I Will Quit the Entourage of the Villainess

Chapter 82 – Second Arc: First Chapter – Bob and the sweet potatoes

It was now mid-autumn, the season of delicious food. Today’s dish was… Sweet potatoes!

“Young lady, I brought the jar!” Bob, the gardener, exclaimed.

“Then let’s put the sweet potatoes in!” I happily exclaimed as we started preparing our meal.

This special jar was prepared just for today. It is a custom-made jar with a custom-made metal wire that is there so that we can hang the sweet potatoes. It was a lot of work, but I love sweet potatoes way too much, so I was not going to give up on the opportunity to eat them!

To think that the bamboo infestation that took over our garden would end up having such a wonderful side effect. I’m really glad we ended up learning how to make bamboo charcoal. We wouldn’t be able to bake those lovely sweet potatoes otherwise.

It all started two months ago, when dad murmured, “Our garden really became a bamboo grove, didn’t it?”

And he was right… The gardening hobby that started from just me and Bob at first, ended up requiring way more manpower just to control the bamboo that was constantly spreading.

… Why is it that bamboo grows so fast in this world? It had already taken over half of our garden.

Our nice European garden now had a rose field filled with bamboos, and a pavilion taken over by bamboos too… One could say that it could become an acquired taste, but this was just no good.

We tried hard finding uses for the bamboo, like making lamps and water bottles and selling them as exquisite articles at Signora, but… It wasn’t enough. We had way too much bamboo here. Even if nobles that liked unusual things did end up buying those products, they wouldn’t buy as many as we could produce.

We didn’t want to waste the bamboo, but we also couldn’t let it keep spreading like this…

It was then that I had the idea of making bamboo charcoal. It could be used as a fertilizer in agriculture, and could also be used in cooking, it felt like the perfect solution!

Only… I didn’t know how to make charcoal, and our fireplaces use firewood, so nobody in the mansion knew how to either. We ended up having to go with trial and error.

Me and Bob made dozens of attempts to make the charcoal, from heating it up in a deep hole, to cramming it into a jar before heating it up.

Eventually, we succeeded by putting a large amount of bamboo on a wide shallow hole, sandwiching some very flammable bamboo leaves in-between the bamboos, then putting everything on fire. Like this, we started making bamboo charcoal.

Then, now that we had a use for it, with the help of Bob’s apprentice, as well as Ricky, the carpenter, we were able to reduce the bamboo grove’s side… It still takes one third of our garden, but we made a big progress nonetheless!

And with the result of our hard work, we are now able to enjoy the delicious sweet potatoes by making use of the bamboo charcoal!

The participants of our sweet-potato-making contest are just me and Bob. We put the potatoes and the charcoal in the jar and waited for an hour… Until, finally, the sweet potatoes were completed!

“Delicious…” Both me and Bob murmured as we tasted them.

They became even sweeter and shinier than usual as they slowly got baked while inside the jar. With each bite, it felt like they were melting inside my mouth.

“Absolutely delicious! I never tasted such lovely roasted sweet potatoes! It has a stronger taste than when they’re baked with leaves!” Bob commented.

I was glad that he enjoyed it, but I was not done yet! It was time to show my secret weapon! As I giggled, I took out a jar of… “Butter!”

“Oh!? Butter for sweet potatoes!?” He seemed to be surprised by it, but he’ll be even more surprised by its taste!

I carefully spread the butter on the hot sweet potatoes and bit it. The taste became mellower and sweeter with it… This truly was bliss.

It was our first time using the bamboo charcoal, so the sweet potato tournament involved just me and Bob. However, now that we are sure of how delicious the sweet potatoes become when roasted like this, it felt like a real waste to make it only for us two, so we baked a lot more sweet potatoes for everyone in the mansion.

And today, the Edelweiss mansion was filled with happiness.