I won't arborio with the details.

Mode: 1-2 Player
Hardware: Pan
Accessories: Lady Grey Tea

I was going to make a nice mushroom risotto with some mushrooms that I had in the fridge but TWIST they were mouldy.

Sad mushroomy grave.

:'(

I could eat nasty sainsbury's seafood mix EVERY DINNER.

So I had to improvise with whatever else I had. Seafood mix, carrots and beans, half an onion, sweetcorn and of course the risotto rice.

Casually stealing Flander's sandwich materials as usual.

Lots of soy spread, garlic and finely chopped parsley. I melt the butter over the rice before I add the water incrementally.

Not necessary if you aren't this bored.

This is a finely chopped up vegetable stock cube. That also goes in.

Broth it like it's hot. Broth it like it's hot.

Here I add the water and the other vegetables. You can kinda leave it for a while but keep coming back to stir and add more water when it gets soaked up.

The mug says 'PIG'.

Now is a good time to make a cup of tea! I like lady grey tea. Did you know that bergamot tea was invented to offset the nasty taste of northern hard water? FUN FACT.

Grains before prawn.

Once it was nearly ready, I added the pre-cooked seafood mix and frozen sweetcorn and stirred it in for a bit till it had warmed up.

Weeaboo chopsticks not necessary either.

Post-mortem: **** I enjoy this, I enjoy risotto in general, but I also like that 'seafoody' taste that a lot of people really don't like. Some seafood dishes I make are great because they don't taste 'fishy' in that way, but this one really really does. So... uh... yknow... to each his own... different strokes.. and uh.. keep watching the skies.

Pre-Halloween Party, aka Halloweenween

Mode: Party Game!
Hardware: Everything.
Accessories: Black vodka cocktails.

Green Sage and I had some CRAZY idea that we'd have a little party this weekend that involved us making loads of halloween themed treats. See, halloween is prettymuch the only time in an entire year that you can actually purchase pumpkin, and thus make pumpkin pie or ravioli or both. We enlisted the assistance of 2 other specialist warriors, who need to give me code names later and I'll probably amend this if I don't forget.

Don't 'boo' me! I'd like to see you do a better job!

Here's the basic spread, minus the sausages cause they were still in the oven. Turns out I didn't really have many informative pics of the process, so I'll have to just show you the finished products. Most of this is vegetarian, with the exception of the bits that had meat on them.

Pumpkin Pie

The pumpkin pie was a bit of an arse, because while I though I had a food processor gathering dust in the corner, apparently it is a non-functioning food processor that does not switch on. So the pie was very, um... fibrous and chunky, however, the double cream and spices made it taste great, and making the pastry and the mix ourselves we were able to make it egg free, for one of our party members is allergic to eggs.

Severed Fingers and Pomegranate

Cut the crusts off a slice of bread, add jam, rolled up, pinch one end carefully and stick an almond slice on it, and spread jam on the base of the other end.

Black Spider Pizza

Patrick offered to make us full on pizza-bases for our pizzas, with big thick dough that tasted fantastic! I arranged mozzarella slices in the shape of a cobweb, and used black olives for the spiders, slicing some of the olives into slivers to make the legs. I'm really happy with how this one came out, the spiders are hella creepy!

Red Spider Pizza

And for the meatatarians and olive-haters (like me!) I made a red-spider alternative using pepperoni and red pepper slices.

Eyeballs and Coffins

Eyeballs in a jar are made with lychees stuffed with black cherries, 'pickled' in ginger ale. The coffins are mini mars bars with the edges cleverly trimmed.

Pumpkin Ravioli

Pumpkin and sage butter ravioli made by Green Sage, a very thick and meaty alternative to meat.

Fried Beetroot and Carrots

A side-dish that I thought it would look kinda halloweeny.

Monster Faces

Egg-free banana cupcakes by Sage and Ned. Some creepy monster faces going on, I thought the gold teeth were a real nice touch!

Sausage Roll Mummies

I got this idea from somewhere on the internets, bought some chilled puff pastry, cut it into strips and wound it around sausages to make some adorable mummies!

The 'Decor'

And these are our... um... pumpkin... carvings. Ahem. Yeah.

I Dream of Tagine

Mode: 2-3 Player
Hardware: Pans
Accessories: Orange Juice

I'm trying to write this up while watching The Goonies for the first time, and I'm not sure if I can do this because it turns out The Goonies is completely INSANE. Have you seen this film? It's like watching an improv class with like 5 kids who are all considered 'the mental kid' in their group of friends. Anyway, food, yes.

To finish up that other half of the instant Moroccan couscous, I decided to make a lamb tagine. Now, tagine is actually the name of the cooking pot I think, so it's not really a tagine because I don't have one.. of those... but... who cares? Here are the spices I put in it.

So I picked up some lamb for this right, man, lamb is EXPENSIVE these days! Like way more expensive than beef, what's even up with that?

I fried some onion, lamb and pine nuts together in the spices. MMMM And then I added tomato puree and frozen peas.

The couscous is pretty instant, so I just put that in hot water for like 5 mins while the frying was finishing.

Post-Mortem: ***** REALLY good actually.  Spicy and aromatic and stuff. Worth the overpriced shell out for some lamb chunks? mmmaybe. Also the goonies is still insane it's like a film made out of outtakes its blowing my mind.

Get Stuffed.

Mode: 2-4 Player
Hardware: Oven
Accessories: Lime Juice

Made another sunday roast this weekend! Decided I'd have my first go at using stuffing. I bought some dried instant type stuffing because it was on sale and sounded pretty nice, but strangely it didn't say anything in the instructions about actually stuffing it inside anything, simply baking it in a tray. What's up with that? Is it not the done thing anymore?

