Inside the kitchen of the house, Leah was freshly scrubbed and standing on a stool next to him. She was watching attentively as he prepared the ingredients, her wide eyes tracking his hands, while a small line of drool began to leak from the corner of her mouth.

  Draden rolled his eyes and wiped her mouth. “Leah, you don’t even know what I’m going to make yet.”

  She blinked and refocused on him. “Do I need to? Everything daddy makes is tasty.”

  How was he supposed to respond to that?

  “Err, thanks for the vote of confidence.” With a shake of his head, he refocused on placing the various ingredients onto the counter, along with the recipe he had written earlier.

  Looking at everything spread out like that, there were only a few items he actually needed to make the pizzas successfully. Three to be exact, instant yeast, pepperonis, and some more mozzarella cheese. He still had some cheese from doing the subs, but kids always like cheese pizzas, so more was better.

  Really, just getting more ingredients, period, was better. They were starting to run low on funds at the local banks, but he needed to stock up on ingredients for the restaurant. With a slight grit of his teeth, Draden dug out two gold coins and activated the transfer.

  The ingredients he needed appeared, enough to make plenty of pizzas, along with roughly an additional sixty dollars' worth of ingredients. All told there was probably around a hundred dollars’ worth of items on his counter at the moment.

  Draden had never forgotten the original system message, which said that the ‘cost of ingredients may or may not equal the amount donated.’ In the past, that had simply always been in the negative. This time, he had gotten lucky. Either that or the system was attempting to make up for shortchanging him all the other times. If it was the latter, then it was still deep in the red.

  Which one it was didn’t really matter to him, as at the end of the day he was still getting ridiculously shortchanged. Still, this amount would help, and that was more important than him being annoyed at the moment.

  He quickly sorted everything and reached for his measuring cups. First, he needed to make the dough, then, while that was rising, he could prepare the sauce. Strictly speaking, the dough needed to rise for at least two hours, with overnight in the fridge being best. But there were ways around that.

  Namely, by sticking it in the oven at a slightly warmer temperature. You didn’t want it to be too hot, otherwise you’d kill the yeast, but twenty degrees warmer than room temperature was fine.

  Grabbing the flour, he measured out two and a half cups into a bowl. Next, he dumped in one tablespoon of yeast, followed by the rest of the ingredients. Each one had specific measurements, but he had always done them by what felt right, and this time wasn’t going to be any different. If he wanted a slightly stronger garlic taste to the crust, then he would add more. He would then typically match however much garlic powder he had put in with the same amount of onion powder.

  He took a similar approach to oregano and Italian seasoning. Really, the only ingredients he rarely messed with were the amount of sugar, oil, and salt. The amount of water needed, of course, changed some each time no matter what you did.

  You wanted it to be a cohesive soft ball when you were done mixing, not sticky. If it was sticky, that meant you had added too much water. If it was dry, then you needed more water.

  This was his first time mixing dough by hand, and he had to admit, it made him miss the days of all his kitchen appliances. It worked, but it was a lot harder than it looked, and it was a workout for the arm. But the smell, hmm, Leah definitely seemed to approve.

  When it was ready, he coated the bowl with oil and spread some oil on top of the dough to keep it moist. Then put a damp towel on top of the bowl and then stuck it inside the slightly pre-warmed oven.

  With the dough taken care of, he could now focus on making the pizza sauce.

  He gently pushed his daughter away from the counter while he grabbed an onion. The last time he had cut up an onion near her, she had complained about it attacking her as revenge for them trying to eat it. There was no reason to put her through that traumatizing incident again, since it could be so easily avoided.

  He quickly diced the onion, a few tears coming to his eyes despite himself. It was a particularly pungent onion. He splashed some oil in a pot and dumped in the onions. After letting them cook for a minute and getting brown, he added some garlic and let those cook for a minute as well. Once those were ready, he added the peeled tomatoes, red pepper flakes, sugar, oregano, and salt and pepper.

  Then it was just a matter of letting it simmer and thicken up some.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  While they were waiting for it to thicken, he enlisted his daughter to help him carry the extra ingredients over to the restaurant.

  Unlike the oven, which used qi to heat things and, while expensive, was readily available, the idea of a refrigerator was pretty unknown. They had items that cooled things, they just hadn’t made the next step. Regardless, those particular items were ridiculously expensive at about three to four times the cost of one entire oven unit, and that was for a small, barely working model.

  He wasn’t sure why they were so expensive, but he wasn’t about to spend that sort of extra money when he could just make an old-school version. It wouldn’t be perfect, not by any means, but it would work.

  The key to its success was the large stream right behind the restaurant. When he had been designing the restaurant, he had included a large walk-in refrigerator. The walls were surrounded by thin metal pipes which had water from the stream continually running through them. The refrigerator was then insulated to keep it cold.

  The inside was damp, but leaving a couple of towels inside that he would swap out each day, mostly took care of that.

