Chapter 27: The Kitchen Curse
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Prompt: TheUltimateChefofDestruction -You should write about Keith's adventures in baking lol!
I am a weak weak author for these sort of prompts - you never know where they're gonna lead you. Especially after eating Subway cookies.
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Disclaimer: Per usual, all characters belong to their respective franchises.
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Keith was adamant he had some sort of curse placed upon him.
Because in Nibelheim he had no issue with cooking whatsoever - in hindsight he also had a limited source of ingredients and cooking appliances, Omael and Vincent were still terrified whenever they saw him around a stove as they would immediately remember the time he almost blew the mansion's kitchen up when he meddled with the only working gas stove in the decrepit building - but here in Midgar when he tried to cook anything beyond a simple pack of noodles, he either damaged the appliances to the point it was beyond saving, or he made something rather decent.
He had a lot more luck with baking, there were instructions for him to follow and measurements he could stick to, but give him a leg of meat and vegetables?
He was most likely going to cook the meat until it was dead and the color of ash, and the vegetables would be burnt to a crisp, which would crumble into nothingness the moment someone even touched them.
If Keith went off the book with any baking recipe he used, there was a 50-50 chance that it would either come out alright, or it ended in something getting ruined beyond all repair.
Seriously, he had no idea how he blew up that one oven.
And they couldn't rely on video footage either, the explosion somehow managed to short out the cameras in the kitchen and Keith was banned from cooking in the Tower's kitchens unless he was being supervised.
Keith understood why Bob made that rule, even he realised how bad this curse of his was.
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Everyone in the Tower knew of Keith's luck in the kitchen, so whenever he actually made something that made it out of the kitchen they knew it was good, and so would devour it before anyone else did.
While he more than often would destroy a kitchen, his cookies were sinfully good.
They could sacrifice a few appliances if they could get that sugary bounty.
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Shiro and Lance soon found out about Keith's . . . . curse . . . . shortly after they moved in with him.
They had wondered why Angeal and Sephiroth had warned them to not let Keith cook unsupervised, especially if he was using the oven.
They soon found out when they came home to find one of the stove grills embedded into the ceiling and Keith trying to get brownie batter out of his hair. Despite it's pitch black appearance, the batter wasn't that bad, just a little burnt, but it took them an hour to pry the grill out of the ceiling.
When Lance told Tseng about it the next time he ran across the Turk, it was a little terrifying to hear that having just a grill stuck in the ceiling was considered minor compared to other incidents they had witnessed.
Reno was a bit too eager to give a shortened rendition of the top 10 incidents thus far, although he only knew a few snippets about the worst as only Sephiroth had been present at the time and refused to speak of what had occurred.
Sephiroth was keeping that recipe for triple choc orange and lemon zest brownies between himself and Keith, that was theirs and theirs alone.
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Technically Keith's first experimental cooking was with Cloud, and their tooth rotting sugary candy - literally tooth rotting sweet (A.N: refer to Fletcher in Chapter 13) - and we all know how that went.
The only reason there weren't explosions involved was most likely because one could not classify the room they used for their experiments as a kitchen, more like a shack.
But the moment he tried to cook a simple dish of seasoned meat on Mrs. Strife's stove?
The only reason he was able to appease Mrs. Strife for burning a hole through her frying pan was by filling her cellar with enough meat to last the entire town for a month, but from then on he was only allowed to grill meat outside on a fire.
Give Keith an open flame and he could cook any slab of meat any-which-way you want it, but give him a stove and he'll ruin your pots.
He could do a mean casserole though, as long as he cooked the meat on a fire and left the oven work to someone else.
Cloud though . . .
Cloud was a whole 'nother problem.
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Cloud was an excellent cook.
However, his ingredients were less than desirable.
Keith had no issue with eating whatever Cloud gave him, he knew it would taste good and there was no food he would have issues with eating, he literally ate monster meat for most of his childhood because there was no way in Hel the butcher was selling him meat that was actually fit for human consumption.
