“Draco, what did you do?” a tired Harry (also known as a normal Harry because when you got down to it, when wasn’t Harry tired) said in that drawn out tone one used when trying to suss out just what kind of trouble a dog or a young child had gotten into.
“I didn’t do anything!” Draco shouted back at Harry from the kitchen where he had been in the process of making himself some lunch.
“Uh huh.” Harry said blandly as he stared at the sizable package sitting just outside their front door that had prompted his questioning of Draco. It was not unusual for Draco to get a package that he hadn’t remembered to tell anyone else that he was expecting. He by far bought the most things online out of the five of them and there had even been a couple of times when he’d gotten something delivered that not only hadn’t he been expecting but didn’t even know what it was that he’d gotten (and no, he didn’t have a shopping addiction).
A bit curious now (because he didn’t remember buying anything recently), Draco made his way out of the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about. He checked the package Harry was staring at; yep it was addressed to him. That was odd since he hadn't ordered anything recently and thus wasn't expecting anything to be delivered (or at least not that he could remember anyway). He shrugged at Harry and started to do the only sensible thing he could think of - carry the mystery package into the house.
“What the hell” Harry sputtered as he kind of shook himself out of whatever fugue he’d fallen into after finding the package and followed Draco and the package back into the house.
“If you want to open a parcel on our front stoop go ahead with your next one. I’m going to open mine inside like a normal person.” Draco snorted as he carefully put the package down on their coffee table. It had been a tad on the heavy side, but not so heavy that he’d had trouble lifting it (or at least not for very long; it’s not like he had a strength quirk after all and the weight of the package was kind of running up against the limits of what he could comfortably lift).
Harry just rolled his eyes and closed the door. “Well, what is it?” he asked (he might’ve been a wee bit crabby. He’d sort of been taking a nap on the couch when the delivery man had rung the bell, waking him up out of his light doze).
“I’ll let you know when I’ve opened it up.” Draco shot back with an eye roll of his own. He grabbed a pair of scissors out of the nearby desk and set about carefully opening the package. Naturally, inside the packing box was another box; tightly packed in so as to make removing it from the shipping box a right pain. Eventually he was able to carefully remove the box from its shipping box, allowing him to get a good look at what had been sent to him, "It's a freeze dryer?"
"Oh, I've heard of those. They let you make freeze dried food at home - like that astronaut ice cream you find in the natural science museum's gift shop. I’m not sure why someone would want one though.” Harry said, brightening up a little. He could admit that it was a pretty cool concept; certainly he’d enjoyed the astronaut ice cream when he’d had the opportunity to eat it (mostly for the novelty of it then for the actual flavor since it was a bit on the chalky side of things).
“A paranoid survivalist prepper who was also all about being one hundred percent certified organic, locally sourced, and a bunch of other buzzwords that fit that kind of hipsterish lifestyle.” Draco replied as he searched the shipping box for the packing slip. He knew he hadn’t ordered a freeze dryer or really anything similar to it like a food dehydrator (mostly because technically they already had one. Multi function kitchen gadgets for the win!), “Or someone who has to have every latest cutting edge kitchen gadget to come out no matter how far down the molecular gastronomy rabbit hole they have to go.”
“True. So I guess the question is why would you want one since we never really use the dehydrator setting on our toaster oven/air fryer. Unless your boss...” Harry agreed.
Draco shook his head. “It wasn’t me. Prepping’s more your or Ron’s style than mine. And my boss would’ve let me know about it ahead of time if he was going to send something.”
“If you didn’t get it, and your boss didn’t get it for you, then who did?” Harry asked.
“I don’t know. There wasn’t a packing slip included and the return address on the shipping label’s for the store not whoever sent it. It doesn’t feel like it’d be Severus or Blaise’s style to send something like this - or at least, not something they’d be doing at this stage. We only just met Blaise a few days ago and while Severus used to be my godfather back Before, only you’ve formally met him (seeing as I was too sick at the time to really meet him when we first ran into him). Plus, it’s not my birthday for a couple more months and I haven’t reached any sort of present getting milestone recently.” Draco said, scrutinizing the freeze dryer’s box.