2 mixtures going on here: one to go ON the chicken, one to go IN the chicken. I mixed some olive oil with sage, black onion seed and lemon juice to be the herby glaze that I thought would go well with the stuffing. I think it was sage and sausage flavour or something.

Popped the chicken, a free range corn fed from devonshire, possibly called 'pecky', in the oven for 75 minutes.

Post-Mortem: **** Good, good. The trouble with chicken is though, I think it's pretty hard to get wrong. You kinda rely on the fact that meat is already delicious just the way it is, and go from there. Oh also that salad was terrible I need to throw that dressing out it's so old it had the consistancy of snot.

Grizzly Pie

Mode: 4 Player
Hardware: Pan, oven.
Accessories: stuff.


The classic mash-topped non-pastry meat pie is usually named after the kind of farmer or hunter that would be most inclined to eat or provide meat of that animal. Lamb mince is shepherd's pie, seafood is fisherman's pie, etc. So who or what is most likely to be the patron for a pie that's entirely salmon? I can think of none better than the north american grizzly bear. Hence, Grizzly pie.

So what's the dealy yo? I was going to make a mixed fish pie because I had a bunch of potatoes and a small fillet of salmon leftover, but instead of finding any other kinds of fish at my local, the options were only more salmon. So I was like FINE.

 Try to get in with the boiling your potatoes as early as possible, because for some reason some days it takes for-goddamn-ever. Really, I should have totally diced the potatoes. But I did not think of that.

UGHH me vegetables have frozen through! I swear some ass is going around turning the fridge temp up all the time. Like how all my stupid flatmates wash their clothes on 60 degrees, I have this predition that its just because they don't know shit and are picking a random number that seems 'medium' enough instead of realising that you can wash everything at 30 degrees like all the billions and millions of TV adverts and global warming PSA's have been saying for the past 10 years now if you'd only paid attention instead of switching your brain off whenever you see something that seems like 'mum stuff'.

So I chopped the salmon and all the leftover vegetables I had from the vegetarian sushi evening. Man, these look really good right now. Shame I have to cook the shit out of them.

I added finely chopped parsley, lemon juice, garlic, pepper and a bit of sugar. Usually fish pies have a white or cheese sauce, but try making a white sauce for a dairy allergic person. Not that easy. I decided to go the tomato route instead. It's legit, don't worry.

And finally, some tomato puree, and mixed it all up. The potatoes were taking aaaaaaaaaages to cook, and so I got bored of attacking them with a knife and decided to pre-cook the meat mixture, just in case that helps in some way.

FINALLY, geez. Actually, even now its still not properly soft enough but it's like 8pm and we have to eat SOMETIME THIS EVENING.

Also remembered to add some frozen peas and carrots that I was gonna add but forgot.

Put the mash on top, and in the oven for 25 more mins.

Post-Mortem: **** Nice! Potatoes a little too 'al dente', and you couldn't really taste the tomato, but pretty good just with a salmony vegetabley potatoey flavour. And you can always add the ketchup.

That's what sushi said!

Mode: 4 Player
Hardware: Pan, Steamer, Sushi rolling accessories.
Accessories: Vodka and 7up.

I went out on a magical journey to Manchester and brought back a fellow warrior, EMERALD SAGE who loves the animals, but not so much on a plate. I wanted to show her my awesome ability to make vegetarian sushi. And also non-vegetarian sushi. Oh, also noodles.

Segregated for their own benefit.

We delegated a sidequest to her Bee-Eff to pick us up some food items while I prepared some sushi rice in the steamer. In the mean time, I got bored and started chopping vegetables for it. So far all I got is pickled beetroot and mangetout.

I'm still suspicious about whether or not bayleafs do anything.

Prepared a noodle soup stock thing to cook the noodles in. Cant really remember what I put in this. Lotsa soy sauce, some bean paste, salt and pepper, a bit of coriander and ginger I think?

Ramen-Ra, appointed by his noodly appendage.

Noodles go in! I'm gonna try juggling cooking noodles with making sushi and hope I don't burn anything.

Also booze. Hi mum!

Hooray! Our buddy has returned with the goods we require to continue. We've got prawns, salmon, spring onion, shiitake mushrooms, a cucumber.

Yes everyone, that is a Duckula egg cup.

Here's the set-up I handed to Emerald Sage, I taught her how to roll sushi nori.

...filled with vinegar.

You get the seaweed wrap, put the rice and fillings all on one edge, like so...

This is how we roll.

Then you roll it up using the bamboo mat to aid your evenness and grip, and seal the end by moistening it with some rice vinegar. You then chop it with the sharpest knife you can find. Good luck with that, though.

Since the salmon we got was uncooked fillets and not smoked, I stuck that in the steamer for a while while we made the vegetarian rolls.

Cooked the shiitake out of them.

Here's the noodles cooking well, they get spring onions, mangetout and shiitake mushrooms. I was gonna fry them separately to put on top, but I ended up nearly burning them so I mixed them in the noodles instead.

The game genie of cooking.

Here's another way to roll sushi things... in a funky little sushi roller gadget! Doesn't work so great with seaweed though.

Still quicker than making a pie.

I then assembled all our creations, and as you can see for comparison, a vegetarian and non-vegetarian meal side by side.

Post-Mortem: ***** Looks snazzy. Tastes snazzy, vegetables or non. I love me some sushi. I think the others liked it too.