Food in the Steddilly / Harringroveson House
After the events of S4/5 calm down, life is starting to go back to normal, there's a small group of people who settled down a little differently.
Eddie, Steve & Billy bunking down in Hoppers old cabin afterwards.
Steve's house was either sold by his parents after the earthquake, offering to take him to wherever they were moving but he refused to leave the town or the kids. Eddie's trailer park is gone, shut down by the government for further watch just in case. Billy's reclusive now anyway, having barely survived his first encounter with the monsters, living out his healing in the hospital for most of S4's events.
Anyway. The boys basically end up making a home out of the cabin, it's small and cramped but they don't mind it. They work together to fix it up, work together to make it theirs and work together to keep it theirs too. Hopper helps them get supplies to build a small addition to the cabin, another bedroom but it rarely ever gets used by either of the boys. They stay in the same room, one big bed taking up most of El's old small room, bed pressed to the wall where the three crash every night.
It's cozy for them, safe and nightmares have practically gone away almost completely with constant company and touch. They aren't dating at the time, at least that they know of, merely existing together like well oiled machines that have always worked well together.
Food becomes something of a bonding activity for them, getting supplies, preparing, cooking and storage all being done together. Billy's always wanted to try out a garden, he admits a while later, prompting Eddie & Steve to surprise Billy with a small greenhouse hand built on the side of the cabin. They till the raised beds a little further off together and plant sees Joyce brings them.
Billy is surprisingly amazing at growing plants, growing food. He's got a green thumb and by the time harvesting comes around, they've got no where to store it all! So, Robin tells them about canning, something her grandmother did before she passed and thus that begins.
It's a full day of canning, picking, cleaning, cutting, boiling, waiting, storing. It's a lot of work but after a few days, their entire garden's been tucked away into jars for the winter.
Steve dives head first into trying to actually cook for real now, getting cookbooks from the thrift store, going down the pages and ripping them out to save when they like something, trashing the rest they don't.
Eddie encourages Steve to try weird things, foreign dishes, odd ingredients that they have to drive out to Indianan to get. Eddie love's the idea of different and new. He himself gets into the act of making herbs, drying them, breaking them down into powders before storing them in little jars he finds. Mushroom hunting becomes a past time for him, finding both edible and fun mushrooms they can use.
The cabin, after a few years, basically looks like a witches cabin in the woods once they've found their groove. Potato bags on the porch, hanging strings of the latest herbs Eddie's grown, pages of recipes and notes on how ingredients taste pasted up to the walls around the kitchen.
The extension on the house was never used by them so they turned it into a guest bedroom, a futon to fold out and shelves lining the walls for all their storage they'd need.
Even though everyone has to eat off their laps in the Harringroveson house, they all still somehow manage to fit the entire party into their home.
