Volume 2 - CH extra

Neither my old man nor I cook. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all three meals of the day usually consist of ready-made lunch boxes. Neither of us particularly care about it, either, which means that we only have the bare minimum of cooking utensils at home—at the very least, until my old man got married again.

What the heck is this? On the drying hook on the kitchen hung what looked like the small child of a tong, with metallic teeth at the tip. While washing the vegetables in a strainer, I asked Ayase-san about it, since she was standing next to me.

“What is that?”

“A Peeler.”

What great English pronunciation. But, what is it?

“It’s the same as this. Have you never used it?”

Ayase-san took out a plastic object from the drawer, which looked like someone had cut through the tip of a Y-shape with a knife, and showed it to me.

“Ahh, a potato peeler.”

“That’s right, this is—”

Ayase-san returned the peeler to its original place, and now grabbed the child of the tong, putting it against the potato she just finished washing.

“You use it like this, slowly peeling off the skin.”

“Huh, I see.”

“You can also use something like this.”

She returned the potato and the small tong and now moved on to take out the boss of all cutters from the still-open drawer.

“Is that also a peeler?”

Ayase-san nodded.

“Why are there so many different peelers?”

“Asamura-kun, there aren’t just peelers. Look.” She closed the drawer and opened up one below that.

I hate to repeat myself, but neither I nor my old man cook. That’s why we originally only kept cooking utensils of utmost necessity with us. I don’t know when it happened, but the drawer Ayase-san had opened was now filled to the brim with smaller and oftentimes odd-looking cooking utensils.

“We even threw away a lot when we moved in here.”

‘Mom is bad at saying no, so she got roped into buying all the recommended stuff from the employee.’

A certain phrase I had heard some time ago came back to mind. Is Akiko-san possibly the best customer to have?

“Mom should be able to do most of the cooking with a single kitchen knife, but whenever someone tells her that something will be useful to have, she ends up wanting it.”

“I sort of understand that.”

“And yet she still uses that single kitchen knife to peel the potatoes.”

“She’s not even using the stuff she bought?”

“Would you like to try it?” Ayase-san asked and handed me a potato she just finished washing.

“I just have to peel the skin off, right?”

“Yup, I’ll make some potato salad later. Well, boiling it with the skin and peeling it off later would make the taste a lot thicker.”

I accepted the peeler and potato from Ayase-san, and while starting the peeling, I understood Ayase-san’s words. Yep, this really is a pain. Potatoes don’t have a round smooth surface like apples, so it’s hard to find a place to put the blade, and the peeled parts make your hands slippery. By the time the suffering was over, the potato had become a lot smaller than before. At the same time, Ayase-san had been using a kitchen knife, and yet got the work done a lot faster than me. By putting the blade to the potato and slowly turning it in her hand like the earth turning around the sun, she quickly got rid of all the skin.

“What a sight.”

“I’m just used to it,” Ayase-san said and moved on to the third potato.

There were still a lot of other potatoes left in the strainer. Alright, it’s time for me to continue as well. I started working on the second potato when I saw Ayase-san looking over at me with a somewhat bewildered expression. When she realized that I had seen that, she frantically returned her gaze down to her own hands.

“Thanks.” She said with a faint voice.

You’re welcome. I can’t wait to eat your delicious potato salad after all.