100 Ways of Cooking Mushrooms: How to Survive When Hunting for Horcruxes

The Kondo craze had finally sunk into Hermione, and she had designated Sunday as cleanup day. She decided to tackle the stuff in the attic. She'd been avoiding the task, because even after thirty years as a witch certain Muggle attitudes remained in her bones, and avoiding "difficult" house chores was one of them. Granted, magic meant that she could have just Evanesco'd everything away, or she could've called a house elf to do it - but she didn't think that Vanishing one's mess was quite the same as sorting everything out properly, and she still wasn't comfortable with letting house elves do her chores. In keeping with the Mari Kondo method she had three boxes out (this time, aided with an Undetectable Extension Charm and a Featherlight Charm; Hermione might still do some things the Muggle way, but other things were just way better with magic).

She was a little bit worried that the Donate box might end up regurgitating its contents if she stared at it long enough, so she had fixed it so that anything she put there would be concealed until the box was sealed and the counter-charm performed; less chance to regret giving up things she couldn't see. Not that Hermione was against donating things to the needy, but she was intending to put some of her old books in there and she felt that she was going to loose her cool if she saw a pile of books waiting for her to say good-bye. In a similar way, the Discard box was charmed so that anything she put in there would disappear from her sight, automatically being sent to the appropriate recycling or composting receptacles. Hermione was currently working on some legislation to allow a modification to the Statute of Secrecy, allowing witches and wizards to use magic to shrink and vanish garbage in the vicinity of Muggles, but it was slow going; the best she could say was that her own house's carbon footprint was as small as humanly possible.

The first two hours of cleanup went briskly. Into the boxes went old jumpers, faded Quidditch uniforms (Golpalott's Exceptions to Transfiguration provided a limit to the number and amount of repairs or expansions that could be done on different materials, as much as Hermione regretted losing her favorite sleepwear), out-of-date magazines, and for some reason, a frilly pink tutu. She had just come back from a quick trip to the toilet when she picked up an old, battered, beaded, purple bag.

A small smile crept across Hermione's lips as she opened the bag and thrust her arm in as far as it would go. Surprisingly, the twenty-year-old Undetectable Extension Charm she'd used on it was still okay. She'd tried her best when bespelling the bag, after all. She began pulling things out of the bag: an old tent, now smelling mildly of dust and strongly of mildew rather than the fragrance of cat urine that prominently featured in her memory of the thing; a battered cauldron, its bottom just a tad too thin; some crumbling bunches of herbs. Another foray brought a familiar shape to the tips of her questing fingers. Hermione firmly grasped the paper spine and pulled a book out.

It was, apparently, a cookbook, entitled "100 Ways to Cook Mushrooms". The name scrawled under the title was blurred, but Hermione knew that handwriting as well as she knew her own. She smiled fondly and rubbed it. "Prat," she murmured.

She sat back on her heels for a moment and opened the book, her hands running over the crisping edges of the pages.