Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World (LN)

I buy it from the Adventurers Guild and then we return home.

Miria begins her dinner preparations by pouring some water and wine in the pan first, after which she adds fish sauce and olive oil onto the mixture. Next, she leaves the white fish to boil together with the other ingredients that have been procured by us ahead of time. All in all, this is shaping up to be a pretty ordinary, by-the-book recipe for making boiled fish.

What exactly do you need this Slime Starch for?

I asked while Miria was carrying on with the preparations.

This right here, desu.

Miria then shaves some of the Slime Starch, dissolves it in water and adds a small quantity of the solution into the pan. Is she going to be using it as some kind of seasoning? That may be, because from the way shes handling it, it seems to me like shes going to make this Slime Starch into her secret ingredient for the entire dish but no, wait a minute.

Now that I look at it more closely when she served the finished dish, that was not the case at all. What she did with it was something else entirely.

She was actually making Ankake! And since she made Ankake using Slime Starch, then does that mean that Slime starch possesses the same kinds of properties as the potato starch from my old world?

Back on earth there was this peculiar method of preparing some types of food where you had to add potato starch to the saucy mixture in order to make it all nice and thick, and it was usually done by dissolving the starch in a small quantity of water right at the very end of the cooking process, and that is exactly what Miria did here, so I feel like my hunch might be right on the money.

Now that everything was ready, I gave one entire white fish to Miria and cut the other one into three equal slices for me, Roxanne and Sherry. For people like us, why are not exactly fish fanatics, I feel like one third of an entire fish is going to be more than enough to fill our stomachs up, even more so since one whole white fish is supposed to be enough for four people in total, according to what I heard. And even if we dont end up eating the entirety of our slices of fish, then Im sure that Miria is going to be all too eager to eat the leftovers for us and shes going to clean them us so thoroughly that there wont be even a piece of it left on the plates.

Without further ado, we thanked for the food and proceeded to eat the Ankake boiled fish that Miria prepared for us.

I have to say, this is pretty delicious.

I really meant the words that I said just now. Although the recipe itself was as simple as could be, the end result turned put to be much tastier than you would have normally expected it to be. It was probably thanks to the fish sauce and starch sauce that Miria incorporated into the dish, which added a rustic, kinda wild taste to the entire dish, and I am willing to bet that it would have tasted even better if she went and diluted it with a little bit of sugar and vinegar. Or maybe she shouldve gone even further and just go and make a sweet and sour ankake? Yes, that wouldve been great as well for sure.

I have eaten it all, desu.

Miria seems to be pretty happy and satisfied. Well, who can blame her for it? This time it looks like she must have already eaten her fill, because she wasnt trying to snatch mine, Roxannes or Sherrys fishes from our plates.

Now that Mirias desire for fish has been satisfied, I guess we should be able to make due without eating fish for a while, or at least I certainly hope so.

On the morning of the next day, I trued to make the sweet and sour ankake myself. I tried to add wine and sugar to Mirias starch sauce, and then I boil some water, add sugar, wine, fish sauce and more Slime Starch. I also made some I make stir-fried vegetables, and served it all with sweet and sour ankake of my own making.

Oh yes! What I created just now can be called a true porkless sweet and sour pork! Had I added pork to it, it would have been just like the real sweet and sour pork, much in the same vein that you cannot really have the genuine sweet green pea paste bun without adding sweet green pea paste to it. I didnt go with pork and added stir-fried vegetables instead because I was afraid that it might mess something up and ruin the entire dish beyond the point of recovery, and it looks like it was still a good call on my part.

Well, I feel like the story would be more or less the same even if I didnt go for the sweet and sour pork and decided to do something totally different instead, like champon or tenshinhan I feel like all of these dishes would still turn out pretty good as long as I would have prepared them with stir-fried vegetables.

Oh, and by the way, even if tenshinhan is written with kanji for Tianjin, China, you have to remember that it is just a name of a Chinese food born in Japan, and it has literally nothing to do with the Tianjin in China. And while we are on the subject, there seem to the kind of sweet chestnuts that are called Tianjin Broiled Sweet Chestnuts that are not Chinese in origin despite having Tianjin in their name as well, which I feel might cause Tianjin and China itself quite a bit of damage because of rumors.

However, I seem to vaguely recall that the name Tianjin Broiled Sweet Chestnut has been invented in the first place because Tianjin was a shipping port to which chestnuts were being shipped in the past, just like it was with Mocha, the port to which mainly coffee was shipped too, and the port of Imari where the Arita porcelain was being shipped to the rest of the world, hence giving rise to the Imari porcelain.

Its really tasty. Master.

Its sweet and sour at the same time. I havent eaten anything like it. Its delicious!

Tasty, so tasty, desu!

I receive compliments from the girls, most likely because they never has sweet and sour pork before, so they dont even realize that this dish is not really complete, but even though they say that they find it tasty, I still think that it is lacking. But even so, Im not going to allow this small, minor setback to discourage me! After all, every failure is just another opportunity to learn and improve so that you can do better next time.

Now that I know that Slime Starch can be used as a cooking ingredient, Ill use it in even more dishes, because now that I understand how to make starch sauce and I have tried making it myself already, I could always try to modify it for a bit whenever Ill grow tired of having it the usual way, so now I decided to test one of the alternatives out by soaking the Goat Meat that I obtained from defeating Pan, the Boss of the seventh floor of the Labyrinth of Vale in the fish sauce and then I leave it there to marinate for half a day.

Miria, can you please shave some Slime Starch for me?

Of course, desu!

Now that the Goat Meat is marinating itself in the fish sauce, I asked Miria to prepare some more Slime Starch for me one we returned home in the evening after our afternoon forage into the Labyrinths.