Malta

[peace_inthe_violence]

This is a fairy tale of blood and bullets
It is the story of three men and three women and a small island between Italy and Africa.
This is a story about tragedy and pain, about healing and hope, but mostly it is about
love.

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[peace_inthe_violence]

He blinked, amused expression clouding for a moment as he came over to smell the milk. It was fine, just as it should have been. Stepping back, he shook his head.

"Nothing is wrong with it? It smells fine. A little grassy, perhaps, but her goats are pasture raised, not grain fed so that's to be expected..."

[notariver]

"Oh. Goats." She nodded once, as if that explained everything. Which it probably did, and she had to remind herself that it hadn't gone through the whole factory filtering and pasteurization process, either.

"Is any getting reserved or is it all going in the pot?" That was the next important question, all in all.

[peace_inthe_violence]

"All of it.

Did you think it was cow's milk?" He smirked, shaking his head as he moved back over to the table. He was teaching her how to make this, right? Well, right now was all about patience, time, and paranoia.

"You'll find that cow's milk doesn't settle well on our stomachs. Booker can handle it a little better, but Andy and Joe and I never really drank cow's milk until this last century or so. It was always goat or sheep's milk. Mare's milk, but that was usually kept for babies who's mothers couldn't nurse them. I've had camel milk once, and that didn't upset my stomach, but it is much easier to get from a goat.

"Let me know when you get to 13 degrees."

[notariver]

"Did you somehow miss the part where I said I was from the city? It's all cow's milk, and it's all highly processed to keep it from spoiling too soon or making anybody sick from who knows what." There was amusement in the first question, because it really was meant as some kind of tease.

She nodded at the rest, however, filing the information away for later, "Stir it or no?" She knew for things like caramel it needed to be stirred to keep it from scorching and sticking to the pot. It was also some stroke of luck that his version of teaching was also the way Nile learned best, hands off and clear instructions.

[peace_inthe_violence]

He wanted to ask what kind of animal husbandry practices were going on in her home country that drinking fresh milk caused sickness, but this was also the country that banned collecting rainwater and refrigerated eggs. The whole thing didn't make a lick of sense to him, and getting into a debate about it wasn't going to change that.

"Stir it. If it scorches, it will be ruined. The whole batch will taste burned." He wrinkled his nose a little at the idea, pulling a pad of paper and it's attached pen over to himself so he could start jotting down the next week's shopping list. After a moment, however, he had to put his pen down and look at the woman in his kitchen.

"Why do you put your eggs in the refrigerator?" Because that question was completely sequential with their actual conversation and not just with what was in his head. Right?

[notariver]

She had nodded at the answer, and had picked the right spoon for stirring it, one with a wedge bowl to actually get into the corner along the bottom of the stock pot, because she wasn't completely incompetent in the kitchen, it seemed.

The question however, had her blinking, brow creasing as she turned to look at him, "What?" She shook her head then, returning to watching the milk as she stirred, checking the temperature again because she knew that once it started to heat it would heat quickly, "Not everybody does, people that have their own chicken and can get fresh eggs don't, but it's the whole commercial processing thing again, how they're washed or something strips them of a protective coating, makes the shells sort of porous or something? Easier for bacteria to grow on them, same reason you have to be careful not to get bits of shell into it when you crack one."

[peace_inthe_violence]

It would heat quickly, and probably even quicker considering the milk was from the market run that he'd only gotten back from just before he'd come out into the garden. The milk was still slightly chilled from the morning, but it hadn't come from the fridge that was tucked into the back corner of the pantry. They hadn't been a thing when he'd started imagining this kitchen, but it had fit well enough there.

He looked a little puzzled at her answer, but he let it go with a small disgruntled sound and a thump of the eraser against his notebook. "Well, when you go shopping here, the eggs will not be refrigerated." He scrawled a few more items onto his list, absently twirling the wooden utensil in his fingers as he pondered.

It was another ten or so minutes before he glanced up from the list again, his internal clock tickling at him that the milk should be coming up to the proper temperature range.

[notariver]

She had just given a shrug at that first statement, "Just as long as I don't have to actually fight a chicken for them, I'm good." She'd had both eggs from the supermarket and eggs from the neighbors' chickens growing up, and her brother had always been better at collecting the eggs than she had.

It was right about when Nicky looked up that Nile was testing the temperature again, "Couple degrees shy, what should I be preparing to do?"