From Spawn of Endra's discussion of Gravy.
Intelligent Items of DF Felltower
11 hours ago
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Spawn Launches Food Blog
As regular readers know, when he's not doing radiocarbon measurement or kicking ass in Ara, Spawn of Endra is quite the food aficionado -- see his culinary arts-related posts here,
here, and
here, including this review. In this same vein, he has now launched a new food blog utterly dedicated to his culinary pursuits! The blog is called Coup de Gras and is worth checking out!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Caldo Ba (Gopher Stew), or Wilderness Foraging LARP
Propoundeth Ein Spawn:
Coincidental with hunting mechanics overtaking my focus in the last couple of days (please check out Talysman's stuff on hunting, gathering and malnutrition/starvation mechanics ... and encourage him to continue with his Liber Zero and Liber Blanc projects, wherein all of this great stuff may be compiled in two awesome places), I was trying to find some images for my disseration and ran across a sequence of photos of me cooking gopher stew in camp in Belize. Just to show that I'm not against capturing and cooking small game here's a little photo essay. The dish is call caldo ba in Spanish/Mopan Maya. One of the project members was paying folks to bring her ba heads for a study, and I eventually told her we should be getting the whole animal (duh, stupid gringos). So a Maya friend of our set some traps and snagged us Mr. Ba.
Coincidental with hunting mechanics overtaking my focus in the last couple of days (please check out Talysman's stuff on hunting, gathering and malnutrition/starvation mechanics ... and encourage him to continue with his Liber Zero and Liber Blanc projects, wherein all of this great stuff may be compiled in two awesome places), I was trying to find some images for my disseration and ran across a sequence of photos of me cooking gopher stew in camp in Belize. Just to show that I'm not against capturing and cooking small game here's a little photo essay. The dish is call caldo ba in Spanish/Mopan Maya. One of the project members was paying folks to bring her ba heads for a study, and I eventually told her we should be getting the whole animal (duh, stupid gringos). So a Maya friend of our set some traps and snagged us Mr. Ba.
Here is his head with hair (part of the study) and the rest of the gutted carcass with the hair singed and scraped off. Fresh ba meat smells a lot like rabbit meat, slightly sweet.
Here's the prep counter/pantry. On the left you see a wa'a leaf with a bunch of fresh culantro that was gathered by another Maya friend. It smells a lot like cilantro (coriander leaf for our UK readers), but is stronger and sharper. Good for caldo! Also the obligatory Belikin stout.
Here I am prepping the ba and vegetables (I imagine this the sort of prep that The Happy Whisk is always talking about). Ba was cut into 6 pieces so everyone could have a taste, and here is sitting in a bunch of garlic, salt and pepper. Also going in: literal Maya onions, bell peppers and tomatoes.
Now for a bit of browning the ba, onions and garlic. In a crappy aluminum pot! Yay! Why did I not change out of my field clothes, you ask? I probably wasn't digging that day, and had a beer shower (whereby drinking a few stouts makes you feel less dirty than you are).
You gotta problem with that?
Now adding the rest of the veggies.
Cooking gopher stew is a lonely business, my friends. That's the dinner table in the background that slopes violent to the right, and has delightfully warped and splinter-causing benches. Obligatory One Barrel Rum calendar in the background.
Here's the finished product with the achiote soup stock and culantro added.
And a portion of caldo ba along with the usual dinner items: rice and salsa, corn tortillas and unidentified breaded object, perhaps a piece of chicken. Overall, quite tasty. There's not a hell of a lot of meat on a gopher, but since these ones eat a lot of fresh corn and so forth, they have a not-so-gamey flavor. I recommend giving it a shot. Bon appetit!
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Optimal Foraging Theory and D&D Wilderness Mechanics: A Half-Assed Treatment
Said Spawn of Endra:
Hunting seems to be a hot topic in the last day or so, between this spell of Mr. Bat's that causes people to hunt (a great spell to clear a bunch of people out of a village so you could steal their stuff, if you ask me), and this Simple Hunting mechanic laid down by Mr. Talysman. I always dig what Talysman puts forth. His posts are often what I wish I could come up with instead of my own posts that are 80% material that only I find amusing, and maybe have 20% of something useful for anybody else. As I commented on his post, I think he's got a simple mechanic that is also nicely granular. But wilderness foraging rules still just stick in my craw, and I've touched on that once before when looking at the Joy of Cooking Grindhouse Edition.
In the comments to Tal's post I bitched about "Why is wilderness food-getting all hunting and no plant gathering?", and I said "Well when I'm in Belize I just go eat bush food and look at me I'm so special." What kind of a twat writes stuff that? But anyway, to me hunting game is just a big risk and big waste of time for the traveler. Here's my take on wilderness adventuring hunting.
First, why are you in the wilderness? You either have a specific goal to get to and you've decided it's quicker to risk going off-road to reach it, or you've got a vague sense that there's something in a general area and you've got to explore the hex until you find it. Or you got teleported there or whatever other deus ex machina scenario. [I have literally never played a hex crawl session, so please jump in and tell my why else you are in the wilderness.]
Second, why are you hunting? You ran out of rations, I guess. Is this bad planning? Lack of player skill? Or did something steal your rations, or they got rained on? Hmm. Well if it's either of the latter cases, the DM cares about not hand-waiving* the particulars of wilderness adventuring. If one has to resort to a hunting mechanic, simple or otherwise, one is probably the DM that wants grit and realism in the hexcrawl (or delights in another tool to throw shit at the PCs perhaps?). As a player, well, I'm going to buy so many iron rations and commission a 500gp sack for them that is both waterproof and has a chainmail outer lining before I play in your game.
