Completed "Inn" dividual Thinking

[Tazrae]

Timestamp: 10th of Summer, 521 A.V.

The sun was going to set soon, but Tazrae didn’t mind.

The woman often spent the evenings out on the dock because it had become an almost endless source of food for the Inn without her even planning on it being that kind of resource. The young Innkeeper owned lobster traps and crab pots, which she baited and tossed, tying off frequently from the pylons of the dock itself. The food kept her guests well-fed. But today she had four rather large shrimp pots that James had brought back with him from Riverfall for her. She was excited to add more shrimp to her menu, knowing she could cook them properly if she could catch them.

One of the local fishermen, who often caught shrimp in a net, had told her to bait the traps with what she would bait the lobster and crab traps with. That fact alone made Tazrae wonder why the bottom feeders always tasted so delicious if they simply fed on offal and what was left of other fish once they were gutted and fileted. She hadn’t often purchased shrimp from him because his prices were outrageous and when she traded services with her for the meat, he often ate well more than he supplied for the Inn if the trade was taken in meals.

Besides, she wanted to be self-reliant.

Taz dumped the traps on the dock, pulled out her bucket of offal, and began quartering the big stinky bucket between the four traps. Once baited, she loaded heavy rocks into each one to help them sink, and gently tossed them off the dock, tying their ropes off to the pylons as she had planned. They could ‘soak’ overnight or later until she was ready to see how fruitful her foraging was.

Tazrae exited the dock, took the bucket down to the waterline, and scrubbed it out where the stinky offal had been clinging to its insides, then stowed it back in the shed next to the Inn. It lived there when she had no offal to store, otherwise, it was kept in her icebox near the back of the block with a thick burlap covering its top. Once the traps were set, Tazrae grabbed a big carry bag, changed into her interior gear, and set off for the jungle. Living in Syka meant Taz had two modes of dress… one casual and colorful, with limited clothing and bright lightweight breezy fabrics.

Her interior jungle gear consisted of long-sleeved shirts, heavy tall boots, and long pants with gloves. She wasn’t afraid of snakes anymore – no she had too many tools to use alongside them to be afraid… but that didn’t mean the jungle still wasn’t dangerous. And no matter how many charms against snakebites one had, everything else in the jungle would bite you just as badly.

Tazrae had enough time before dark to go on a foraging trip after setting her shrimp traps.

Taz headed for the outskirts of Syka where she knew there was a large grove of wild pineapples. The denizens of the city often came to the grove to tend it, though it wasn’t an official crop of the settlement. Taz had a big machete with her as well, planning on harvesting a dozen or so of the fruit and taking the rest of the bell to tend to the patch she harvested from. Once the fruits were cut off, more would grow in as long as some of the leaves were trimmed and the underbrush hacked back giving the freshly harvested plants a lot of light. Gardeners knew sunlight somehow fed the plants, and pineapple was no exception.

Taz walked on, channeling her energy into a firm bold stride that ate up the ground. Normally she would ride Bree, but the Ixam had been sound asleep and it had been late enough that Taz hadn’t wanted to wake her. Instead, Creature followed her. The big Imperial Mastif Moonlight gardening was the best anyhow.

[Tazrae]

Taz arrived, looked around, and worked her way to the back of the wild pineapple field that no one had tended in hundreds of years until the settlers had arrived. No one knew what kept the vast majority of the field free of weeds and jungle. It was in an odd location, tucked off the beach but close enough to the settlement that someone had to have planted it in the past and tended it for food. She immediately set out to harvest a dozen of the fruit, having to walk through and find that which were ready. It wasn’t like a normal tended crop – with all the pineapples coming ripe together.

Instead, this crop staggered itself, in a huge multitude of growth stages. In a way that made it a lot more productive for the settlement. The settlement would have too many ripe fruits at once to eat otherwise. The wild field stretched more than two acres, bordered on all sides with jungle. Taz enjoyed utilizing her special backpack to carry the harvested pineapples. The cool brown leather seemed to have no storage issues and never got too heavy for her. It came in handy, for sure, with pineapples being heavy, pokey, and awkward.

