Delicious in Dungeon #2: Man-Eating Plant Tart

 Oh no! a man has been man-eaten by this man-eating plant!

Don't worry Richter Belmont i'll avenge you, you sexy idiot.

I'm going to just dry roast the squash baraselia in its shell to soften it up...

When it had a headstart i put the aubergine betan in too. They'll be easier to work with and I wont have to worry about how evenly they cook in the middle of the tart.

Plan A was to see if the squash shell would make for a decent tart crust, but im not really feeling it, so fortunately I had a plan B

A bunch of easy-peel clementines! The crust is supposed to not be edible, and this will hopefully infuse the tart with a bit of pleasant citrus flavour.

hmm... I didnt think I really need to get it water tight, but is this really better than nothing...? I'm sorry I can't be senshi.

Some of the fruity-veg gets cubed, and then a bunch of the squash will go in the blender

Why not add a cheeky bit of extra clementine! and some water to help it mix.

This has blended thoroughly, its thick as hell which is nice. (Like our boy richter)

Now for the tart magic! I didn't actually have any scorpion broth leftover, so we'll use a vegetable stock cube, and for the power of slime gelatine, im trying a sachet of vegetarian gelatine. I'll plan to bake it in the oven and cool and just hope it solidifies somehow. I have never tested or tried anything like this before.

That blended baraselia (squash) gets mixed in with the hot vegetable jelly water..

It's poured recklessly over the way too loose peel, and topped with all the vegetables, including the tomatoes meeroak! But lets also season this with salt and pepper at this stage. Its going back in the oven for like 20mins and then gonna cool for a few hours... good thing i started this after lunch.

*

It's failed to set, maybe vege-gel wasnt the way to go... but thats not even the biggest problem. The cooked clementine peel is massively overpowering, and has made everything super bitter and marmalade-y, not pairing at all well with the vegetable stock. I'm going to scrape the rest of the vegetables out and cook them into something else like a curry. Oh well, you're not a brave adventurer unless you try something stupid once in a while....

Delicious in Dungeon #1: Huge Scorpion and Walking Mushroom Hot Pot

Dungeon food. Ah, dungeon food.

It's not hard to find low level critters like this in a dungeon. A giant scorpion, a slime, and a walking mushroom. The mushrooms a little small, but itll have to do.

Once they've been processed they look a bit more appetising! The scorpion sure looks like some fake prawns made from surimi, the mushrooms body and feet are like oyster and shiitake mushrooms, and the slime is dried into konjac noodles, a special type of clear low-calorie noodle.

First we fry up the meat and mush, to get it a bit brown I guess. Meanwhile we can forage for a few more things to make the food more flavourful!

A chopped up invertato (potato) and a couple types of moss (leaves and heart of bok choi)

Im gonna try and sear these cabbagey hearts a bit more, especially since I had stored them in my freezer.

And of course, lets boost the broth with some appropriate seasoning! I have some instant dashi powder, some white miso paste and some cornish seaweed salt.

In that goes with some hot water and noodles.

And now I can laboriously rearrange it to look like the hot pot...

***

It's a pleasant vegetabley flavour. A tiny bit fishy, a tiny bit mushroomy, but mostly cabbage-y. The mixture of textures is nice. A healthy meal in a pinch, but probably very low calorie.

Delicious in Dungeon: The Monster Meshi

 Ah, this manga series was made for me. I was already a huge fan before the anime came out, and with the manga wrapping up last year it was already set to be on the shortlist for my next challenge... so, here it is.

I will be following the manga recipes to completion, but for the benefit of anime fans I will throw in a spoiler marker post once I have caught up with the end of the anime season 1. I will also try not to spoil the story anyway, and see if I can keep any major plot points revealed in recipes nice and vague, with some tactful renaming if necessary. Hopefully at worst all that might be spoiled is potential monster encounters, minor details, and, of course, the recipes themselves.

Alright, time to see if Ocado has dragon meat........

Stardew Valley: Food Festival! - COMPLETE

Grandpa's ghost appeared to me in a dream... in his weird little diagonal bed... he told me I'm a Gourmet Chef now! 

Things I learned:

- So many ways to make a fish and seafood stew.

- DON'T use expired yeast!!

- Brown sugar is the secret to great fruit pies.

- Snails. They're edible I guess.

- Root vegetables, especially parsnips, are so versatile and underrated.

- Stardew Valley recipes lean very North American, and I wanna say... northern states?

- I still don't care for rice pudding.

Total Ratings:

*            x 3

**          x 11

***        x 18

****      x 23

*****    x 26

Average score: 3.72

Favourite Recipe: 

#20: Fish Taco, #46: Farmer's Lunch and #79: Tropical Curry

It's a three-way tie! I'm in charge so I'm allowed to do this. It was such a long challenge with so many good recipes, there were 3 distinctive chunks in the process where I was like "this is it, this is my favourite one of the challenge."

The fish taco was my first ever fish taco, my first time cooking with tuna steak and chimichurri as well. I wanna use them all for cooking more!! and have soft shell tacos again! That's a whole lot of horizons expanded.