The PC is hunting because he/she/it has no food. The player is hunting because the DM is stripping away attribute points like CON or STR (and CHA, obviously -- starving people are just NOT attractive), and probably HP. So I propose this axiom or something:
That's a problem with LabLord, which otherwise has a decent (i.e., plant-gathering option) mechanic: the penalties for starvation are left to the DM. Raggi's Grindhouse Rules (p.36) do give a mechanic, which is a Save vs. Poison each day or lose 1 CON. At the same time, he acknowledges the real problem is dehydration -- Save or CON is at half.
Note that I'm not proposing any mechanics myself. First off I'm too busy, otherwise lazy and stupid to do so. Second, I don't see the realism that it would add as adding fun overall. Any hunting mechanic must exchange PC time for caloric returns. That's at some cost of movement rates through the wilderness. Depending on the starvation mechanic, in most real situations one is better off just moving on toward the goal rather than spending time and energy chasing game they may not catch, i.e, get out of the wilderness. Time spent hunting is also time for Wandering Monsters to appear. They may either kill you or solve your starvation problem by becoming food. At worst, I envision a space where the party has to devote all their time to hunting rather than moving, and so end up in a positive feedback loop that locks them into sitting in place and not adventuring because they need to devote all their time to hunting. Sucks to that ass-mar.
Why hunt when you can gather?
I'm an archaeologist, and I draw on the anthropological traditions of cultural ecology and what is typically called human behavioral ecology in my work, among a billion other things. Before starting this post , I went back to some classics looking for data to show why hunting shouldn't take precedence over plant gathering. And I got confused. Here's a classic on Ache foraging by Hawkes et al. (1982)** that shows that deer and peccary are the highest ranked resources they encounter in Paraguay, and most plants and insects are lower ranked:
The ranking is based on the caloric return per unit of time devoted to search, pursuit, and handling/processing. So big animals are higher ranked, and when encountered they should always be taken as opposed to the palm hearts that present themselves at the same time (which are lower ranked due low calories and processing time). Beyond a point of caloric return per unit of time, some potential food sources should always be excluded from the diet, no matter how abundant or easy to get:
Ei/hi is energy per handling time by resource, and E/t is energy return per time invested in foraging given the breadth of resources in the diet (i.e., the return at rank 4 is for a diet that includes resources ranked 1-4 inclusive). It happens that plants are more abundant, so the encounter rate for these resources is higher than for game, but in this group of foragers a lot of the diet is made up of game (about 75% during the period of this study). But it's important that as the diet breadth increases, (the number of resources acquired from rank 1 to rank 12 increases), the average returns of foraging per hour increase. So all the stuff from rank 7 to 10, including the larvae, birds, palm products, capuchin monkeys, lead to overall higher average returns.
These returns are in kcal/hr, so for a 2000 kcal/day diet, this is going to mean ~2.5 hr foraging/PC/day when plants and all the better stuff is included (~800 kcal/hr return). If you only take big game (the two 1st ranked resources) and ignore other foods, you'll get big caloric returns when you bag them, but the hourly return rate goes down to ~100 kcal/hr, so it's going to take 8 times as long if you're picky. That assumes you're in Paraguay and you're with subsistence foragers, or have a good ranger, etc.
If you added the costs involved in devoting so much time to hunting, like random monsters encounters with no loot reward, some other plot-related time-crunch, then all of these things get shifted around. More time spent foraging = more bad stuff, and therefore PCs are foolish to go for the big kill. They should get on to their goal, and not sink time into hunting big game. But again, the DM and the players need to know the costs of starvation for these types of evaluation and decision-making to have any meaning.
And next time I put my money where my mouth is: The Spawn of Endra cooks gopher soup in Belize.
____________________________________________________________________
*Is it hand-waving or hand-waiving? Discuss on spellingpedantry.com.
** The reference is: Kristen Hawkes, Kim Hill, & James F. O'Connell. (1982).Why Hunters Gather: Optimal Foraging and the Aché of Eastern Paraguay. American Ethnologist, Vol. 9, No. 2, Economic and Ecological Processes in Society and Culture, pp. 379-398.
Hunting seems to be a hot topic in the last day or so, between this spell of Mr. Bat's that causes people to hunt (a great spell to clear a bunch of people out of a village so you could steal their stuff, if you ask me), and this Simple Hunting mechanic laid down by Mr. Talysman. I always dig what Talysman puts forth. His posts are often what I wish I could come up with instead of my own posts that are 80% material that only I find amusing, and maybe have 20% of something useful for anybody else. As I commented on his post, I think he's got a simple mechanic that is also nicely granular. But wilderness foraging rules still just stick in my craw, and I've touched on that once before when looking at the Joy of Cooking Grindhouse Edition.
In the comments to Tal's post I bitched about "Why is wilderness food-getting all hunting and no plant gathering?", and I said "Well when I'm in Belize I just go eat bush food and look at me I'm so special." What kind of a twat writes stuff that? But anyway, to me hunting game is just a big risk and big waste of time for the traveler. Here's my take on wilderness adventuring hunting.
First, why are you in the wilderness? You either have a specific goal to get to and you've decided it's quicker to risk going off-road to reach it, or you've got a vague sense that there's something in a general area and you've got to explore the hex until you find it. Or you got teleported there or whatever other deus ex machina scenario. [I have literally never played a hex crawl session, so please jump in and tell my why else you are in the wilderness.]
