After Marrying a Chef, I Eat My Fill at Every Meal

In the seventh year of the apocalypse, on the night their grain store was robbed, Zhou Sui was so hungry she couldn’t even chew tree bark. When she opened her eyes again, she had become a skinny little girl in ancient times, so frail a gust of wind could knock her over. Her family was so poor they could barely afford to eat. The rice jar was almost empty, and even wild greens were fought over. Before she had time to adjust, a marriage contract landed in her lap. A coarse cook with a strange temper, who spent all his time by the stove, showed up with a marriage contract and said he wanted to marry a Zhou daughter. By rights, the cook should have married her older female cousin, the eldest daughter of the Zhou family. But her cousin thought it was humiliating and refused at all costs. So the marriage was pushed onto Zhou Sui instead. Everyone was waiting to laugh at her. Only Zhou Sui stared at the words “make a living as a cook” and quietly swallowed. She couldn’t ask for a better marriage. The smoke rising from a kitchen stove, which others took for granted, was the kind of peaceful life she could only dream of returning to. On their wedding day, the rundown courtyard was cold and the stove was empty. Everyone expected her to cry. Instead, her eyes lit up at the bowl of noodles the man had just made. Later, while neighbors bickered over a mouthful of food, she squatted by the stove and gnawed on crispy pork. While villagers were still chewing coarse rice, she was already deciding whether to have steamed or braised dishes that day. Others mocked her for marrying beneath herself, but she grew fairer and healthier by the day. Then one day, someone recognized that the husband who spent all day by the stove had once been a famous imperial chef. Later, their little tavern became the finest restaurant in the city, with ordinary diners having to book three days in advance. The powerful and wealthy flocked there just to taste a dish he had cooked himself. And Zhou Sui still sat in the back courtyard, slowly savoring freshly made sweet-and-sour ribs.