  Regardless, after they finished carrying the items over, the sauce was ready, and the dough had risen several times over.

  Taking the dough out of the bowl, he cut it in half and rolled it out into the general shape of a pizza. He obviously didn’t have anything specifically made for a pizza, so he was going to be cooking it on a thin piece of metal he had previously cleaned and oiled.

  Speaking of, he cranked the heat on the oven up. It was harder to tell the specific temperature here, but they had created a few methods using what looked like mercury. Anyway, he wanted the oven to be around five hundred degrees.

  After the dough was all rolled out, he took some olive oil and spread it around the edge of the pizza crust and then inward as much as he could. The idea was that the oil would help crisp up the crust as it was cooking, whatever wasn’t covered by sauce, which was typically the edge.

  With that done, he grabbed a ladle and began spreading the pizza sauce he had made on top. Next was the mozzarella cheese and pepperonis.

  He was keeping the first two pizzas simple, for Leah’s sake this first time. With the second just being straight-up cheese. That one would have mozzarella, cheddar, and a little bit of parmesan.

  Later, assuming she liked them, which she would, because one, she was a kid, and two, she was his child, he would introduce her to more varieties.

  Carefully sliding the metal sheet into the oven, he set a timer for ten minutes. He would need to check on it multiple times while it was cooking to ensure it didn’t burn.

  Putting another thin metal sheet on the counter, he began rolling out the second pizza.

  Seeing what he was doing, Leah stretched out and grabbed the olive oil for him, along with a spoon. By the time she was helping him spread the sauce a minute later, the aroma of baking dough and pizza had begun to flood the kitchen of their house.

  “What do you think about cheese, Leah?” He asked, gesturing towards the second pizza as he began spreading the mozzarella. “Do you like it?”

  “Cheese is yummy!” She declared, her eyes wide with excitement. “Especially that stringy, pull-apart kind you get sometimes!” Yeah, she really loved string cheese.

  He smiled, pleased with her enthusiasm. It was moments like these that made all the effort worthwhile. Seeing her joy, her unadulterated happiness, was a reward in itself.

  The timer on the first pizza dinged, signaling that it was time to check on its progress again. He carefully opened the oven door, peering inside to assess the browning of the crust. It looked promising, a golden-brown hue spreading around the bare edges. He grabbed a mitt and took hold of the metal sheet, and slid the pizza out. Carefully, he placed it on a flat stone sitting on the counter for exactly that purpose.

  Lifting up a corner, he inspected the bottom of the pizza and frowned. The rest of the pizza looked good, but the underside wasn’t quite as firm as he personally liked. Another minute or two with the bottom closer to the heat would fix that.

  He stuck it back in the oven, on a lower rack, and set the timer again. “You’re drooling, sweetie.”

  Leah wiped her mouth and shook her head with a smile as some bangs fell over her eyes. “Is it ready yet?”

  “Not quite. Even once I take it out, it still needs to cool, otherwise it’ll burn our mouths.” A lesson that he had learned the hard way, many, many times.

  She looked pitying at him and patted her tummy. “But daddy, Leah is hungry. Listen, her belly is talking.” As though on command, her stomach actually did choose that moment to grumble hungrily, shocking them both. The little girl giggled and patted her tummy again. “See, I told you!”

  Shaking his head, he took out the pizza and replaced it with the cheese version, making sure to reset the timer.

  He checked the underside again and nodded happily. It wasn’t burned, just crispy. It was a perfect thin-crust pizza. Next, he would need to make a regular crust version, but that one would take some time. He had made it before, and it had been so good, but it was also a lot of work. Subsequently, it had been a year or two before his death that he had made it last.

  He could make a few guesses for some of it, but at this point, his main hope was that once he was able to start cultivating again, it would improve his memory.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Leah discreetly reaching for a crispy pepperoni. Turning to watch, he let her take it and blow on it before eating it. A look of utter bliss came across her face as she did a happy little wiggle on her stool.

  “Sho good,” She muttered, licking the grease from her fingers.

  “You were supposed to wait,” He chided her lightly, poking her nose.

  Leah wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue. “It was calling to Leah, asking her to please eat it. Ignoring it would have been rude.” She said firmly, crossing her arms.

  “It would have been, huh? Alright, we’ll go with that, this time.” Reaching around her, he grabbed the long knife he had prepared beforehand. Cutting pizzas properly required long instruments, or a pizza wheel, which he obviously didn’t have. However, long knives were extremely easy to find in this world.

  This particular knife had an edge, but not a particularly sharp one. He didn’t want to worry about chipping it when it hit against the metal sheets. He had also wrapped the tip with some cloth so he could hold it. Later on, he planned to swap that out for a piece of wood.

  Carefully, he pressed the knife against the pizza and began cutting it up into squares. While he preferred the normal triangle-ish shapes, the squares were easier for kids.

  (The recipe I use in this chapter can be found on my Patreon for free.)

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