Second, why are you hunting? You ran out of rations, I guess. Is this bad planning? Lack of player skill? Or did something steal your rations, or they got rained on? Hmm. Well if it's either of the latter cases, the DM cares about not hand-waiving* the particulars of wilderness adventuring. If one has to resort to a hunting mechanic, simple or otherwise, one is probably the DM that wants grit and realism in the hexcrawl (or delights in another tool to throw shit at the PCs perhaps?). As a player, well, I'm going to buy so many iron rations and commission a 500gp sack for them that is both waterproof and has a chainmail outer lining before I play in your game.
The PC is hunting because he/she/it has no food. The player is hunting because the DM is stripping away attribute points like CON or STR (and CHA, obviously -- starving people are just NOT attractive), and probably HP. So I propose this axiom or something:
No hunting mechanic should exist without a preceding starvation mechanic
That's a problem with LabLord, which otherwise has a decent (i.e., plant-gathering option) mechanic: the penalties for starvation are left to the DM. Raggi's Grindhouse Rules (p.36) do give a mechanic, which is a Save vs. Poison each day or lose 1 CON. At the same time, he acknowledges the real problem is dehydration -- Save or CON is at half.
Note that I'm not proposing any mechanics myself. First off I'm too busy, otherwise lazy and stupid to do so. Second, I don't see the realism that it would add as adding fun overall. Any hunting mechanic must exchange PC time for caloric returns. That's at some cost of movement rates through the wilderness. Depending on the starvation mechanic, in most real situations one is better off just moving on toward the goal rather than spending time and energy chasing game they may not catch, i.e, get out of the wilderness. Time spent hunting is also time for Wandering Monsters to appear. They may either kill you or solve your starvation problem by becoming food. At worst, I envision a space where the party has to devote all their time to hunting rather than moving, and so end up in a positive feedback loop that locks them into sitting in place and not adventuring because they need to devote all their time to hunting. Sucks to that ass-mar.
Why hunt when you can gather?
I'm an archaeologist, and I draw on the anthropological traditions of cultural ecology and what is typically called human behavioral ecology in my work, among a billion other things. Before starting this post , I went back to some classics looking for data to show why hunting shouldn't take precedence over plant gathering. And I got confused. Here's a classic on Ache foraging by Hawkes et al. (1982)** that shows that deer and peccary are the highest ranked resources they encounter in Paraguay, and most plants and insects are lower ranked:
These returns are in kcal/hr, so for a 2000 kcal/day diet, this is going to mean ~2.5 hr foraging/PC/day when plants and all the better stuff is included (~800 kcal/hr return). If you only take big game (the two 1st ranked resources) and ignore other foods, you'll get big caloric returns when you bag them, but the hourly return rate goes down to ~100 kcal/hr, so it's going to take 8 times as long if you're picky. That assumes you're in Paraguay and you're with subsistence foragers, or have a good ranger, etc.
If you added the costs involved in devoting so much time to hunting, like random monsters encounters with no loot reward, some other plot-related time-crunch, then all of these things get shifted around. More time spent foraging = more bad stuff, and therefore PCs are foolish to go for the big kill. They should get on to their goal, and not sink time into hunting big game. But again, the DM and the players need to know the costs of starvation for these types of evaluation and decision-making to have any meaning.
And next time I put my money where my mouth is: The Spawn of Endra cooks gopher soup in Belize.
____________________________________________________________________
*Is it hand-waving or hand-waiving? Discuss on spellingpedantry.com.
** The reference is: Kristen Hawkes, Kim Hill, & James F. O'Connell. (1982).Why Hunters Gather: Optimal Foraging and the Aché of Eastern Paraguay. American Ethnologist, Vol. 9, No. 2, Economic and Ecological Processes in Society and Culture, pp. 379-398.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Review: Digital Orc's Dad's Pepper Dish Recipe
From the kitchen of thoust Spawn of Endra:
I'm not much of an innovator in the Old School blogosphere, but I think I may have finally come up with something original*. I'm not a DM and I've never felt qualified to give a review of anything Old School, until now. I AM a proven Old School cook, so here's a review of a recent recipe for Gaming Grub posted by Mr. Digital Orc a few weeks back -- his Dad's Pepper Dish. I've recently moved to central Pennsylvania and Saturday evening I was bored and hungry, waiting for the Irenic apocalypse:
While looking for a recipe for ajvar I saw that I had bookmarked DO's recipe. I have been greatly impressed by the pickled banana peppers I get on subs around here, and so I'm on board to start working with these vegetables. And maybe Irene was coming inland and this would have be my last home-cooked meal for a while. Who knows?
The recipe is simple: 1/2lb bacon; 3lb red potatoes; 15-20 banana peppers; S&P to taste. That's it. Cook in phases in a covered skillet. Well, I looked at my skillet and could not see all this fitting in there, nor did I have a lid for it. So I went to the next biggest heavy implement: my Dutch Oven. Seriously. It took me a few hours to realize how weirdly appropriate this was. I started in simmering the bacon and then adding in the red potato wedges:
I strirred/tossed this every 5min or so to spread the browning love. While this was going on, I was dealing with the peppers. I used Hungarian wax peppers ... presumably the same thing? But DO's instructions were confusing:
Very pretty. I let it cook away for about 15 minutes and then by that point there was a fair amount of browned bacon/potato residue on the bottom, so I pulled it off the stovetop and finished it in the oven at 350F for ~10 min to avoid a charred blackened mess. By the time I got to the peppers, all the stirring/tossing had pretty much gotten it to a chunky mash consistency. In the end, after adding some black pepper and 1-2 tsp of salt, I had a right mash if there ever was one:
I'll admit, as this thing moved along I had some doubts. The recipe looked like it had some serious gaps, and the fact that it was turning into a hash/mash ... well, maybe that's right but who knows? DO doesn't say how it should look. Then I'm thinking, "If this sucks, what kind of an asshole am I to write a negative review of somebody's sketch of a favorite recipe on a blog about gaming? That's the worst possible Old School blogosphere asshole imaginable!" Indeed, such a creature will appear on the cover of Raggi's new Random Blogospheric Asshole Generator, due out this Fall from Goodman Games.
