I don't like cacti. It's spiky, it's prickly, and irritating. And those furry creatures insist on including it in every single recipe! Why cacti? Why??
Cacti in
Kra grow in a multitude of shapes and sizes, from the tiny needlespeck to the massive colossine. But despite their needles sharp as knives, and the tendency of some of them to spit fire to the face of a predator, they're still one of the tastiest vegetables around. Or so they claim.
A prickly matter
While
otterlings are adapted to the harsh conditions of active volcanos, they're not immune to the sharp needles of this delicious food. How cacti are prepared varies wildly among tribes, but generally, the eastern tribes prefer to peel off not only the needles but also the outer skin. The western tribes, on the other hand, usually keep the outer skin and, while the peel off the needles, they break them down until they are no longer dangerous and use them as food too. This seems to be mostly due to environmental factors: the western areas of the
Fire mounts are significantly more isolated than the east, and food is scarcer, so their cultures have evolved to not waste as much.
Common recipes
Drink cactus juice. It'll quench ya! Nothing's quenchier. It's the quenchiest!— Excited otterling merchant. The sentence feels oddly familiar... did I hear it on
Earth?
In an age where long-distance communication is still slow and dangerous, there is a lot of variation between cultural groups (and even between tribes of the same cultural group). But here are some of my favorites:
Lava juice
This seems to be a favorite among many otterlings. It's really simple to prepare if you have the right equipment:
find a cactus, cut it so it's in the shape of a bowl, and add some drops of lava into the juice. The lava quickly solidifies and it's not edible, but according to my otterling companing, it gives it "a delicious lava aftertaste". Unfortunately, he didn't elaborate and all my encounters with lava have been all but delicious. It is possible an otterling's taste buds don't quite follow what I thought was a standard among all humanoids. This would explain a lot, actually.
Color salad
Cacti are well known for their incredibly beautiful flowers, and to otterling cuisine, they're just as tasty. Color salads on the east combine cactus flowers with other fruits and leaves, but everywhere they look like true works of art.
Sometimes they grind the flowers to create abstract paintings with a multitude of colors. Other times, they arrange the full flowers in bouquets that explode with color. This is one of the few otterling dishes I truly enjoyed.
Cactoke
Cactoke by Ondo
This is another easy-to-cook recipe that also uses lava—though fortunately for me, not as part of the dish itself. Instead, this dish is traditionally cooked with a lava lake as the heat source. To prepare it,
the cactus needs to be boiled for a long time until it becomes soft as a paste. Then, that paste is traditionally moulded into a down-facing semisphere and served with flowers and meat if available. Cactoke is often served with cactus flowers and cactus juice in the shape of a volcano.
This cactus feels like something that survives out of spite. Not water, not sunlight, just pure rage baked into a plant with too many teeth. I do not trust it, I do not like that it exists, and I would absolutely pay money to watch some poor merchant try to harvest one without crying.