Thank you answering my QOTW about the. Lakes bar birthday. You did mention in the fic that Bellamy had a good relationship with everyone and that they all hung out in various phases of their careers.
However, you never touched on Octavia’s history and i love that her and Murphy used to work together. It makes sense that she would trust him in her kitchen . Has Octavia’s training just been her learning on the jobs and ideating on the best flavors, etc? How did she come up with the beer batter recipe. I love the thought that she’s pretty much all learn from experience and self taught with trial and error.
Anytime! You should always feel free to ask me about anything you want to know more about from any AU! I can't always get specific prompts/one shots to work, but a question about specific people or events is almost always something I can answer pretty thoroughly/quickly/without having to set aside special time. Sometimes it takes me a little longer to get to an ask and that's usually because I want to give it proper attention, and when my life winds up and gets busier, I don't have as much time to give things my full attention, but i know they're there and will get to them eventually!
I have always pictured Octavia and Murphy as Portland Locals who grew up working. They had their first jobs at 13 and they worked a lot. Instead of doing a sport or an activity, they had jobs. There are TONS of restaurants in Portland and you can make good money in them, they're always in need of work, sometimes it's under the table, sometimes it's not, and I imagined Murphy and Octavia have been running into each other in kitchens since they were sophmores in high school.
Octavia also worked very hard in school because she thought going to college would be her only way to get the hell out of town and away from the life she hated, but quickly realized acadamia wasnt for her, the kitchen was, and she was back in portland after the first semester and started to take herself much more seriously. She started working anywhere that would have her and learning anything she could. She mentions that she keeps up with food tv and food magazines and food news. I think Octavia knows how to study and learns really well, but she hasn't had a lot of great teachers so she has had to stumble upon things herself. She knows how to make connections between food but she doesn't know how to explain it. Similar to extremly talanted musicians that can't read music.
The beer batter was probably originally someone else's bad recipe that she made thousands of times working the fry station at a shitty tourist bar where she had to make fish and chips twelve hours a day every day of the summer. She has a natural gift and instinctively over time started tweaking it. Every basket she drops in the fryer is a chance to improve. Octavia's brain is always on the next move, the connection between the two, that whole 'get knocked down, get back up' canon mentality of 'this next one will be better because I can be better.' Practice and repitition gets Octavia to where she is, and cooking/working is literally ALL she does. She doesn't really have days off, she works all the time and when she's not working, she's either asleep, or thinking about work.
By the time we meet her in the main story, she does have Murphy and some other staff that allows her to relax a tiny bit, but not really.
She was born with an extreme work ethic, she learned flavor on her own through trial and error, she was taught hustle and process over a bunch of kitchens, but no one has shown her refinement and elevation, and that's a hard one to sort out on your own. That's where Lexa and Indra come in, and that refinement and specific encourgagement creates a really genuine confidence in Octavia that she should be proud of all she's done, she should recognize how rare her natural talent is, and she can only go soaring up from here. The smarter you are, the faster you can get smarter. The more you know as a cook, the faster you can learn and do more as a cook.
I like to think that if things were different in canon, Lexa and Octavia would've had a good relationship, and that's part of where their relationship comes from in Quality Ingredients. Indra could see that Octavia had a natural talent that needed guidance or it would get her in trouble. Lexa didn't really have the time, circumstance, or perspective to appreciaite that about Octavia, but I think they have a lot of fundamental similarities. They were on opposite sides, so obviously that would be an immediate threat. I like to think about how different things would be between them if the grounders and sky people had been set up to better trust each other sooner.