But all of this worry was for naught. I have no idea if this is the correct outcome (i.e., the hash format), but this dish was DELICIOUS. The bacon of course is going to be nice, but because of the potatoes it doesn't make the dish overly salty (you still need to add salt at the end). The bacon fat makes the potatoes creamy but not heavy, and the juices from the peppers permeate the dish and add a really nice noticeable but mild, clean heat to the dish. The tanginess of the peppers adds a distinct flavor and if you've got good bacon these two things provide all the seasoning you need outside of S&P.
Okay, it's good, but how good? Well, at the end of the night here's what the dutch oven looked like:
That's right. I ate the whole damn thing all by myself over the course of 4-5 hours, right off the stove top. 3lbs of potatoes, 1/2 lb bacon and 15-20 peppers, down my gullet. Could not stop and didn't want to. Such a simple and sublime dish. Having this on your stove top is a sign of good living. I think if you were to cook this for game night, probably double the recipe.
In Conclusion: Digital Orc's Dad got this dish right and is presumably a genius. It embodies everything I love about rustic one-pot cooking. 4.5** of 5 stars
_____________________________________________
* I've been looking at some older posts from Grognardia, The RPG Corner, Jeff's Gameblogs and DNDWPS lately and it's shocking to see how many ideas I think are new have been circulated in the OSR back in fucking 2006 or 2008. Prog rock RPG setting? Yes, it's been done.
** I need to leave open the possibility of something even more awesome than this dish; otherwise, 5 of 5.
I'm not much of an innovator in the Old School blogosphere, but I think I may have finally come up with something original*. I'm not a DM and I've never felt qualified to give a review of anything Old School, until now. I AM a proven Old School cook, so here's a review of a recent recipe for Gaming Grub posted by Mr. Digital Orc a few weeks back -- his Dad's Pepper Dish. I've recently moved to central Pennsylvania and Saturday evening I was bored and hungry, waiting for the Irenic apocalypse:
 |
| The hellish view from my back porch Saturday evening (slightly altered) |
The recipe is simple: 1/2lb bacon; 3lb red potatoes; 15-20 banana peppers; S&P to taste. That's it. Cook in phases in a covered skillet. Well, I looked at my skillet and could not see all this fitting in there, nor did I have a lid for it. So I went to the next biggest heavy implement: my Dutch Oven. Seriously. It took me a few hours to realize how weirdly appropriate this was. I started in simmering the bacon and then adding in the red potato wedges:
I strirred/tossed this every 5min or so to spread the browning love. While this was going on, I was dealing with the peppers. I used Hungarian wax peppers ... presumably the same thing? But DO's instructions were confusing:
Remove caps and seeds of banana peppers, cut into 2 inch rings, add to skillet, allow to cook for 15-25 minutes until banana peppers cook down.Being the type that will always play the system as written before house-ruling it, I cut the peppers into 2"-long, er ... tubes? In the end, I don't think this matters, but removing the seeds and membranes (my habit, not strictly in the recipe) from these is a real pain in the ass. But eventually I prevailed:
But all of this worry was for naught. I have no idea if this is the correct outcome (i.e., the hash format), but this dish was DELICIOUS. The bacon of course is going to be nice, but because of the potatoes it doesn't make the dish overly salty (you still need to add salt at the end). The bacon fat makes the potatoes creamy but not heavy, and the juices from the peppers permeate the dish and add a really nice noticeable but mild, clean heat to the dish. The tanginess of the peppers adds a distinct flavor and if you've got good bacon these two things provide all the seasoning you need outside of S&P.
Okay, it's good, but how good? Well, at the end of the night here's what the dutch oven looked like:
In Conclusion: Digital Orc's Dad got this dish right and is presumably a genius. It embodies everything I love about rustic one-pot cooking. 4.5** of 5 stars
_____________________________________________
* I've been looking at some older posts from Grognardia, The RPG Corner, Jeff's Gameblogs and DNDWPS lately and it's shocking to see how many ideas I think are new have been circulated in the OSR back in fucking 2006 or 2008. Prog rock RPG setting? Yes, it's been done.
** I need to leave open the possibility of something even more awesome than this dish; otherwise, 5 of 5.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Session 39 Menu: Little Whore and Spoiled Grandfather
Thine Spawn of Endra recaps the latest foodal offerings in the campaign:
That's one way to translate last session's dishes -- Pasta Puttanesca and Baba Ganooj. I've been meaning to post on what we eat on game night for a while. We have a multi-timezone game over Skype every other week, with me hosting the bulk of the crew at my place on the West Coast, and Hazel in the MidWest, and Carter DMing from New York state. Works pretty well, but since we start at 5pm Pacific I've mostly tried to come up with something substantial during the dinner hour, and everybody brings in some delightful treats of food and beverages. (The downside of this is that we get called scum and a bunch of rotten bastards by Carter and Hazel who have to watch us having a food orgy during the game.)
Part of the challenge for me is accommodating Yor's player, who's largely vegetarian, but does eat fish, so that helps. I have nothing against vegetarian cuisine per se, it's just that I don't cook it much and so my repertoire of top-of-the-head recipes is weak. I want my guests to feel taken care of, I don't like serving a dish to one person where I've merely removed the meat. Defeats the whole purpose of eating together since we're not eating the same food. And you know, when you've got a player that has such fun at the sessions and asks the mind-shattering question "Can I get my crowbar enchanted to become a +1 Crowbar?" that player deserves the best.
