"Hmm." Jayne tasted the food that had been placed in front of him with all of the seriousness of a connoisseur or a gourmet. "Yeah, not bad - I like that. Who fixed it up, anyway?"

"A pretty big group effort, actually," River admitted. "Simon, Kaylee, Inara, and myself."

"Yeah, it's good stuff, and thanks," Zoe added. "Might as well use the real stuff while we can, since the yeast rations don't spoil."

"And maybe by this time tomorrow night, we'll getting feasted by the Boros provisional government!" Jayne enthused, and took another big forkful.

"Not bad," Mal said, trying his food a little more cautiously once the rest of the table had tucked in. "What's it called, anyway?"

"You're kidding, right?" Kaylee asked him, "Just macaroni in spaghetti sauce." Mal's face remained a little blank. "Well, I guess it may not have been typical ranch food back on Shadow, but I'd figured you'd have run into Italian at *some* point in your travels."

"I've had eetalion food," Mal insisted, mangling the pronunciation a bit. "There was one time, before you signed up, when we ended up on Beylix, with some money to spend but no way off because..."

"Because of Bester, yeah," Zoe agreed, smiling at the thought. "Pretty good italian cook in the town there - introduced us to pizza, and catch-a-toree roasted chicken, and a few other things."

"Like, real chickens that used to cluck?" Jayne muttered, more than a little impressed. Mal nodded.

"We had pasta there, come to think of it," Mal muttered. "Spaghetti, which is a bit like these things." He poked at some shell-shaped pieces of macaroni. "But never a sauce like this."

"I'm not sure if you'll ever come across a sauce quite like this again, considering the effort we put in to making do with it," Simon admitted. "Half of the meat is yeast-based, and a lot of the 'vegetable' chunks. The other half of the meat was dry preserves. But the tomatoes and carrots are real - canned, but made from vegetables that grew in the ground, I'm pretty sure." After a bite, he r