A few SOLDIER's had the misfortune to taste Cloud's food (because it smelled heavenly and they could smell it coming down the hallway from the breakroom), and then ask what it was.
The only reason they didn't throw up immediately was because the taste of said food was still on their tongues, and it tasted too good to cover up with the taste of bile.
Sephiroth had no issues with Cloud's food, heck, it was the only thing that trumped Keith's baking - seriously, Sephiroth loved his older brother, but besides anything sweet he would choose Cloud's food over anything - and he would devour it without even asking what Cloud had used in the dish.
Angeal understood the pain of having to resort to less than appealing food over proper cuisine, so he had no problems with Cloud's cooking as long as he watched it being prepared, to ensure that Genesis didn't end up with the wrong plate.
Zack was a Puppy, no explanation needed there. He would eat anything.
Genesis though, was the most fussy among Cloud's mates when it came to food, while he would try some of Cloud's monster dishes, there were certain things he couldn't palate (after his incident with the Malboro he couldn't look at noodles the same way ever again), and so Cloud made sure to have something set aside for Genesis if he happened to cook up a dish Genesis couldn't handle.
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Bob liked experimenting with foods, as did Tony, so when Cloud decided to borrow the kitchen for the day, he wouldn 'forget' to inform the hungry staff of who cooked certain items for the day.
It was a mystery who had cooked the fluffy omelets with little bits of spicy sausage inside it with a sprinkle of herbs, and Bob refused to let the Tower know exactly who had cooked it so they could get the recipe off them.
Only Cloud's mates knew exactly what the omelets had been made out of, Keith did comment that perhaps next time Cloud could substitute the Behemoth's tongue for Zolom meat, in earshot of Lance and Shiro who looked somewhat horrified to learn what those bits of 'spicy sausage' had been in their staff lunch.
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Sephiroth could say that his big brother was a menace in the kitchen.
He very clearly remembered at the young tender age of three when he witnessed Keith melt an entire kitchen.
To be honest, the mansion kitchen was in dire need of an upgrade, and maybe he shouldn't have asked for sweets (once learning that Keith was more than happy to provide him with sweets he took full advantage of that offer) when Keith was a little hyped up from romping around with the local wolf pack.
Keith had been a little heavy handed with the cocoa and grated the skin off at least a dozen oranges and lemons, before throwing the brownie mix together with very little care of how the flecks splattered all over the counter. Sephiroth did not help when he held up a packet of chocolate buttons, he had recently figured out the brown buttons that melted in his hands were very sweet and made him feel happy, giggling as Keith poured the buttons into the goopy mixture.
The more Keith poured, the more Sephiroth giggled, and Keith may or may not have ended up pouring the entire 250 grams bag of 70% dark cocoa chocolate into the pot.
They had recently run out of baking paper, so Keith ended up slopping oil into the cooking pans to coat them before pouring the entire litre's worth of brownie batter into at least five different pans.
He then shoved all five into the oven and since he was so hungry, he blasted the oven's temperature up to the max and notched the heat up a little higher with a Fire Materia.
Which turned out to be a bad idea as Keith had knocked the oil bottle over in his bustling about, coating the entire kitchen floor with the flammable liquid.
It was only after he lit the oven with the Fire Materia that he realised there were flames outside of the oven, and promptly scooped Sephiroth up before fleeing the kitchen like a bat outta hell, throwing an Ice Materia spell behind him before escaping the mansion.
Omael and Vincent were horrified when they came back to find the kitchen literally melted, the metal counters warped like putty under clumsy fingers, the fridge slumping pathetically in a white heap upon the ground, the entire kitchen floor covered in melted ice.
The only thing that appeased them were, the frankly delicious brownies Keith and Sephiroth gave them to taste, the chocolate buttons still warm and oozing when they broke the springy sweet apart.
Sephiroth wasn't sure if he wanted to sacrifice an entire kitchen just for the sake of some brownies, but if the taste was as he recalled it, then one kitchen was a small cost to pay for some heavenly sweet brownies.