With summer finally here in the PNW I've been grilling and Baba Ganooj comes into my life. Typically you grill your food, and there are still coals in the grill for an hour or more, so I get one or two extra whole eggplants and put them on there to bake/smoke, turning them occasionally so they cook evenly-ish. This goes for an hour or more 'til they're well gushy. Takes no effort and makes use of the otherwise wasted heat.
Then you strip the charred skins off and scoop out the gooey innards and retain the juices. For one ~1lb eggplant mix it with:
You can food-process this, but if you've really cooked those eggplant you should be able to mash it with a fork. Plus I like a certain amount of texture in this. Serve it with flat bread warmed in the oven. We had 4 folks eat through double this recipe with about 16 full pieces of bread. (I can't remember where I found this recipe; it's on a well-worn scrap of paper from about 10 years.)
Puttanesca. This version I modified from America's Test Kitchen ca. 2005. I didn't follow it precisely last session because I had the wrong pasta and the wrong tomatoes, but it still was really good. Cook 1lb of rotini (or similar short pasta; note that my favorite Italian brand DeCecco calls this fusilli) in plenty of well-salted water. Meanwhile, in a skillet/saute pan, heat olive oil to cover the bottom on medium to med high heat. Saute:
Saute these, but mind that you don't burn the garlic. That sucks. Don't be an asshole. Strain 28oz of diced tomatoes, reserving the liquid for later. Add the tomatoes and simmer while stirring for 5-7 min. The idea is to blend the flavors, but don't overcook the sauce and destroy the fresh tomato flavor. In the meantime:
The four of us ate almost all of this minus perhaps one bowl of pasta. After a bit of a rest we ate through a Party Size Bag of Tom's Salt and Vinegar Chips, apparently adventuring party size. Overall, it's a pretty quick prep: if you're already grilling, you do the Baba Ganooj the night before; if you're doing the Puttanesca this takes 35 min once you're familiar with it. And this gives you good flavors and happy folks for not too much money. These are relatively inexpensive dishes to feed a bunch of folks, especially if they're expecting or used to Cheetos, chips, sour gummi worms, etc.
But it's definitely a morale boost to have food there if the session is cutting into normal feeding time, and sometimes folks worked the whole day, skipped lunch, and biked across town at top speed to get here, and are fucking ravenous. As a friend of mine in Belize often says, "A hungry man is an angry man." And as for angry people ... well, nothing more needs to be said on that score.
That's one way to translate last session's dishes -- Pasta Puttanesca and Baba Ganooj. I've been meaning to post on what we eat on game night for a while. We have a multi-timezone game over Skype every other week, with me hosting the bulk of the crew at my place on the West Coast, and Hazel in the MidWest, and Carter DMing from New York state. Works pretty well, but since we start at 5pm Pacific I've mostly tried to come up with something substantial during the dinner hour, and everybody brings in some delightful treats of food and beverages. (The downside of this is that we get called scum and a bunch of rotten bastards by Carter and Hazel who have to watch us having a food orgy during the game.)
Part of the challenge for me is accommodating Yor's player, who's largely vegetarian, but does eat fish, so that helps. I have nothing against vegetarian cuisine per se, it's just that I don't cook it much and so my repertoire of top-of-the-head recipes is weak. I want my guests to feel taken care of, I don't like serving a dish to one person where I've merely removed the meat. Defeats the whole purpose of eating together since we're not eating the same food. And you know, when you've got a player that has such fun at the sessions and asks the mind-shattering question "Can I get my crowbar enchanted to become a +1 Crowbar?" that player deserves the best.
With summer finally here in the PNW I've been grilling and Baba Ganooj comes into my life. Typically you grill your food, and there are still coals in the grill for an hour or more, so I get one or two extra whole eggplants and put them on there to bake/smoke, turning them occasionally so they cook evenly-ish. This goes for an hour or more 'til they're well gushy. Takes no effort and makes use of the otherwise wasted heat.
Then you strip the charred skins off and scoop out the gooey innards and retain the juices. For one ~1lb eggplant mix it with:
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt (or to taste)
1/4 cup tahini
1 1/2 tsp cumin
3 cloves garlic pressed or minced
You can food-process this, but if you've really cooked those eggplant you should be able to mash it with a fork. Plus I like a certain amount of texture in this. Serve it with flat bread warmed in the oven. We had 4 folks eat through double this recipe with about 16 full pieces of bread. (I can't remember where I found this recipe; it's on a well-worn scrap of paper from about 10 years.)
Puttanesca. This version I modified from America's Test Kitchen ca. 2005. I didn't follow it precisely last session because I had the wrong pasta and the wrong tomatoes, but it still was really good. Cook 1lb of rotini (or similar short pasta; note that my favorite Italian brand DeCecco calls this fusilli) in plenty of well-salted water. Meanwhile, in a skillet/saute pan, heat olive oil to cover the bottom on medium to med high heat. Saute:
~6" anchovy paste or 4-5 minced fillets
1/2 tsp red chili flakes (or more to taste)
3-4 cloves pressed garlic
Saute these, but mind that you don't burn the garlic. That sucks. Don't be an asshole. Strain 28oz of diced tomatoes, reserving the liquid for later. Add the tomatoes and simmer while stirring for 5-7 min. The idea is to blend the flavors, but don't overcook the sauce and destroy the fresh tomato flavor. In the meantime:
Chop: (1) 14oz can of black olives
Mince: a handful of fresh Italian parsley
Sequester from their brine: 2-3 Tbsp of capers
(Yes, that's Tbsp folks. Tsp are a waste of time here.)