The machete was useful too as she grabbed the big fruit, twisted it, and used the blade of the weapon to part the fruit from its leafy base. Once her harvest was collected, she took the time to wander around the patch, swinging her machete purposely to clear branches away from the margins, move back parts of the encroaching jungle, so the plants would get the full benefit of the tropical sun. Her overhead swing needed practice anyhow.

Taz had worked up a good sweat by the time she was done with the pineapple harvest. Creature had a good time as well, the large imperial watcher darting between the growths of spikey pineapple with his nose to the ground and his tail wagging heavily. He rousted numerous jungle rodents, snaking on one or two of the slower ones until Tazrae called him back to her side before turning to walk home. On their way home, they snaked through various trails around Syka, harvesting as they went. Tazrae picked fresh grapes, oranges, and grapefruit. She also collected lemons to a surprise lemon tree she hadn’t known was where she found it. Her backpack held them all happily. Mangos, starfruit, and dragon fruit also went into the pack.

Her guests were going to eat like kings. That much she was sure of.

Tazrae dropped the pineapple off, leaving her backpack on the kitchen counter where she unloaded the pineapple and took stock of her new inventory of other fruits. Everything was gently washed, sorted, and either put in the icebox or left to finish ripening on the counter. The pineapples themselves would keep nicely on the counter until mid-morning tomorrow when she would need to start seriously thinking about lunch and dinner. Tazrae always served sandwiches with leftover sliced meats and cheese for lunch. She usually threw in a pile of jungle fruit that she gathered on her numerous journeys, which came off as exotic to her short-term visitors.

[Tazrae]

With that, Taz and Creature went to bed. They would have to be up early the next day, checking the shrimp traps and gathering what they could from the dock traps. She slept well and deeply, the foraging trip before bed helpful.

And just as the sun was rising, Taz headed out to the docks, pulled the traps, and emptied the captured shrimp into a clean bucket to carry up to the Inn. She was impressed by the haul, having at least a half of her small bucket full once she got the four traps emptied. She cleaned the traps and then walked them up to the Inn’s storage shed to stow before she carried her bucket into the Inn to begin the prep on the shrimp.

Taz usually planned big breakfast meals when she had a full house. When there were just one or two patrons, she could custom make breakfast for each individual and not plan so much. Her current two guests loved yogurt which she’d made the previous day and still had plenty leftover. Slicing them up fruit to dress the yogurt with along with adding crunchy baked oats coated in brown sugar would see them nicely fed. She would throw together some scones for any of the denizens of Syka that stopped by later wanting a snack. Though the settlement had no restaurants, the Inn functioned as a café for the most part until some business-minded individual decided to actually open some sort of restaurant.

With breakfast all planned out, Taz was able to pull a large bowl from the cupboard and her huge stockpot. She braced the bucket of live shrimp between her knees as she sat on the counter, and began one at a time cutting the heads off the shrimp and then gently peeling away their shells, legs and tails. Once that was done, she took a super-sharp paring knife and deveined the digestive track out of the creature's back. The shells, heads and tails went into the stockpot to make shrimp stock out of while the cleaned bodies went into the large bowl that would go directly back into the icebox. The mud veins were carefully wiped on a stay banana leaf she could easily discard in the bonfire garbage pile.

The work was tedious, but Taz amused herself by singing a sea song as she prepped the seafood. She concentrated on tightening her diaphragm, holding her notes, and sang out soft and sweetly, letting her voice amuse her hands as she worked.

“The Ocean has its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.
The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there;
And there are those for whom we weep,
The young, the bright, the fair.
Calmly the wearied seamen rest
Beneath their own blue sea.
The ocean solitudes are blest,
For there is purity.
The earth has guilt, the earth has care,
Unquiet are its graves;
But peaceful sleep is ever there,
Beneath the dark blue waves.”

[Tazrae]

Singing made Tazrae happy and quickened along her work. One song ran into another, like poems written into a single text. She moved through the songs easily, singing what came to her memory.

“I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The Konti in the basement
Came out to look at me.
And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.
But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,
And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve –
And then I started too.
And he – he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle, – then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.
Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.”

