Delicious in Dungeon #66: Final Gratin

The starch boys are at war again.. can't you be more like cheese and tomato?

We've got a bit of a decision to make on this one. In Japanese cuisine, gratin is typically a macaroni bake, sometimes with veg and chicken or prawns, and bechamel sauce & cheese. But in Europe, its a potato bake, using slices of potato with bechamel & cheese.

All we know is this recipe has to incorporate plenty of our FINAL MEAT. So, I decided to get minced meat, and do kind of a cross between a cottage pie and a gratin dauphinois, which is the potato one. I also have a bunch of leftover vegetables, so we'll work a bit of that in too.

I've peeled the potatoes and im gonna shove them in the steamer, that way I can leave them and I dont even have to keep an eye on them as they do their thing.

I've roughly chopped the onion, and a bit more finely chopped the celery and carrots and we can fry them up in a bit of oil.

We could also enhance it with garlic, ive got a big jar of garlic paste I can crack open. 

We can also throw the meat in already, and just cook it all till its nice and browned.

Again just going with my nose on these spices. I'm using worcestershire sauce, oregano, nutmeg, black pepper, chilli powder and paprika.

Thats looking good, we can turn the heat off and let it sit while we make the bechamel sauce aka white sauce.

I always forget how deceptively easy this is... just a couple tablespoons of butter and flour...

melt the butter and mix it until it becomes a beige paste

and then you can just slowly mix in milk as you heat it until you have a nice thick sauce. Why did I use a fork instead of a whisk? I could have used a whisk. Whatever.

while thats warming up we can drop the cooked mince in the chosen casserole dish. I choose a big round flat one. Oh god its gonna get too full again isnt it.

Looks like a sauce, check!

Potatoes are steamed. Hmm. I dont know if they are supposed to be pre-cooked, they are quite a lot fluffier and starchier than I expected. Makes it hard to slice them actually. Still, that wont matter because the gratin looks all lumpy in the manga.

Our fluffy potato layer! yep its definitely overfull again.

The white sauce! And we can add another layer of seasoning here. I've just got paprika salt, pepper and nutmeg.

And now, we have a decadent 2 types of cheese! Cheddar for flavour and mozzarella for texture. Is it me or do they look like the mario bros?

****

Is it me or did i overreact to the overly wet pie and end up making something a bit dry? I should have added more/thinner sauce. Apart from that minor room for improvement though (and the potatoes cut a bit too thick), its super delicious! Meaty, cheesy, flavourful. I absolutely would make this again.

Delicious in Dungeon #63: Final Meat Pie

We're in the final stretch! But, deceptively, there's a whole series of these recipes. They all feature the same final ingredient.

A mysterious meat! If you read the manga you know. We gotta use something versatile that comes in a lot of cuts, so I'm going to be using pork.

The first cut is "breast and liver", and ok I don't know what pork breast would be, but ive chosen a lean cut, and i couldnt find any liver so i got sausages. Whatever, I just think they'll go well in a pie. We also got onions, mushrooms, aubergine, and tinned carrots cause they were out of fresh! Oh and some pastry, because, well, you'll see later how bad I am at handling pastry.

Chopping the onion into medium chunky chunks.

Followed by the mushrooms..

I'll put the onion straight in a pan to fry and put the chopped mushroom and aubergine aside so we can cut the meat last.

The pork fillet. Tenderloin, is it? Always seems to be quite nice to cook with.

And 2 of the "chorizo spiced" sausages sliced up.

Now, we get to add plenty of undisclosed spices. It's a bit of a scattershot here, but im leaning into the chorizo idea a bit. We'll have just a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, plenty of chilli flakes, celery salt, paprika, black pepper, and a sensible amount of fennel seed and thyme flakes. And another of those concentrated chicken stock capsule things.

Mm spicy! once the pork and onion are looking somewhat browned ill throw in the mushrooms and aubergines next.

And try and melt down the stock in a little bit of water, though i expect the vegetables to produce a fair bit of liquid as they cook.

When everythings had time to cook and soften we can add in the tinned carrots last, as they're already soft.

Oops its very wet in there. Perhaps we can thicken it up with some cornflour?

I had a bunch of leftover bits of square pastry to use up, so ive just kind of.. yeah this is just how I do pies. No technique.

At least its the right size! Now for the lid... I guess it need to be...

about this big!! haha!