Finally, mix the drained pasta (al dente) in its pot with the cooked sauce, the olives, parsley and capers, AND the reserved uncooked tomato juice. The last adds another layer of freshness to the proceedings. Toss and serve immediately.
The four of us ate almost all of this minus perhaps one bowl of pasta. After a bit of a rest we ate through a Party Size Bag of Tom's Salt and Vinegar Chips, apparently adventuring party size. Overall, it's a pretty quick prep: if you're already grilling, you do the Baba Ganooj the night before; if you're doing the Puttanesca this takes 35 min once you're familiar with it. And this gives you good flavors and happy folks for not too much money. These are relatively inexpensive dishes to feed a bunch of folks, especially if they're expecting or used to Cheetos, chips, sour gummi worms, etc.
But it's definitely a morale boost to have food there if the session is cutting into normal feeding time, and sometimes folks worked the whole day, skipped lunch, and biked across town at top speed to get here, and are fucking ravenous. As a friend of mine in Belize often says, "A hungry man is an angry man." And as for angry people ... well, nothing more needs to be said on that score.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Get Your Small Game On: The Joy of Cooking (1974 Grindhouse Ed.)
From Thoust Spawn:
In the midst of a garbagey OSR week, I found my thoughts turning to FOOD, since that is one of the few things I have never become fundamentally disillusioned by and bitter about. At one point I went over to The Happy Whisk’s blog for about an hour and just stared at all the great food pictures and read the nice comments and cheerful repartee to get a break from the BS. I have to say I consider myself an Old School cook, as well and Old School RPG player. There are many odd overlaps. For example, the copy of Joy of Cooking I own was a used copy given to me by a friend (as were my AD&D PHB and DMG), and it is the 1974 version.
People, let me tell you: This book is Old School. They give you everything you need to cook, and let your imagination do the rest. There are some very basic instructions here: e.g., they take the time to tell you how to make toast, non-judgmentally. There are also solid treatments of obscure foods you might encounter (e.g., p.512 covers Pigs’ Ears, Chitterlings [Chitlin’s], Cockscombs, and finishes with an advisory piece, “About Marrow”, wherein we learn marrow can be substituted for brains in any recipe – good to know!). Many recipes have to be house-ruled (always double or triple the amount of garlic in these recipes), and some are best ignored, like encumbrance rules. The 1974 JoC feels a lot like 1e AD&D to me: People take from it what they want, and nobody ever uses all the recipes. And despite the improved meal-resolution mechanics of later versions of JoC, some of the charm is lost in later revisions in the 90s. To wit, in a perverse Borgesian turn there's a section in the Cookbook entitled Game, just as in most RPGs you've got rules in the Gamebook for finding Wild Food.
Do people use these rules often? “Rations and Foraging” in the Labyrinth Lord Basic rules, p. 46, tells us that ‘scavenging’ for food can be “accomplished without hindering travel by gathering fruits, nuts or small animals” in the course of a day. Or you can hunt and not travel, and then you get better chances of success. Despite devoting a section to Foraging and Hunting in the rules of Mr. Raggi’s LotFP:GE (Rules and Magic, p.33) the actions described are only hunting (which is covered under the Bushcraft skill in the new rules) and not foraging. One expends d10 of missile ammunition in a day's attempt at gathering food.
For Raggi foraging = hunting = meat, unless we assume that d10 crossbow bolts are being sacrificed for a basket of elderberries, or sloe apples, or majestic camas bulbs. Or if Les Stroud is your ranger, he shot d10 servings of lichen tea off of a Douglass fir. Perhaps there are no plants in the icy Finnish wastes.
Now that you've got your quarry, what do you with it? My JoC has several recipes for Rabbit or Hare (skinning them shown above), followed by Squirrel and a nice illustration of how to deal with that little guy. Note that gray squirrels are preferred over red, which are "quite gamey" (Mr. Arkhein?).
[UPDATE: I just noticed a link to this great website on Christian's sidebar, The Inn at the Crossroads. Attempts to produce the great dishes of literature!]
[UPDATE 2: Here's an earlier post that would have benefited from some JoC help -- Blood Sausage Making.]
Friday, January 14, 2011
Where’s Our ELP? An Outline for a Destined-to-be-Classic Campaign Setting...
... inspired by (or derived from) the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
The Spawn of Endra says: I shit you not.
I read ChicagoWiz’s post of last week and at first was stumped: “Our EPT”? ... Emerson Palmer and ...? Emerson .... “Oh, Empire of the Petal Throne,” I realized. “There’s something I know fuck-all about.” And so I immediately posted several grumbly-assed comments here and there about liking the derivative game I play (with which I still abide).
But before that a few posts got me thinking (unintentionally) about Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, to wit those mentioning Baba Yaga’s Hut as a 1e magic item, and Baba Yaga herself, e.g., where Mandy and Zak were talking about Baba Yaga as an NPC in her game. That got me thinking about making borscht for our game group (folks liked it; if you use this recipe you should add 2-3 cloves garlic, and probably puree before serving). For me, Baba Yaga brings up Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (in the form of “The House on Fowl’s Legs”) and of course ELP’s live album of the same name from 1972. So then I thought, could I make up a campaign setting in the Lands of Ara (but probably on a different continent than Ara, or on a different planet in the Ara universe) using material from ELP? I’ve never done world-building before, maybe I’ll see what happens. And either way, I have a feeling that ELP is not a source that I’m going to be fighting over with anybody else, so I don’t envision any intellectual property theft happening here.
So in a series of posts, I’ll go through their albums up to Brain Salad Surgery and see what I can pull out of them in terms of settings, monsters, magic items, etc., for a mostly Lab Lord campaign, though I can already tell there will be some Mutant Future overlap (maybe even Boot Hill! Egads!).