Farmer's lunch was very representative of the wonderful simplicity of stardew's food: fresh vegetables, and a powerful combination of flavours. This reminds me of a pear & blue cheese omelet i had in a restaurant once, but using simple cheddar and sweet glazed parsnips makes it a cheap and easy dish to make at home!

I was anticipating Tropical Curry for the whole challenge... How easy would it be to make a pineapple bowl? Would it be sweet and sour and flavourful like I hoped? Finally when it came around it absolutely lived up to my hype!

Least Favourite Recipe:

#10: Strange Bun

Ugh, what was I thinking!? Every step in this process was frustrating. From the nasty smelling filling, to the unshapeable dough cones to the runny garnish, nothing was working how I hoped. I was convinced this would still be edible...

Guess what it made me sick. I actually thought it was the cockles, and tbh I still never want to eat those again, but after getting ill in a later recipe, I realised it might have been the expired yeast after all!!

This recipe really made me take a step back and reassess my approach, as I'm probably too brave and stubborn for my own good.

Special thanks:

Special thanks to the following resources:

stardewvalleywiki.com

Mo - the best at baking!

Twee - a star chef and plays stardew with me on weekends.
Tobi - my spreadsheet legend, morale booster and stardew witch wife.

Stardew Valley #81: Moss Soup

Ingredients: Moss

Item Description: It's thick and slimy, but edible

Moss soup!!! Easy.

What? You don't want to be food? Fine... maybe I can make some sort of alternative...

So when I first started this challenge... there were 80 recipes. But some busy game developer couldn't resist... they had to add just one more new recipe in a recent update! I don't think I can get any sort of edible moss, but I did find a recipe for a sea moss soup that im going to take inspiration from, though i'll be changing it so much you can hardly call it the same dish.

Let's start with peeling and cubing a bunch of potatoes, both regular and sweet potato.

Thats already quite a bit! These will take the longest to cook so im going to start boiling them in the water already and then slowly add everything else.

Peeled ginger and garlic ill just blend into a paste.

This is quite a bit of ginger, but its gonna be a big soup.

And then for the other spices: a cube of chicken stock, turmeric, allspice and orange pepper. Hopefully this will give it an interesting caribbean style flavour, making it different from our many, many other soups. Especially algae soup.

These black eyes peas are classic Caribbean and South American veg, and they're already pre-soaked so they wont need anywhere near as long as dried ones. I'll add about 4tbsp.

A tablespoon of honey! How medicinal.

Now im gonna throw in... this whole entire bag of spinach. I really wanted to get okra to make it "slimey" like the description... I even walked all the way to waitrose, but they were fresh out ;_; The recipe I am following has a little bit of many things including broccoli and cabbage... but I just want to use up the greens I bought and not have a ton of leftovers.

Gonna chop these up loosely, so we can really fill this soup out with goopy green clumps. What? It's moss soup! Its gotta be all.. goopy green clump-y

The algae is back, as our last attempt at a satisfyingly moss-adjacent ingredient. And because I still have loads to use up.

And lastly, some chopped green chillis i put in at the end so that hopefully they can be visible and look a bit like okra...? And a drizzle of olive oil. The more non-starch, non-grassy flavours we can get the better I think.

*****

Wow!!! I accidentally made something great again. It's so powerfully ginger-y and spicy, and the sweetness of the honey and sweet potato gives it this tropical summery flavour somehow. It's fiery and medicinal, yet tasty, satisfying and well balanced. Would make a great soup for when you've got a cold. Sometimes its good not to stick to the brief of making something... merely "edible".

cannibal!!

Stardew Valley #80: Squid Ink Ravioli

Ingredients: Squid Ink, Wheat Flour, Tomato

Item Description: Temporarily protects from debuffs.

We have squid ink! Well cuttlefish ink, basically the same. We have tomato in liquid form. I also didn't want to make my own ravioli, so I decided to get some. There was somewhat limited options of flavours, so I just had to follow my heart on what I thought might be acceptable to pair with seafood flavours. 

First lets make a strong start, frying up some garlic in olive oil. Is 3 cloves too much? Who cares, garlic.

While it burns browns I will decide on a bit of seasoning, ive got lemon pepper and chilli flakes. Probably best to put these in later but ill probably forget so maybe now is ok. Cooking.

Damn this ink is thicker than I thought! I don't know what I expected, but its a full on paste. I will just put enough in to make it black. We've also got tomato passata and white wine in now. A classic seafood pasta flavour imo.

Now we just gotta cook this pasta, very fast just 4 mins. Yeah sorry my hob is dirty needs a clean again, always needs a clean.

Meanwhile yep! Well it looks quite grey in the photo because its blown out, looks darker irl. It's already got a great consistency thanks to the ingredients so its ready to go.

Don't forget to drain the water out the ravioli. 

And geeeeeeently stir in the sauce, trying not to break the raviolis.

****

It's overpoweringly garlicky! Very zingy, very nice. The black colour makes it hard for my brain to process the tomato flavour. Its very pleasant. The squash and cheese filling is ok, but something like crayfish or pork might have been even better. With the power of the garlic, im not sure if the ink adds any subtle flavour of its own. But I have a ton of it left, maybe I should make a paella with it? Oh and does it protect from debuffs? Well its full of allicin and vitamin C, so... yeah...?