“Maybe there’s a note from whoever sent it in the freeze dryer’s box itself?” Harry suggested.
“I think that that’d be a bit odd. Usually those kinds of notes only come with more personalized things like jewelry or hand made arts rather than factory made kitchen appliances; something about mass production versus custom made orders. But if you help me get it into the kitchen and find a good place to put it, we can see.” Draco said, thinking it over.
Draco managed to pick up the (rather heavy) freeze dryer and walk it into the kitchen while Harry simply (and unhelpfully) followed him in. Their kitchen was a good size for the five of them and modern enough not to need redoing to bring it up to the current fashionable standards for another few years yet. It had all the standard equipment: a microwave, a slow cooker that doubled as a rice cooker (well, that’s how they thought of it anyway. It actually was a rice cooker that also worked as a slow cooker but since they didn’t eat all that much rice but did make a fair amount of slow cooked meals thanks to their often hectic schedules and how easy it was to just toss a bunch of stuff into a slow cooker and press start before heading off to work that’s how they thought of it), two different coffee makers (one that could brew up to a full pot and took traditional coffee grounds and one that used self contained pods to brew by the cup on demand), a stand mixer with a bunch of seemingly random attachments (and just why did they have an attachment to make pasta when they just bought the premade stuff?), a waffle maker, a fondue set (that was a gift from one of Ron and Percy’s relatives who was well known for being a bit out of touch), a blender, a soda making machine, a food processor... For a bunch of people who didn’t think of themselves as cooks, their kitchen was pretty tricked out.
It took both Draco and Harry about ten minutes to actually unbox the freeze dryer and find a decent spot of counter space for it to live (for the moment anyway. Chances were that it’d end up getting moved around during one of their sporadic kitchen rearangings mostly depending on how much they’d end up using it, how much they needed the counter space for other things, and how much of a bitch it was to move in the first place. The fact that it was both large and heavy meant that it likely would stay there for a long time before the annoyance of having it there outweighed the hassle of actually moving it somewhere else). And as per usual for these things, the freeze dryer itself was as tightly packed in its box as its box had been in the shipping box.
“Now what?” Harry asked as he did his best to sweep the last of the bits of broken off styrofoam off the counter so it could be properly thrown out.
“We test it out.” Draco said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world (which it was, but also not).
“What should we make to test it out then?” Harry asked slightly snarkily (to be fair, while using it was the obvious answer it wasn’t the only answer. Just because you got a new bit of kitchen kit, it didn’t mean that you had to use it right away. Or, as in the case of their fondue pot, at all).
“There really aren’t all that many limits.” Draco replied as he began to flip through the freeze dryer’s owners manual looking to see if there were any suggested recipes included. Most modern kitchen appliances included those with the instructions so that the people who bought the appliance in question had some idea what the appliance was capable of (which made it a lot easier for a person to justify buying something like that on impulse instead of doing a ton of research on the subject beforehand that had the chance of dissuading someone from getting the appliance in the first place - or worse yet, buying it from the competitor), “Fruit, vegetables, and ice cream are kinda the obvious things but you can freeze dry practically anything. Of course it’ll take about a day for anything to be ready, but we have three shelves worth of space to work with so...”
“Experimentation time?” Harry gleefully asked.
“Experimentation time.” Draco agreed just as gleefully. He headed over to the fridge to look for something good to try while Harry began to drag out some pots and pans for them to work with. Sure they’d toss some cut up fruit or vegetables in there (because why not. Plus, freeze dried fruit or vegetables made for a nice healthy snack), but at the same time they wanted to see just what they could do when it came to cooked foods (and who knew. It might end up being cheaper in the long run to make their own emergency rations).
“What on earth are the two of you doing?!” Percy said with exasperation as he walked into the kitchen after yet another long day at the office. Harry and Draco stopped in the middle of their ‘experimentation’, took a look at the mess they’d managed to make out of the kitchen in their zeal to test out their new ‘toy’ (and finally realizing exactly just how long it would take to freeze dry anything, let alone the large collection of foodstuffs they thought it would be cool to try out), and smiled sheepishly at Percy before beginning to clean up their mess.