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Cloud didn't really get why he had two varying reactions when he cooked.
Either the staff would fight to eat his creations or they would flee the cafeteria if they saw him inside the kitchen.
It was only when Angeal calmly explained that most of the staff that liked his food found eating monster meat common since they were from small country towns just like Nibelheim, while the city born and raised were confounded and slightly disgusted.
After that, it made perfect sense.
Keith then suggested perhaps Cloud should let the staff know when he was using the kitchen, so then the staff who rather preferred their food to be less . . . wild, could make arrangements to bring their own lunches or would factor in the time they needed to go buy lunch outside.
The staff were more than grateful to be forewarned, mostly the ones that liked Cloud's food, and so there weren't many staff fleeing the cafeteria the next time Cloud went cooking.
It really said something that those that stayed were mostly from the more 'Military' departments that had seen active frontline combat
After several weeks out in the field, to be honest, they didn't care what they ate as long as it didn't come out of a rations bag. Several actually became rather fond of the cuisine.
Cloud was wondering if he had to actually order in monster meat as a regular shipment instead of going to hunt it once a week.
However, procuring a supplier could be difficult, not many people were too eager to hunt down monsters due to the dangers.
What made it more difficult was that most of the edible monsters Cloud was familiar with cooking were on the other continents, not so much on the Central one besides Zolom's and Kalm Fangs.
At least, until he mentioned it in passing to the Trooper in the Medical area. Then he had more than enough Volunteers to back him up in his hunting, including a few surprising SOLDIERs.
When and How Kunsel himself had ended up addicted to Behemoth Jerky no one, not even the man in question, knew. Maybe it had something to do with his Spider Mutation, or maybe it was when he had been deployed in the short Wutai War before Cloud took over, either way he still ended up with Withdrawal symptoms strong enough to knock him flat on his arse if he didn't have at least two pieces per day.
Keith's only issue with hunting monsters for their meat as a regular supply, was his worry about there being over-hunting.
So they had to write up a set of rules before they started, to prevent there being the possibility of species extinction.
As well as getting permission from the locals to hunt, they didn't want to wreck someone's land or accidentally kill domesticated monsters, cause that would be a messy situation for their PR team to sort out.
Once that was all sorted out, hunting could begin.
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OMAKE
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"Cloud, I think we have a storage problem."
" . . . How much space is left in the freezer?"
Since they couldn't store the monster meat with the general ingredients, they had to clear out a whole freezer specifically for said monster meat.
It had been about a month since Cloud and his volunteers had been hunting monsters, and while the monster meat was in high demand, the amount they were catching was starting to become a little too much for storage to handle.
"There's enough space for one Kalm Fang, otherwise then it becomes a safety hazard."
" . . . . We may have been a little too enthusiastic in the last hunt."
The hunting team did come back with two Behemoth's, one of which was being prepared solely for jerky, and the other for general meals.
" . . . . Should I make kebabs or something? I think there's space on the parade grounds I can use as a barbeque." Keith suggested, taking into account his 'curse'.
"That sounds good, I don't recall there being anyone with allergies." Cloud replied, and began to send off a memo to the SOLDIER department to help set things up.
Keith ran off to the kitchen to ask Tony and Bob with some help in cutting up the meat and putting them onto skewers, lunch would certainly be good.
70% of staff attended the bbq, some were kind enough to help make salads (it couldn't just be meat), and they cleared up enough freezer space in time for the next hunt.
Cloud had a new freezer installed, but he did then put a limit on how much they actually could hunt so they wouldn't have this issue ever again.
It was a solid two months before they tackled another Behemoth, only because they ran out of Kunsel's jerky.
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A/N: A slow day at work started the creation of this chapter, and I so happened to be browsing the comments and it thus spawned this. Seriously, there's nothing I can do because all my work relies on this one system and . . . .
I think I have another idea for the next chapter.
If you thought Sephiroth and Keith having nothing to do was bad, imagine the entirety of the general departments being unable to work!
Although this would suit Janitor!Verse more than Sugar!Verse . . .