Heaven's Senses

XXI

~~~~Hikari~~~~

I stood in front of a piece of paper that announced the dish we would be creating for the Fall Selection. This year, it was curry, a very flavorful dish filled to the brim with spices that exploded in your mouth with every bite. It didn't make it as much when I was younger because of my heightened senses, but now with my methods of treating it, this should be an interesting battle.

Megumi seemed a little more nervous than normal and sighed at the sight of the theme.

"Hey, what's wrong Megumi?" My brother asked.

"Seeing and tasting Akira's curry... it kinda knocked the wind out of my sails."

I hummed at Megumi's answer. It turns out that my brother and Megumi went to taste Akira's curry, the boy I had met just the other day. Turns out that he's a spice master and an excellent chef when it coms to working with spice filled dishes.

"It's a little more than a month until the Selection." Megumi said nervously as she panicked around the room, "It's gonna be hard to create a dish that rivals Akira's in such a short amount of time. It's nearly impossible! I don't know what I'm gonna do."

I stopped her before she could continue her little panic run and pat her on the head, "Just calm yourself down, Megumi. You keep running around like that your stress and nerves are only gonna get worse."

She calmed down just a bit and looked over at my brother who kept staring at the paper, "What's up with you, Soma?"

"At our restaurant. Back when we were watching our dad work up close, I hate to admit to myself, but there was so much I still needed to improve."

I chuckled, "Yeah, I remember all that. Dad trusted you and I to come up with new dishes for the menu more than once. It was pretty funny to see a sixth grader come up with weird dishes for the menu of a good eatery."

"The sixth grade?!" Megumi repeated in shock, "I wouldn't be able to handle that kind of pressure."

"Maybe." Soma said seriously, "But if you only worry about what you need to improve on, you'll never get anywhere. Like right now, I've got nothing to lose here, and I've got everything in the world to gain. Right, sis?"

I nodded and rested my arm on his shoulder, "Yep. And the worst thing you can do is to give up before the battle even starts. The only thing we can do right now, is man up and tackle this crazy showdown."

Megumi nodded with a newfound determination.

"Okay, so spices are gonna be an important part of this battle, no question." I said.

"Right, but I don't think that's all it's gonna be about." Soma added.

I smiled at my brother's determination, ready to take on this crazed showdown of curry and cooking. We only had six weeks to figure out what kind of curry we would be making, so time was of the essence.

Later on that day, I gathered with the girls to go over the fundamentals of curry. We looked through a bunch of textbooks that we borrowed from Zenji all about curry and the spices needed to balance it.

"Generally, about forty varieties of spices are used in curries" Yuki read off, "Of these, only ten to twenty varieties are selected and then blended."

"I don't think that you can just mix them up randomly though, or the individual flavors would end up cancelling each other out." Ryoko said.

"That's right, that's gonna be pretty tricky to figure out for sure." I pointed out leaning back in my chair.

"Should we use them whole, powdered or raw? I just don't know." Megumi panicked, again, "Plus we have to choose the recipe and the odor's aroma. And do we use roasting or ripening methods? How will the ingredients react? There's just too many factors to consider!"