he still drew the line at that one confection in Faedin that he was pretty sure was somehow made of mushrooms. That was going by the vendors cagey smile and refusal to tell the outsider what was in it.

                He’d try a lot of things… if you weren’t cagey about it.  That made him feel like a child someone was trying to sell boiled Brussels sprouts and it was bound to end in a similar poker faced stand off and not one taste.

                He had to admit he just generally wasn’t a big fan of eating mushrooms. Something about them summoned images of the cheap tins of brown, slices that his mother would pour out of a can and into a pan with leftover bacon and onion. It always filled the small apartment with the most indescribable smell. The bacon and the onion made his mouth water, but the slightly damp, distinctly fungal smell and the lingering note of canned goods made him want to go for a long walk no matter what the weather was like.  

                No amount of money was going to convince him that ‘canned’ wasn’t a distinct flavor and smell of it’s own.

                He also remembered her annoyed complaints that sure; they were eating cheap but ‘at least it wasn’t cabbage’. He still wasn’t sure what she had against cabbage, though if it was anything like his feelings about mushrooms he couldn’t exactly complain. He’d been convinced for some time that Cabbage was basically an evil lettuce that was somehow worse than tinned mushrooms.

                He’d been employed by The Team for maybe a year before he’d found out otherwise. Been introduced to things like sauerkraut or serving it with corned beef. And Kimchi. They’d gone to a place uptown to, as his mentor had explained, drop him cold into a situation and train him on trying stuff with a straight face so he’d be able to pass as comfortable. His poker face had gotten damn good over the years, even over caviar. Caviar was like mushrooms. Overrated and something he wasn’t convinced people enjoyed, just pretended to on principle.

                Something about Kimchi had been the official springboard to him actually looking forward to those outings, even the one where he’d ended up at a fancy business dinner pretending to be an employee and trying to not full body cringe because a well-intentioned caterer had wedged a pencil thick slice of ginger inside beaten thin bits of chicken.

                Watching someone else smuggle theirs into a napkin and stash it inside an enormous vase had been so gratifying it still made him smile.

                But not as much as the Kimchi which had somehow escalated food from ‘the thing you do to survive’, to ‘very small things can be amazing and entirely in reach’.

                Kyanoko had reformed him on S’mores. He didn’t like marshmallow on it’s own, and had never had much call to camp let alone incinerate a marshmallow on a stick and make it a graham cracker and chocolate coffin, but much like Kimchi was not -just- a variety of cabbage, S’more were more than their component parts.

                Made him wonder if she’d had grilled cheese or something. That’d be a fun bit of sharing, anything from the ones of his childhood with flimsy white bread and processed cheese to cheese with names he stumbled to pronounce and things like pepper or thin sliced fruit. (He wasn’t sure it technically counted as a grilled cheese at the point that it wasn’t primarily bread and melted cheese but… he got the idea.)

                Though he wanted to find someplace with a good Kimchi again. There were enough portals out there one of them had to have something like he remembered from his home portal.

                Food was a fantastic adventure. Food was survival, but also home, and friends, and wonder.  He liked that. And maybe he’d reconsider those sketchy damn sweets in Faedin.