Recipe for Disaster
Step 1: An Eyeful Surprise
"No, Zelda! That's not how you peel a potato."
Princess Peach Toadstool was, oddly enough, in the position of mentor this fine afternoon. It just so happened that today, she decided to teach her friends the fine culinary arts of how to make a proper – or at least edible – dish.
Princess Zelda of Hyrule was standing over the kitchen sink, a knife held poised in one of her hands with a spotted and dotted potato in the other. She tilted her head slightly at the indignant Peach in front of her.
"I – I'm sorry."
Peach gave Zelda a hard stare for a moment, before breaking into a slight smile. She shook her head gently and said:
"Don't be. I just don't want you to cut yourself, that's all. Here, let me show you how to hold the knife properly."
She walked behind Zelda's back and brought her arms around her, guiding her motions gently. Zelda watched her directed fingers move daintily yet skillfully across the handle of the knife, holding it as though it were a brush instead of a dagger.
"You have to hold it like this," said Peach, proceeding slowly and smoothly through the steps. "And then you bring the knife at an angle to scrape the peel off slowly. There's no need to go too fast; slow and steady will do just fine, and you can never be too careful."
Zelda took in Peach's advice with a nod of her head. Doing this kind of work was not entirely unknown for her; she has had to prepare live game once or twice while she was on the run from one of her many kidnappings. But she mostly used magic to prepare her food, as it was more time efficient and more comfortable for her than doing things completely by hand. Zelda wondered if Peach got her cooking skills from foraging in the wild while on escapades from her more numerous kidnappings.
"Don't forget to peel out the eyes, now," said Peach.
"Eyes?" Zelda seemed puzzled by this terminology.
"The eye of the potato. The place where all the little roots and tubers come out," Peach said, pointing at one end of the potato, where a bellybutton shape was indented on the side of the potato.
"And how would you do that?" Zelda asked, sounding a bit more skeptical than questioning.
Peach let go of Zelda's hands and made a scooping motion.
"You gouge it out. Like how you would do it with a real eye," said Peach with a grin.
Zelda gave Peach a slightly incredulous look. The pink princess turned slightly pink.
"Er, I don't mean to be... morbid," said Peach sheepishly. "But that's really how you do it. You gouge them out. It doesn't have to be with a knife. A spoon would work just fine, I think."
"All right..."
It was apparent now that skepticism was prevalent in Zelda's expression. She laid the knife down and picked up a nearby spoon. Then, as though she were scraping out the innards of a pumpkin, Zelda dug into the potato and stuck it under the potato eye. After a few seconds, Zelda managed to get the spoon caught under it entirely, and that was her cue to scoop it out. With some slight effort, she yanked the eye out, perhaps with a little more force than she would have liked.
The momentum of the force caused the potato eye to go cruising across the kitchen, bouncing off the walls at a supersonic speed. Too surprised to move, all Zelda and Peach could do was stand there, listening to the eye ricocheting off of every surface for what seemed like forever. Eventually, the potato eye would have to stop, but not before it had hit something else along the way.
Eventually, poor Peach was the next target as she got blasted right between the eyes by the potato eye.
"Ow!" Peach yelped.
The cry snapped Zelda immediately out of her trance and turned to Peach, who had her hands covering the spot where the potato eye had landed.
"Are you alright – " Zelda began.
It was at that moment that Zelda got pelted on the back of the head by the eye, causing her to drop the spoon and potato. It was impossible to not recoil from the sudden pain. The impact of such a small object was rather frightening.
"Argh!" Zelda gasped, feeling her grip slip from the counter.
Zelda stumbled and lost her footing; in the blink of an eye, the two of them lay on top of each other, sprawled across the kitchen floor. The two of them, dazed, struggled to regain their senses, which was made all the more difficult by the never-ending bouncing of that dastardly potato eye.
Just then, the kitchen door opened. A furry, jovial-looking figure walked in, his sharp teeth bared in a feral smile.
"Hey, Princess One and Princess Two! Got any snacks..." began Fox McCloud, stopping when he saw the scene on the kitchen floor.
Zelda and Peach, both of whom were still recovering, both turned to look at Fox with a sort of detached disinterest. Only when they realized what position they were in did the two of them bounce back up immediately.
"It's not what it looks like – " Peach blurted out, only to get stopped mid-sentence by another hit in the face by the potato eye.
"Yes, Fox – " It took only a moment for Zelda to get hit by the potato eye again too.
Fox's eyes trailed from the two women to the flying object within the room, the object that had just hit the two princesses in their faces. The eye was still bouncing off of the walls too fast for anyone to see, even for someone with battle-trained eyes like Fox McCloud.
"How – " Fox began to phrase a question, only to suddenly have his mouth stuffed with a piece of a potato. The impact was strong enough to have hit the sensitive part in the back of Fox's throat, and promptly knocked him out. The two women watched as Fox slowly fell to the floor, landing with a loud conk.
Peach and Zelda blinked rather shockingly at what had just happened.
The topic of gouging out any eyes has since then become prohibited.