I buy it from the Adventurers Guild and then we return home.

Miria begins her dinner preparations by pouring some water and wine in the pan first, after which she adds fish sauce and olive oil onto the mixture. Next, she leaves the white fish to boil together with the other ingredients that have been procured by us ahead of time. All in all, this is shaping up to be a pretty ordinary, by-the-book recipe for making boiled fish.

What exactly do you need this Slime Starch for?

I asked while Miria was carrying on with the preparations.

This right here, desu.

Miria then shaves some of the Slime Starch, dissolves it in water and adds a small quantity of the solution into the pan. Is she going to be using it as some kind of seasoning? That may be, because from the way shes handling it, it seems to me like shes going to make this Slime Starch into her secret ingredient for the entire dish but no, wait a minute.

Now that I look at it more closely when she served the finished dish, that was not the case at all. What she did with it was something else entirely.

She was actually making Ankake! And since she made Ankake using Slime Starch, then does that mean that Slime starch possesses the same kinds of properties as the potato starch from my old world?

Back on earth there was this peculiar method of preparing some types of food where you had to add potato starch to the saucy mixture in order to make it all nice and thick, and it was usually done by dissolving the starch in a small quantity of water right at the very end of the cooking process, and that is exactly what Miria did here, so I feel like my hunch might be right on the money.

Oh, and by the way, even if tenshinhan is written with kanji for Tianjin, China, you have to remember that it is just a name of a Chinese food born in Japan, and it has literally nothing to do with the Tianjin in China. And while we are on the subject, there seem to the kind of sweet chestnuts that are called Tianjin Broiled Sweet Chestnuts that are not Chinese in origin despite having Tianjin in their name as well, which I feel might cause Tianjin and China itself quite a bit of damage because of rumors.

However, I seem to vaguely recall that the name Tianjin Broiled Sweet Chestnut has been invented in the first place because Tianjin was a shipping port to which chestnuts were being shipped in the past, just like it was with Mocha, the port to which mainly coffee was shipped too, and the port of Imari where the Arita porcelain was being shipped to the rest of the world, hence giving rise to the Imari porcelain.

Its really tasty. Master.

Its sweet and sour at the same time. I havent eaten anything like it. Its delicious!

Tasty, so tasty, desu!

I receive compliments from the girls, most likely because they never has sweet and sour pork before, so they dont even realize that this dish is not really complete, but even though they say that they find it tasty, I still think that it is lacking. But even so, Im not going to allow this small, minor setback to discourage me! After all, every failure is just another opportunity to learn and improve so that you can do better next time.

Now that I know that Slime Starch can be used as a cooking ingredient, Ill use it in even more dishes, because now that I understand how to make starch sauce and I have tried making it myself already, I could always try to modify it for a bit whenever Ill grow tired of having it the usual way, so now I decided to test one of the alternatives out by soaking the Goat Meat that I obtained from defeating Pan, the Boss of the seventh floor of the Labyrinth of Vale in the fish sauce and then I leave it there to marinate for half a day.

Miria, can you please shave some Slime Starch for me?

Of course, desu!

Now that the Goat Meat is marinating itself in the fish sauce, I asked Miria to prepare some more Slime Starch for me one we returned home in the evening after our afternoon forage into the Labyrinths.