New Plan, Step One: Provide For My Community [open]

[summerdude]

Magnus needs something to change, so when a Mansion calendar helpfully informs him that it's International Falafel Day back on Earth, he goes to the library for some cookbooks, and then to the kitchen.

He lays out ten different falafel recipes. He gathers the ingredients they list, as best as he can understand them. He has canned chickpeas and fresh chickpeas and dried chickpeas and chickpea flour and box mixes of falafel that say 'just add water!'

Cripes.

"I can do this," he says, peering at the assorted recipes intently for a good ten minutes, and then takes the dried chickpeas over to the sink to rinse and soak.

Comments

[lightbearinglord]

"Mooncakes and fruit. Incense." He discards the top of the last can and then turns to Magnus for further instruction.

[summerdude]

"Is it anything like Chuseok?" Magnus glances at the recipe(s). "I think we rinse and drain those. now."

[lightbearinglord]

"In Samhan? Mn." Dutifully, Lan Wangji finds a strainer and crosses to the sink so that he can upend the chickpeas into it and rinse them as directed.

[summerdude]

"Is Samhan the same thing as Korea?"

[lightbearinglord]

"I believe it must be, from your description of its location to myself and Sir Sagramore."

[summerdude]

Mangus nods. "I don't know much about Chuseok, but they'd do something for it in the restaurant downstairs."

[lightbearinglord]

"Where you learned to eat with chopsticks," Lan Wangji ventures. He gives the strainer of chickpeas a gentle shake, rinses them again to be thorough, and then turns back to Magnus.

[summerdude]

"Yeah, exactly!" Magnus goes back to the recipe, scanning it twice over.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji, meanwhile, summons up his own memory of that same recipe. While Magnus reads, he busies himself fetching the herbs, onions, and garlic so that he can begin chopping them neatly. "What is a food processor?"

[summerdude]

Like Magnus knows! "I think it's like a blender but sharper?" he guesses.

[lightbearinglord]

"You will operate it," Lan Wangji decides promptly. He did not care for the blender, as useful as it proved. He settles into focus on mincing a clove of garlic.

[summerdude]

Surely there's an operational manual somewhere? "Yes, sir," Magnus says.

[lightbearinglord]

"Hanguang-jun," Lan Wangji corrects him automatically. He chops an onion, methodical and precise about it. Presuming that Magnus has already seen this portion of the recipe and knows about it, he adds, "You are prepared to wait the eight hours while it chills?"

[summerdude]

And Magnus, who missed that part, groans, loudly and evocatively. "Why does cooking take so much time, Hanguang-jun?"

[lightbearinglord]

"It is a lesson in patience and planning." There's a tiny quirk of fondness at the edge of Lan Wangji's mouth. He has more serious matters to discuss with Magnus anyway; perhaps they can use that wait.

[summerdude]

"This is why they invented delivery pizza," Magnus grumbles.

[lightbearinglord]

"They have yet to invent delivery pizza where I am from," Lan Wangji says, calmly peeling an onion skin. "That must be why I am patient." Obviously not. Wei Ying also grew up without the benefit of delivery pizza.

[summerdude]

Okay, okay, that coaxes a little laugh from Magnus. "Yeah," he says. He's been watching every move Lan Wangji makes like a hawk, trying to quietly learn from it; the peeling of the onion is no different. "That must be it."

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." Lan Wangji makes fairly short work of chopping the requisite ingredients. Once they are finished, arranged into orderly piles, he also goes to retrieve the green peas the recipe instructs them to include.

[summerdude]

Magnus, meanwhile, goes off in hunt of a food processor. This is made a little difficulty by the fact that he doesn't know what they look like. "Hey, Hanguang-jun?" he calls. "What do you do when you're looking for something but you don't know what it looks like?"

[lightbearinglord]

It is at this point that Lan Wangji becomes cognizant of the probability that Magnus may be no better-qualified to operate a sharp blender than he himself is. He pauses, thinking. "Look it up," he says.

[summerdude]

"Is there a guide to kitchen appliances somewhere?"

[lightbearinglord]

"The library is expansive." Lan Wangji pours the peas into a bowl. "I am no help to you." At least this is a somewhat more entertaining context in which to contend with the fact that Magnus was born more a thousand years after he was.

[summerdude]

It feels silly to go all the way to the library to find a food processor. Magnus goes instead to the pantry and starts poking around until he sees a machine that looks vaguely familiar. It has a blade and stuff. He takes it out and brings it back into the main kitchen.

[lightbearinglord]

The object Magnus has produced does bear some resemblance to the blender they used when they made tamales with Sagramore. Choosing to believe that Magnus has not erred, Lan Wangji begins depositing the ingredients within it, one by one.