Boredom in Kodoka Ⅰ

Wonton: Shiro

I remember the times when my lair barely had any sort of furniture & was still in college.

It was also the time when Zekrom had less new possessions than I did & had to live with me while waiting for their home to be modernised. I was the one with the table, "beds" (as we know, it was really a thin-ass mattress on a tatami mat), couch, & cooking appliances, they did not. Either way, we were both broke together.

The only reason I was able to have this stuff early on was because Meloetta & Victini threw some money our way. I still could barely afford AC and had to sacrifice a "mortgage" of tears, bones, flesh, & blood to whoever overhauled mine & Kuro's lair.

The mattress & tatami mat was really the thing I could reasonably afford at the time in terms of bedding. Zekrom used to sleep on the couch (a small one, mind you) & really didn't like sleeping in a sitting position nor over the armrests.

I'm pretty sure you can figure out what I did for them.

...

Now you know why Kyurem calls me a simp; I didn't even get to keep the bed.

What about college itself? For one, we became the Native Speaker™ for anyone studying ancient Unovan. Two, I'm apparently a god at mathematics and sciences. Three, Kuro's really excellent at comforting people. Four, a lot of textbooks Kyurem has has quite a lot of valid info. Five, Kyurem & Meloetta are really good tutors; sometimes, they were better "professors" than my actual professors (though they were not terrible; good actually).

Anyways, we also didn't have a lot of recipes in mind at the time, so for a while, all we ate was instant ramen and eggs. It was extremely flavorful at first, but over time, we got used to the taste and it slowly became really bland.

You really can't believe how long we went without spices in our house because we're so used to it being expensive; we forgot that it's more readily accessible these days. I'm very grateful for Kyurem opening my eyes to the flavour of MSG & other umami flavourings.

I'm starting to realise our dumbasses could've just gone over to Kyurem's and get food there. Then again, the portal wasn't set up at the time 'till our senior year. Alleos was also an entire fucking province away from Unova.

You know, 1 and three-quarters more hours of feeling hungry, 30 minutes more trying to find the damn house in the first place?

All of this annoyed the absolute shit out of me, so I asked Kyurem how to cook. They showed me some basic dishes everyone should know every week to give me some time to attempt it myself.

Overtime, the dishes became more complicated and delicious, and Gyeoul and Kyurem's time in East-hemo KD's influence started to show up. I went from making bread, to spaghetti (from scratch, mind you, and it's harder 'cause it's the Kodokan version), to bún bò huế  (KD variant from Vietnamese immigrants). This was also the time where I learnt the best stores to buy the ingredients for those more "exotic" recipes.

The ingredients were tamer than the KD mirror of it, but still packed a punch.

One of the earliest of these types of dishes was a variant of wonton, specifically the one with char siu (aka, that red pork in bánh mì). Kyurem (more specifically, Brandon) introduced me to this godsend of a dish after telling me about some Asian market nearby my residence.

I remember the night I decided to try making it myself at home. It was lightly snowing that day with strong winds (thanks, Tornadus). I recall getting hair in my face on my way to getting the ingredients for the wonton soup. The roads were fine enough to bike, but the thin layer of snow proved to be slightly troublesome.