A Guide on How to Love Jules Everett

Chapter Seven

The Cooking Lesson

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WITH THE COMBINED efforts of both me and Harr, we caught five fresh fishes of different breeds. In order to help us cultivate our skills, our meals for the first two nights would have to be prepared by ourselves. As such, we decided to stock up on our loot so that we needn't return to the riverbank every day to fish for dinner.

Since he had been the one to help us fish for dinner, Harr was excused from kitchen prep work. The moment we stepped into our quaint little lodging, he had disappeared in the direction of his shared room with Xavier to get a change of clothes for his shower. Jules, on the other hand, was hopeless in the kitchen. As such, we agreed that it was best for her to stay out of the kitchen and leave the cooking to me and Xavier.

Of course, all of this was just part of our scheme to impart knowledge to Xavier. After all, I had agreed to help him with courting Jules and yet I'd not done much other than advice him a little here and there.

"How hard can it be to cook fish?" Xavier yawned loudly, tilting his head left and right. Light pops could be heard as he moved, his joints cracking.

"Very," I snorted, tying the knot of my apron securely behind me. Reaching into the kitchen drawers, I pulled out another apron that had been prepared by the lodging and tossed it to Xavier. He caught it at the last minute, stumbling a little in shock. "Especially since we're making one of Jules's favorite dishes with the fish we caught."

"Which will be?" He asked, picking up one of the kitchen knives. Xavier ran a finger across the dull edge of the blade, watching the steel shine under the ceiling light above us.

"The taste differs with the type of fish, of course, but we're going to grill up some lemon butter fish fillets with a side of mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables."

I dug at the sack of potatoes on the floor, courtesy of the school since there wouldn't be carbohydrates in our meal if they hadn't provided us with this. There wasn't exactly a farm anywhere near the camping grounds and as such, other than protein and maybe some wild mushrooms and fruits, there wouldn't otherwise be any greens on our plates.

From my back pocket, I pulled out my phone, swiping until I found the image captured of the journal. I stopped at the photo of the recipe I had scrawled into the book, propping it up against the wall so that we could refer to it with ease. Certain pages had been taken down for the sake of convenience since it would've been awkward if we were caught by Jules with the physical guidebook in our hands.

"Do you want to prepare the fish or make the sides?" In one hand, I held the freshly caught fish. In the other was a bunch of vegetables I had grabbed randomly.

Xavier looked at his choices, scrutinizing both options until he reached out and grabbed the fish from my hands. My eyebrows raised at his bold and daring choice, genuinely surprised that he would pick the main star that was both simple to perfect and easy to mess up. Especially for a beginner like Xavier.

"Oh, I see we're starting big," I laughed.

Prepping the chopping board for the both of us, I started on my vegetables some distance away from Xavier, glancing over in his direction every once in a while to make sure he wasn't about to set the entire kitchen on fire.

I started on the potatoes first, chopping them into large chunks while waiting for the pot of water I had prepared beforehand to boil. Once it started to bubble, I tossed the potatoes in, adding in salt before wiping my hands down on a kitchen towel.

To my right, Xavier was still fiddling with the fish clumsily. Every few seconds, he would look up at my phone, his frown deepening before sighing heavily at the fish.