An biographical aside: I had a weird fascination with ELP since late high school, when I found their third studio LP Trilogy in a bin at a thrift store, heard snippits of “Karn Evil 9 (1st Impression)” on newly spawned classic rock radio in Fresno, and of course was beaten over the head with “Lucky Man”. Well, there was something in ELP’s music that intrigued me, and so, after getting some of their re-released boxed stuff in early college, when Rhino re-released their albums in CD form in the 2000s I started acquiring them in hopes of unearthing something really epic and grandiose. That is, a hugeness of vision that had been suggested by the bits I had heard. Ultimately, after lots of listenings to ELP (but only up to Brain Salad Surgery, I’ll add), I now know empirically it simply is not there. So don’t bother telling me how disgustingly rotten they are. I know better than most precisely how and why they are as bad as they are, because I gave them some hard dedicated listening, with every benefit of the doubt I could muster hoping for a miracle. Not many people can say that (or will admit it if they have).
Anyway, we’ll start with their eponymous first album. The cover gives us some DIY art that should give a segment of the OSR a boner just because it’s not particularly well-executed. A visible-brained man apparently meditating or sleeping, and a dove emerging from his mind.
The entire continent or planet is or may be the product of a dreaming god/beast/madman and the PCs don’t know this but may begin to deduce it as they work their way through the world. Um, derivative. Could be Lovecraft, Hinduism, Gnosticism, or all the P.K. Dick I’ve been reading. Sorry, I suck. Let’s say: He actually does exist in Ara held in a magical coma. He has no skull because a demon he summoned told him it needed to be removed so his mind-powers could directly affect the universe. He’s in a tower in some remote part of the continent. My entire ELP setting is his first serious messing-with-the-fabric-of-realities cosmic experiment.
Track 1: The Barbarian. Here Emerson tacks some plodding not-that-ominous-sounding stuff on to the front and back of a Bartok piano piece (Allegro Barbaro). I like a barbarian, maybe one that hangs around a mountain pass fighting people from all directions. Since he’s been up there for a really long time the two valleys below have been out of contact with each other for centuries. He’s a long-lived barbarian, we’ll say. I don’t have any stats, but luckily Talysman posted this yesterday, and I’ll go for the stronger version. His name is Throwgrak.
Track 2: Take a Pebble. At 12:27 long, it’s surprising there’s not much to work with here. Dreary stuff ... maybe this is a very stupid idea for a series of posts. Well, the main image is throwing a pebble into the sea, “disturbing the waters of our lives”. Something about memories not being real. Photographs scattered on your fields. Ugh! Too much incomplete and disjointed imagery in this “song”. I give up. There’s a short hillbilly jam in the middle. Maybe there’s a race of hillbillies in this world (please Talysman, do a post statting up a hillbilly race for me [Update: Ask and ye shall receive!]... or Carter you must have this covered already somewhere?).
Track 3: Knife-Edge. Okay, this song seems to lay out a scenario for a city viewed from some high tower by a king (or by kings flying on silver wings), full of madness, a road through an abbess (or abyss? trying to rhyme with madness), spectres on the city streets, “patient queues for the gallows sing the praises of the hallowed / our machines feed the furnace, if they take us they will burn us!” (not bad lyrics for Lake, honestly). Then throw in a Janacek organ piece for no reason. “When the flames have their season, will you hold to your reason? Can you still keep your balance. Can you live on a knife-edge?” Wow this post is long. More on Knife-Edge City in another post, but I think it’s a pretty messed up undead-filled human sacrifice place! Yay ELP!
Track 4: The Three Fates. A classic Emerson ultra-repetitive keyboard showpiece in three parts: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. I’m partial to the Norns, myself, or even some MacBeth-ish three witches from Polanski’s film version. 
Maybe I’ll plunk them out on some barren moors in this world. Derivative, yes, but I’m new at this, cut me some slack. They do witchy things, and I’d like to make them an important source of info and power for PCs on quests. Maybe something like Ningauble and Sheelba in the Lankhmar stories. Or if I had a totally pointless and tedious tricks-and-traps dungeon that both bored players to death and killed their characters, this is the background music I’d be playing.
Track 5: Tank. Carl Palmer’s obligatory drum solo track. I’m a drummer, and I used to study such classic solos as Toad, Moby Dick, and so on (leaving Buddy Rich’s Hawaiian War Chant completely out of this) and I can say, Tank is a dud. I guess Palmer’s a fast drummer, that’s how he was trying to distinguish himself (his one interesting idiosyncrasy is damping crash cymbals after long fills, to his credit). But he’s mostly incapable of creating any real color. Anyway, okay, Tank. It’s the card I dealt myself.
In the lowest sub-level in a megadungeon there’s a huge copper tank. All the excretions of all the humanoid monsters in the dungeon are channeled through conduits passing through every level and end up in this tank. In it they ferment and generate methane gas that the BOSS of the megadungeon or somebody (or everybody) uses to drive steam-powered mechanisms, lamps, flamethrowers, what-have-you. Also, there are special sewage tank creatures that have evolved in the tank through the interventions of some twisted magic-user in the dungeon. If the megadungeon is somewhat past its glory days, the tank will be corroded and weakened in ways not obvious to PCs. Attempts to manipulate valves, hatches, climb its ladder, etc., will cause it to fail catastrophically, deluging all PCs in the tankroom in sewage. Then the sewage creatures swarm on to them (more on them in a later post). Not bad. Probably the best we’ll get out of Carl Palmer until Brain Salad Surgery.