When the shrimp were done, she placed them in the icebox and filled the stockpot with water from the hand pump on the well. Then she swirled the stockpot, mixing the shrimp shells and bits, causing them to float. It would be the basis for a seafood bisque soup she’d make the next day or later that night to go with dinner. Hefting the stock pot up onto the hearth hook, she stoked the fire and contemplated what was next.

A second pot was brought out. This one was filled with dried rice which she rinsed repeatedly and then just barely covered over with water and set to boil. Tazrae wasn’t used to rice, but it was something that people in Syka used frequently because it was so easy to store and fairly easy to get their hands on in terms of imports. So as a consequence, it had become something of a staple for the whole of the settlement. Tazrae just went with the flow and had adapted accordingly adding the staple to her dishes as well. And subsequently, that meant she had to improvise. And that improvisation meant that she had to create something with pineapples, rice, and shrimp.

While the rice was slowly coming to a boil, since Taz had it further up from the heat, she took a moment to go check on the guestrooms that were occupied the previous day. She made up the beds, picked up any towels, and restocked items the guests might have used. She had a pile of washing for the evening that would have to be completed after dinner but before the hot sunset. Towels needed time to dry in the sunshine. Hanging them overnight would just leave them feeling damp and musty the next day since the mold was so quick to grow in the tropics.

She checked back on the rice, saw it was boiling happily, then wrapped a towel around the pot lid, secured it with a leather thong around the lid handle, and set the whole thing aside to sit for twenty minutes so the rice could firm up but not get cooled too fast or dried out before it got to its full fluffy state.

[Tazrae]

While the rice was sitting, Tazrae got started on the pineapples themselves. She decided to make enough for ten guests using five pineapples. She only had the pair of guests, but it was almost a given that at least one or two extra people would drop by for dinner unexpectedly… so three people for sure if she included herself and seven extras should cover what she needed.

Tazrae got out a very large carving knife, and sitting the pineapples upright, she cut five of them straight and evenly in half. Once the pineapples were split, she hollowed out each one, careful not to puncture the skin. She ran her sharp pairing knife in rows across the main body of the pineapple, and removed the meat in chunks, and throwing out the core. That left her neat unique containers to use as bowls without having the waste the pineapple itself by tossing it before it was served in a meat dish. She saved the pineapple she cored out in a dish, knowing immediately that she had more fruit than she’d actually need for the dish.

She’d make something else out of it… perhaps a desert.

Tazrae then checked on the rice as the allotted chimes were up, nodded in satisfaction, and gathered the rest of the ingredients. She stirred up the stove logs, laid a large frying pan on it, and scooped out a generous portion of butter from her icebox crock to line the bottom of the pan. Then she pulled out a jar of corn she’d canned when James had brought in crates and crates of fresh corn ears from Riverfall earlier in the year.

She pulled two onions from the pantry, peeled them, and chopped them up neatly. Retrieving a handful of peppers from the pantry, she added them to her pile of things to chop. The onions, peppers, and a bunch of the pineapple she then diced all went into the frying pan. She added in the corn and fried it all in the butter for five chimes. She emptied out the mixture into the pot of cooked rice, added fresh butter, and then began to fry batches of the shrimp until she had enough done to add to the rice mixture.

Seasoning the shrimp was a breeze. She just added salt, pepper, and paprika to the little curls of deliciousness. Lightly tossing them, she added them to the frypan with butter and only cooked them a minute or two on each side until they were fully cooked. Once the shrimp were completely done, she mixed them into the rice mixture and taste-tested the experiment along with one of the shrimp. It was delicious… though she did add a pinch more of salt before she pulled the tray of hollowed-out pineapples over towards her and began to load them.

It wasn’t quite time for dinner yet, so she stowed them on the shelf over the hearth where bread was kept to rise – guaranteeing they’d be warm and tender when the guests came in to eat.

Word Count: 2764

[Tazrae]

Grading

Tazrae-

Foraging +2, Fishing +2, Machete +1, Hunting +2, Cleaning +2, Planning +2, Cooking +3, Singing +2, Chef Knife +2

Hunting: Trapping Shrimp, Lobster, and Crab, Cooking: Deveining Shrimp, Cooking: Making Shrimp Stock, Cooking: Making Rice, Cooking: Making Pineapple Boats