God of Cooking

But Lisa didn’t hate it. There were times when she felt her life was a bit burdensome in the past. But from the moment she heard from the doctor that she had little time left for her survival, she felt her dream was rather like a gift. As much as she dreamed, she could revive within the time when she would otherwise have been dead in her sleep.

Recently she had another reason to have a dream because even the impossible could be possible in dreams. She could meet someone she wanted to see in dreams. “Dad.”

Lisa smiled softly. Jack was in front of her. He didn’t say anything, which didn’t matter to her. Being able to see his face and hold his hand gave Lisa a sense of security as if she really had everything she had. She talked to him about her story for a long time, such as how her condition was these days and how Ella was doing at school. No wonder she also talked about Paul.

“He’s a cool guy. Apart from being a doctor, he’s very handsome. He’s tall and he has a nice build because he works out a lot. If I’m together with him, I think I can feel secure wherever I go.”

“He hasn’t gotten close to Ella yet. But when he meets her often, he will be close to her. You may think I’m selfish, but I come to expect him to make up for what Ella doesn’t have.”

“At first, I wondered if I could meet him. Since my life was ruined by a man, I didn’t want to see my life ruined further by another man. But he is a doctor who treats a sick person, right? So I thought I would not be hurt even if he treated me…”

“What do you think, Dad?”

Jack didn’t answer. Lisa knew this was a dream. So she knew why Jack didn’t answer.

If Jack answered, it would be what she already knew. But it couldn’t be the real Jack in the end. Unless it was Jack’s real answer, she didn’t want to bother to hear it because she could be confused.

While she asked him questions, she didn’t want to hear his answer at the same time, which was quite contradictory. She slowly came into his arms. She suddenly wondered if his arms were so tight. She raised her head, wondering about that.

Paul was there in Jack’s place now.

“Are you awake?”

The sun was shining through the window.

She nodded slowly with his eyes twinkling.

“Yes. I’m awake.”

Just because a person named Paul infiltrated her life, her daily life didn’t change much.

Sometimes she slept with him instead of Ella, and she had breakfast with him, not Ella, more frequently. And she became more confident.

She knew that the source of her confidence was that Paul was a doctor. Doctor Paul, not somebody else, was meeting her and loved her. Was it because he believed Lisa wouldn’t die? If he had been stupid enough to start a relationship with a woman who would soon die, he wouldn’t have been qualified as a doctor from the beginning.

But that was why she couldn’t ask him directly if she could overcome her illness and live a healthy life again. At first, he could not confirm whether he could answer her question as a doctor or as her lover.

But she came to trust him, though she was not yet sure. As long as she trusted him, she became more relaxed and peaceful just like now.

“I’ll give Ella a ride, so just take a rest, Lisa.”

“Paul, let’s talk for a moment.”

She glanced at Ella quickly then moved to a place where her daughter could not hear.

She quietly opened her mouth.

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I mean your relationship with me and your attitude toward Ella. You are serious, right?”

“Why are you asking such a question? I’ve never dealt with you pretentiously from the beginning.”

“Sure, I believe so. Still, I’m uneasy. If you have already infiltrated my life, as well as my daughter’s so deeply like this and leave abruptly one day, I’m okay, but Ella will be really hurt.”

Only then did Paul realize that Lisa was thinking of their relationship as a mother, not as a woman. He turned his head for a moment as if he was lost in thought. He then looked back at her.

“I’ve thought about my relationship with you for a moment. In other words, I wondered if I was meeting you because of my fleeting romantic feelings for you, and if I was irresponsible enough to leave you when the chemistry between you and me disappears someday.”

“What’s your answer?”

“Well, your worries are groundless,” he said briefly. “A doctor should always be prudent in making a choice. If my hands tremble, I may tear a nerve or blood vessel of a patient. That’s why a doctor always makes a decision after careful thinking. Even if there is not much time, we doctors have the ability to think more than anyone during that short amount of time.”

“So?”

“I have thought about you long, deeply, and a lot.”

‘This man who made the best choice even during a short moment spent a long time thinking about me?’

After she realized the meaning of his words, her eyelids trembled.

“Did I answer your question, Lisa?”

She reached out her hand instead of answering. In her hand were two lunch boxes.

He looked at her with her slightly puzzled expression.

“Why do you have two lunch boxes?”

“One is yours. It has a sandwich I made with bread I baked myself. Do you like sandwiches?”

“Oh, yeah, very much.”

“Great, ” Lisa said, smiling softly. “Thanks for giving Ella a ride to school.”

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The Grand Chef’s final round was just a few days away. Of course, there was no reason for Kaya and Min-joon to stay away from it since they were judges. It was Peter and Gwen who were supposed to compete at the final round, so all Min-joon and Kaya would do was go there and evaluate their dishes.

So they thought that waiting for the final round would be quite boring, but it wasn’t.

Staring blankly at the screen, Kaya muttered, “It’s nonsense.”

What she was looking at now was the status of recipes posted to the Irregular Lab menu.

To be precise, it was the number of recipes submitted by those aspiring to be cooks.

“1030… 1030 recipes! Min-joon, do you think this makes sense?”

“Hey, calm down. Of course, it makes sense.”

“I would have thought even 130 would be more than enough, but this is too much. What the heck are they doing now?”

It was no wonder she was astonished. Even Min-joon’s heart was beating so hard.

1030 recipes. With hundreds of millions of posts on the internet, 1030 recipes might not seem huge. But it was not. People were stingy about showing their recipes to others.

The reason why Min-joon enjoyed such wide acclaim was because he openly showed the recipe of Cho Reggiano. In other words, it was very hard to find the open recipes of popular dishes on the internet. Even with the opening of the internet era, there were still lots of people working at ramen restaurants for several years in order to figure out the secret of noodle broth.

But Min-joon did not think that the chefs who did not disclose their recipes were wrong.

He rather understood their feelings because there was nothing like copyright for their recipes

Of course, the copyright of recipes was impossible due to the nature of cooking. Even so, chefs would not help but get angry if other chefs they didn’t know at all made the same dishes as theirs.

Because of that, the huge number of recipes submitted by ordinary cooks to Irregular Lab was quite unusual. And there was some more that struck them as unusual.

“Tony Lund? Isn’t this guy famous in Sweden?”

“Well, he’s probably a restaurant owner-chef with two stars.”

“But he sent us a recipe.”

“Yeah, that’s unusual,” Min-joon said with a bit of a bewildered expression.

He thought many of the recipes were sent by those cooks who didn’t get recognized for their hard work, but he had never imagined that even a giant chef like Lund would send them a recipe.

After all, there was no reason for such a famous chef to send it. Why was he showing others his recipe for free, which he had developed after hard work? When Min-joon checked his recipe, his expected cooking score was 9. In other words, he really spent a lot of time developing it.

Nonetheless, he sent Irregular Lab his recipe.

Interestingly, Tony Lund wasn’t the only one who did so. Aside from Tony Lund, famous chefs from each country, especially America, sent their recipes to Min-Joon. After reading brief messages attached to their recipes, he narrowed his eyes because he could read their intentions.

“It’s a win-win strategy.”

“A win-win strategy?”