The next day, Sena returned carrying a huge amount of luggage.
Inside the cardboard boxes were countless varieties of soy meat.
「I bought high-quality soy meat from all over the country… Hah!? How careless of me. This is so disrespectful to Papa and the others who grow crops… I will go to a dungeon right now and get defeated by monsters!」
As usual, Sena was acting strange.
I hurriedly grabbed her hand to stop her.
「Sena-san, thank you very much. We do not grow soybeans at home, so this really helps!」
There was no way I could let an S-rank explorer who was here on an investigation put herself in danger over something like this.
And when it came to Dori, Sena honestly looked like she would charge into a dungeon without hesitation.
「Ara ara, with this much, we can make so many dishes.」
Originally, we only planned to make soy meat karaage.
「There are two whole boxes after all…」
When I took one bag out of the box, it said it served three to four people.
There were about twenty of those bags inside.
Looking at the overwhelming quantity, it seemed our soy meat lifestyle would be continuing for quite some time.
「Let’s start cooking right away.」
「Yes, let’s do that!」
Grandma and I decided to make karaage using soy meat.
In the meantime, we asked Sena to play with Dori.
Compared to me, who was slow and weak, Sena was much better suited for active play.
「Alright… first, we soak it in water, right?」
I put one and a half bags of soy meat into a bowl and poured water over it to let it rehydrate.
「It’s my first time using this. I wonder how much it will expand?」
If such a small bag could make three to four servings, it would probably swell to a considerable size.
Feeling a bit nervous, we continued preparing the other side dishes as well.
「Do you think mixing some chicken karaage into the soy meat karaage would help her get used to it?」
「If we mix a few pieces at the bottom, she probably won’t notice.」
Our original plan was to let her get used to the soy meat karaage first, then move on to chicken karaage.
But maybe it would be easier for her to eat if she could not tell them apart.
Thinking that, I cut the chicken thigh meat into small pieces.
According to Grandma, when I was little and could not eat certain vegetables, they would finely chop them or mix them with my favorite foods.
The fact that I had no memory of it meant that if you mixed things naturally enough, the child would not notice at all.
After finishing cutting the thigh meat, I gently crushed the soy meat that had been soaking in water with my hands and squeezed out the excess moisture.
「We really made too much, didn’t we」
「Dori and Sena-san eat a lot」
Both of them were pretty big eaters, after all.
「Papa, coll?」
Dori suddenly peeked in from the living room where she had been playing.
「Yeah. We ended up with so many beans, so I thought I’d have you and Sena-san eat plenty of them」
I hurriedly hid the sliced thigh meat inside the bowl with the soy meat.
Dori stared intently at the soy meat she was seeing for the first time.
「Bean-sans?」
「Yeah. They’re not round, but these are beans too」
「Reelly!」
Without doubting it at all, Dori went back to Sena.
I never thought simply trying to make a child eat something they disliked would be this nerve-wracking.
「Fufufu, you’re just like you were back then, Naoki」
Grandma laughed as she watched Dori and me.
Back then, I was probably just like Dori, keeping a close eye on things so my disliked foods would not be mixed in.
I added soy sauce, sake, mirin, grated ginger, and just a tiny bit of grated garlic to the bowl and mixed everything together.
Even to my eyes, it was already hard to tell at a glance which pieces were soy meat and which were chicken thigh.
After letting it sit for a while to absorb the seasoning, I coated everything in potato starch and dropped it into the oil.
「It really looks no different from chicken karaage」
The way it crackled in the oil and floated up looked almost identical to regular chicken karaage.
The only thing left was the taste, so I tried a freshly fried piece of soy meat karaage.
「Hm… which one is this?」
「If even you can’t tell… the world really has become convenient」
If Grandma could not tell the difference, then Dori probably would not notice either.
All that was left was to have her eat the soy meat and chicken karaage.
Because――
「If we can’t tell which one is chicken karaage anymore, we won’t even know whether she’s overcome it or not…」
The finished soy meat karaage and chicken karaage looked exactly the same.
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