Hell yeah im a genius

thats not so bad, is it? Its vaguely pie shaped. Now it can go in the oven for like 40 mins or until.. yknow, baked looking. The insides are all cooked so its just the pastry.

*****

Yeah ok its a little wet. A little soupy. What i should really have done is strained out some of the liquid and made a gravy on the side! Anyway it tastes AMAZING. A delicious blend of spices and vegetables gave this a super flavourful sauce.

Delicious in Dungeon #27: Cockatrice Stone-Baked Mother-And-Child Dish with Starchy Sauce

The dungeon's "cleaners" really blur the line between magic and monster, these microscopic mites repair the dungeon according to the whims of the dungeon lord.

Anyway today we're eating a brick I guess.

Coz its a fridayy and i have to work, i'm cooking up the grains ahead of time. These are the same barley grains from the porridge recipe , which was a while ago now. But yeah, they keep.

And then we have a TON of leftovers. Cockatrice rib meat (minced), mashed dryad fruit, grated mandrake, depetrification herb, leafy greens (from my planter), and harpy eggs. Filling!!

Here's the cooked up barley, good to get that out of the way for now.

Throwing the meat straight on with some veg oil, and the recipe just says "seasoning: to taste" so I guess its a choose your own adventure today. Since this is sort of inspired by oyakodon, I'm going to try using some japanese 7-spice mix (shichimi togarashi) the warm pepperyness should go well with the pumpkiny flavours. And also some salt. I dunnoooo

Using the rest of the defrosted dryad and half of the (still frozen) mandrake. Maybe I should have used less, this is gonna be so much stuffffff

And for the freshies, just a bit of the depetrification herb and all those leaves sliced up. They just sort of re-grew in my planter, so I hope they are kale. They look like kale I think? They taste like.... leaf.

We can just sautee this for a while. There's so muuuuch.

OK now for the real hook of the recipe. I wanted to imitate the "edible hollow brick bowl" made out of dungeon cleaner secretions. At first I thought about a loaf of bread or something... but then I had a brainwave: simple pastry!? So i've got my conveniently sized loaf tin, and some pre-made rolled shortcrust pastry.

Now, I don't really have a plan for this... i need the baking paper to stop it sticking to the pan or else I won't be able to take it out. But how do I, like...

Wait, I have an idea!! If i blind bake it outside of the pan first, and then when its firmed up a bit i switch it back inside, and then it.. wont stick or collapse...? Is this... an idea...?

While we find out, time to taste test the cooked uh... pulp. Its very orange, hard to believe theres meat in there. It smells like pumpkin pie, which is a bit unsettling for a savory dish. On taste test though... its good!

I don't know what an "egg sauce" is, but it just says its made with "harpy egg" so ill just mix up egg?

Actually I looked it up, its some whole japanese raw egg sauce with lemon, miso, and some other stuff. I'm not going to eat raw egg tonight so im going to use some of this "yuzu salad dressing" to flavour it, and then pour it on top and let it cook with the rest of the um... the... brick.

Oven check! We've got it where we want it, I think. Its hopefully just flexible enough to sort of fit inside the tin.

Yeah! Ok its a little rustic. I could have trimmed the edges and tried to shape it more closely but I didn't want to risk what little structure we have. It's definitely not watertight, and probably way too weak to hold the insane weight of all the fillings, so I doubt we can pop it out of the tin in the end.

But, you know... if this was a viable idea, don't you think the french would have invented this already?

Anyway, it's a brick shaped meal, so I have won. Here's the egg "sauce" on top, its seeping straight through the layers, I guess it might have been better off if I just cracked an egg straight on top. In the oven it goes until everything heated back up, and the egg is lightly cooked.

I hope this is good because theres gonna be a LOT of leftovers.

****

I like it! The egg seeped right through so there was zero chance of it coming out of the pan in one piece. The flavours are surprisingly comforting and nothing clashes, with the juicy meat and the egg really coming through. It kind of tastes... a bit like a sausage roll actually... It's lacking a little something though, it could use an extra sauce, something tangy and bitter, like mustard or cranberry..? Though it was a successfully edible experiment, I feel it strayed extremely far from the flavour concept of oyakodon or ankake that seemingly inspired the dish.

And it's mighty filling! I managed to eat about 1/3 of the brick. As you can see, the pan will be ok.