“I have no strength left.” Zheng Qing said to herself as she looked at the time on the clock in the kitchen instance. Roughly six hours had passed but it was not yet time for Jin to open his store. She looked at the mess she made in the kitchen instance before she tiringly fell to the floor and curled herself up.
Her hands were stained with noodle flour and the kitchen preparation table had various ingredients lying all around. She wanted to make Ramen even more after seeing the bulk of the menu that Jin showed her. He even let her try every dish on the menu except the onigiris.
Mainly because the onigiri was too random, there were too many combinations for Zhen Qing to keep track. Yet, she still took the effort to try one every day, hoping that she would eventually hit a similar taste once again. It was also good training for her especially when it comes to taste.
However, even though Zhen Qing told Jin that every dish he introduced had no ‘soul’ of the food, they were undoubtedly top notch quality. Take the curry rice for example. The pork cutlet was cooked with precision with the crumbs golden in colour and yet the pork itself was still juicy and meaty. Not too dry or too oily.
Jin also told her that if possible, he would like to avoid Chinese food mainly because it would be a competition against the stores in the Tiangong Shopping District. He did not want to have a food war against the shopping district since he was a dungeon supplier, not a restaurant owner. The reason he wanted to have a restaurant instance was to incorporate rest and fun all in the same place.
That was also the reason why he introduced Panda Credits into this shop, just to emphasize once again that the food was not the main attraction of the area but the dungeons. If the cultivators wished to eat his food, they would need to buy the dungeon tickets.
That was the main intention of Jin but he was also a business owner. Eventually, he was also blinded by greed which overshadowed his initial noble intentions. Jin tried to experiment with the possibility of selling food via real cash by allowing Zhen Qing to sell her black pepper pork buns.
It was a fantastic experiment due to a few reasons. Zhen Qing was trying out in his shop to see if it was viable to work with him. Jin knew that he needed Zhen Qing to build some trust in him so the caravan was a good place to start. If she was going to be an employee, it would be vital to have her be exposed to a part of the System. Thirdly, the buns were her own creation and he would like to observe if she had the capability to create something exquisite with minimal help from the System.
Fourth, it was the excuse of using her, an external temporary business partner to try out how cash flows into the shop via food as a merchandise. Thankfully, Zhen Qing did not disappoint with her brand new black pepper pork buns as many people loved it. Lastly, it was for selfish reasons such as Jin liking her.
Sometimes, Jin wondered if she was fully incorporated into the System, would the System aid her to be the best Chef for Jin. However, he was equally scared too. What if the System favoured her more than him? What if the System decided to provide her more aid than she ever needed or perhaps revealing itself to her?
However, reading too much into the future would just stress Jin out so he figured it would be wise to let her have her own way by gifting her a restaurant instance. In the future, if she continued to do well and maybe she could just be content working under him as long he gave her room to grow.
Zhen Qing rested for a while before standing up and washed her face to refresh herself again. She knew that this was indeed a good opportunity to show Jin her skills since her speciality was not in Chinese food but in Japanese food. The reason was that she was not entirely of Chinese ethnicity but a mix of Russian and Japanese too. Her mother was Russian Chinese and her father was Chinese-Japanese.
She was brought up partly in Russia and subsequently in Japan before an incident that caused her and her father to flee to China to keep a low profile. That was also the reason why Jin was astonished when Zhen Qing said that she was going to cook a non-Chinese dish for Jin for the main dish.
Her speciality was Shio Ramen, meaning the broth seasoning was more inclined towards sea salt as this particular type of broth had fairly strong Chinese ties influence in this particular cuisine. However, Zhen Qing wanted to create something new. Something her Sensei was extremely good at.
Tsukemen.
Tsukemen is a ramen dish in Japanese cuisine consisting of noodles which were eaten after being dipped in a separate bowl of soup or broth. While her Sensei taught her many different cuisines as part of her training, Zhen Qing was rather secretly well versed with the art of tsukemen. Especially since her Sensei was undisputedly the number one tsukemen master in Japan. Why did he decide to choose her as his disciple? It was still a mystery to her but she was fortunate enough to be under his tutelage.
Her Sensei taught her his good traits and his bad traits. For example, his obsessive tendency for cleanliness made Zhen Qing a clean freak because ‘a dirty kitchen cannot produce good food’. That was why Zhen Qing always toiled till near midnight in Jin’s caravan store before she left the store. Yet, she always felt that the store seemed to be cleaner than she had left it when she came to work in the next morning.
Even though Zhen Qing wasted her youthful years of being his apprentice, her Sensei would never impart his secrets to his Tsukemen directly to her. He always dealt with the broth himself and if she wanted to learn the recipe, she had to learn by tasting, feeling, hearing and even more tasting of his noodles. Every single day, they would share a bowl of tsukemen as part of a tradition to learn from any mistakes made on that particular day.
That was why Zhen Qing now struggled to attempt to recreate the same particular taste if possible. It had been many years and the taste might have been unforgettable. However, the human’s memory would always dramatise the history to the extreme in order to retain one’s memory about a particular thing.
“Maybe I should give up trying to recreate that particular flavour…” Zhen Qing said to herself as she began to throw the mess she made on the table away into the trash bin.
It was during that instant when she felt like giving up as she was cleaning the mess up that she noticed a label on one of the fridges.
“Perhaps, I should try recreating ‘that’ first before attempting to recreate Sensei’s flavour.” Zhen Qing who was initially ambitious decided to go back to her shio ramen speciality, the one in which she managed to make a small name for herself.
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