I Opened a Café in Another World.

Volume 1, Chapter 12: Rice with egg on top is the best.

After some 20, 30 minutes of stabbing it, I successfully polished the rice. I removed the rice husks and rice bran from the polished rice. I asked Basil to use her windpower to blow away the bits of rice husks I couldn’t pick out, then I washed the white rice and cooked it in a ceramic pot. There were no measuring cups in this world, so I used a teacup instead. The rice to water ratio of our family, straight from my mother, was one to a little more than one cup. After covering the pot, I cooked at medium heat for five minutes. The pot lid began to dance from all the bubbles popping out of the boiling water, and I switched to low heat for ten minutes.

I’m going on a tangent, but there are six burners in the Claude kitchen. There are two burners for each heat power, low, medium, and high. You cannot adjust the heat of a burner, so you have to move the whole pot between burners. I’ll have to talk to Alex about this next time, it needs to be improved.

Using a five-minute hourglass to keep time, I waited for the rice to cook. After ten minutes of low heat, I moved the pot to high heat and counted ten seconds. Then I turned off the fire, but I kept the pot lid on. The rice still had to steam, but it was sitting right in front of me. There was still some time before mealtime, so I decided to try some in secret.

What should I use as the side for rice? I looked in the fridge and the freezer, but nothing stood out to me. Honestly, the fact that I couldn’t make any Japanese sides because we didn’t have soy sauce and miso was very painful to me. While I closed the door of the fridge, my eyes landed on a basket on a shelf next to it. Oh! I have eggs! It must be a sign for me to make rice with egg on top!

I took an egg from the basket and took out a deep-ish bowl to substitute for a rice bowl, and a spoon to substitute for chopsticks. No soy sauce, so I took out some salt. Of course, there was no rice paddle, so I brought out a wooden spatula. Just in time.

“Master, is it ready yet?”

“Yeah, I’ll open it now, okay?”

“Okay!”

At Basil’s urging, I nervously opened the lid. The room filled with the fragrance of just cooked rice.

It’s rice!!

I peeked in the pot to see the glistening, fat white grains of rice and heard a “whoa” in Basil’s voice next to me.

“…what a good smell.”

“It really is, wow!”

Even though it had not been that long since I had come to this world, I felt some sort of nostalgia from the smell of the rice. I gently inserted the wooden spatula into the rice and slowly mixed the rice by flipping the insides of the pot out on top. Some tasty-looking scorched rice was flipped up in the process. These would be perfect for salt musubi later!

After lightly mixing it, I put the rice into the bowl I had prepared earlier. Let me try a bite first.

Delicious!!

No doubt about it, this is rice! All hail rice!

This might have been the first time in my life that I was so moved about eating rice.

It had some bounce to it, and the more I chewed, the sweeter it got. Basil’s eyes glistened as she nodded joyfully, her cheeks plump and full of rice.

After we each had a bite, I made a small cavity in the middle of the rice and cracked the egg into it. I sprinkled on a pinch of salt, cut the egg yolk and mixed it all with the rice. Then I shared some with Basil and, our eyes locking, we each took a bite.

S-s-so good!! Don’t underestimate rice with egg on top!! Simplicity really is the best!

I snuck a glance at Basil, who was completely smitten and ravenously digging into her share. Although I just wanted a bite, I ended up finishing what was in my bowl and even went for seconds. Get latest 𝒏ovel ch𝒂pters on n𝒐velbjn(.)c/𝒐m

That the sight of me, moved to tears by rice with egg on top, was spied on by the people of the Claude mansion from the kitchen entrance was something I would not know about until later.