Finished commission for   adsergal! Gismo and Stephen are working on opening a new restaurant, and now's the time to plan their menu. However, a certain pie made with certain blueberries that his friend seemed too reluctant to part with may leave Gismo "floored"

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Gismo pierced his fork into the salad, making sure to build the perfect bite. As stressful as planning a menu was, the tasting always more than made up for it. Taking a bite of the salad, the sergal began to take mental notes of the different flavor profiles. The radicchio’s bitterness was nicely balanced by the sweet and salty dressing. The thin apple wedges offered a bit of crunchy freshness. Then the guanciale came through, lending a nice, funky taste. All around, it was a lovely dish… but, maybe, it could be better. “I think we should try playing around with some kinds of vinegar in the dressing.”

“Alright, I’ll make a note of that…’radicchio salad…vinegar.’ And I’ll just add ‘apple cider?’ since we’ve got apples already in the dish.” The maned wolf who sat beside the sergal placed his notepad back on the table and grabbed another dish from the many that populated the table. Stephen looked down at the dish, a spatchcocked Cornish hen with a beautiful, crispy, golden skin. Originally, they had gone with a simple garlic butter roast, but Gismo had come back to the restaurant the night before with garlic scapes. Tearing a bit of meat from the hen, Stephen set to chewing and letting the rich flavors dance in his mouth; the scapes did bring a bit of vegetal freshness. However, the lemon juice that was mixed into the butter tasted a bit strong. “Alright…I don’t hate the lemon, but it could be a bit…less? Let’s try adding just lemon zest, instead.” Stephen flicked a lock of his long hair out of his face as he took more notes on their tasting. “How’s the shrimp scampi?”

Gismo was happily pointing to the plate with his fork as the buttery shrimp’s flavors danced in his mouth, “Don’t change a thing with this one! Couldn’t be better.” He rifled through the small stack of papers that sat off to the side. After finding the recipe for the delicious shrimp, he brought it to the corkboard that stood at the service counter and pinned it in place along with other recipes that more than met the pair’s expectations.

Meanwhile, Stephen was beginning to tire of all the savory dishes they had been sampling. “Okay, I think we should come back to the entrees in a minute. We haven’t touched the desserts yet have we?”

“No, we haven’t! All the hot ones should be plenty cool by now, shouldn’t they?”

“I’ll go check.” Before Stephen left, he stacked up some of the empty plates to bring with him into the kitchen while he went to check on the desserts they had finished earlier. Gismo was particularly excited about the desserts. While hunting for some premium ingredients to elevate their dishes, he ended up befriending a local farmer who had begun experimenting with breeding new varieties of fruits and berries. Especially berries. White strawberries, golden raspberries, and many others were being sold by him to restaurants for testing before bringing them out to the farmers market, but what drew Gismo in more was the-

“The blueberry pie’s ready!”