Chapter 221: Birthday for the Two of Us (3)
Umi and I went to the usual convenience store. We were planning to buy today’s lunch, dinner and a birthday cake for me.
It was cool inside the store because of both the AC and the cold air from the frozen food section. The heat had been a pain right up until I went inside. Mainly because Umi had been sticking to me. But thanks to the cold air, that uncomfortable feeling had gone away.
“What should we get for lunch, Maki? I have an idea for dinner, but not for lunch… Since it’s summer, how about some somen?” (T/N: Somen, if you don’t know, is a variant of noodle. It’s like ramen, but it’s thinner than your normal ramen. You could serve the broth hot or cold depending on your taste with somen.)
“That sounds nice, but I’m craving cold ramen more. We still have somen at home, my grandparents sent them earlier this month. I don’t have anything against somen, but I’m getting a little tired of it now.”
“Really? Same! Grandma sent us some as well and we had been eating nothing but that for a while now. I don’t hate it, but I’m getting tired of eating it too. I missed the lunch you made…”
She was talking about the lunch I made for everyone during summer school. Rather than me, it was more like everyone made it together though. Half of the lunch boxes were filled with side dishes that we made together. The other half was just rice and some variations of frozen food. I took extra care of what kind of frozen food I placed in there because I didn’t want everyone to get sick of eating the same thing.
I only did that because I was cooking for everyone. If it was for myself, I wouldn’t even bother thinking about variation. Ever since I started living together with mom and did the chores by myself, I realized that it was pretty troublesome to come up with different meals everyday.
After a little discussion, we decided to go with cold ramen for lunch. So, we bought some cucumbers, ham and other ingredients that we missed. As for the noodles and broth, we bought the cold ramen soup packs, so we didn’t need to make everything from scratch.
We passed the items inside our basket to the cash register then went to the sweets section. We normally don’t visit this section, so seeing the various cakes lined up felt fresh to me.