Track 6: Lucky Man. Oh that masterstroke of irony and poetic justice in the form of an innocuous rock ballad! If you go with it straight-ahead, it’s a boring story about a rich prince getting killed in a war, and boy, by the end of it: You see how he really wasn’t so lucky after all! Zing! Ouch! You got me Greg Lake! You’re so heavy that I need to take more bong rips so I can take in all the implications! What actually appeals to me about this song is the guitar solo that sounds like bagpipes (oh hell, I see the next series of posts: D&D inspired by Tubular Bells!) and the weird Moog solo on the fade-out, because when I first heard that I thought “Hell, if these guys are brave enough to just put that crazy-sounding stuff on their first single, then they must have some really crazy stuff on the albums”. And partly yes, partly no. In fact, they just had no taste ... they probably couldn’t tell what they were doing, and so it’s unclear if this was bravery or not. Sometimes no taste breaks towards the interesting (John Waters) and sometimes it breaks towards the lame (here’s a cheap-shot: FATAL).
Anyway bagpipes = highlanders and Moog = spaceships so I’ll say there once was a war in another set of mountains (not near Throwgrak’s Pass) where a bunch of Celtic-oid, but not really Celtic-oid, tribes fought a musical deathmatch with an alien advance team. This is the opposite of the outcome of Close Encounters. The Celtoids quickly learned that their bagpipes produced vibrations at harmonic frequencies that disintegrated the brain-sacs of the alien invaders, and were able to destroy them all and commandeer their ship. Through what little of the technology they could comprehend, their civilization advanced in the mountains unbeknownst to anyone else. As the technology advanced, so did their sonic aptitude, so that Celtoids could all produce multiple pitches simultaneously through throat-singing, and a select group of monks eventually mastered a vocal sonic attack that tears apart humanoid organs when focused on an opponent. There’s a Hawkwind/Michael Moorcock reference in that, as well. Guess I’ll need to figure out who the Celtoids really are now.
Damn, that was work! I listened to that album twice to write that. Next up is the dreaded sub-concept album Tarkus. Break out your Gamma World / Mutant Future books, friends: cyborg armadillos, cyborg pterodactyls, and a manticore. Sorry detractors, but ELP is Old School, and I don’t care how much it hurts to admit that.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Blood and Guts, Literally: Stonehell Sausage Making
After a couple of weeks of threatening to start contributing to the Lands of Ara blog, I'm finally on it, with this episode bringing you the adventures of Uncle Junkal (Bard) and Innominus (Cleric) in their real-world incarnations doing a (hopefully) recurring food segment for Lands of Ara.
Just so you know where I, thoust Spawn of Endra, stand: I think food is Old School. I've been eating food since 1973. I had my lunches in those Little Brown Bags through the 70s and 80s, and even when Hasbro bought out the license to food, I still ate the food I wanted to eat the way I wanted it cooked every day ... several times a day, in fact! Except when I was traveling: then it behooves one to accept the local fare. Anyway ....
So a Cleric and a Bard ... let's get the easy yuks out of the way. There'll be no "Innominus casts Cure Lite Ham", or "Uncle Junkal casts Charm Guests". When we play Lab Lord we skin dead humanoids (and wear the skins as disguises) and fire bomb their temples before you can say boo. When we get together to cook, it's going to be serious. The other day, we attempted to make what must be the staple of the Oldest of the Sausage-Making Schools: Blood Sausage.
I have experience with blood sausage (aka BLACK PUDDINGS! Don't try to test how Old School I am ... I ate the Monster Manual for breakfast in Europe when I was 5 years old!) since I was a little kid visiting family in Ireland. Uncle Junkal's player had some positive experiences with a Korean form of blood sausage, soondae. I never found a suitable recipe for making an Irish version, and we decided to move forward with the soondae following this recipe. And so we hunkered down for a session more than twice as long as our usual gaming session: 9 hours.
Here's the first cogent admonishment:
"We're goin' to Hell! You better know how to make blood sausage fool! It's all you're gonna get!"
And we're off! Most of the stuffing is sweet rice and sweet potato noodles, and of course blood. Here we see two little gelatinous blobs of congealed pig blood from a blood farm in Washington state:
The one on the bottom separated along a stratum of fat or plasma and one half fell on the floor. Luckily we could clean it, but this was only the beginning of the bloodshed. (Does Raggi have a module where there's a tool shed literally full of blood? Probably.) Uncle Junkal started to work the stuff with a +1 potato masher and eventually added Bigby's Squelching Hand.
Then of course we have the guts. Again we are using pig parts, obtained from a local butcher. These are called 'casings' in the lingo of the pros, not intestines or guts, if you need to impress somebody or pose as an international sausage expert (and after this experience, I don't recommend posing at this kind of thing; the truth will out). These are cheap, $1.79. Cheaper than an Old School pdf.
Here's some dialog that accompanies this screenshot from the video:
SOE: "That's something like 8 or 10 feet, the [butcher] lady thought, of guts shoved onto a ... industrial automotive funnel. And then we're going to squeeze into that -- with a dowel that we bought -- chopped with a machete ... fans of machetes will recognize that style of chopping (if I can get it into focus) ...
but we're going to use THIS end, obviously [the flat squared-off end].
UJ: "That'll be interesting, I'll film you doing that.
SOE: "Excellent!"
Of course it was all high hopes at that point. Crueler realities lay ahead. Once these were packed and made to look all sausagey (I mean those DO look like real sausages, right?):
and the boiling process began, what was meant by "don't pack the stuffing too tightly or the sausage may split open during cooking" became clear. You've got token quantities of blood, and you've got under-cooked rice and glass noodles as stuffing ... then you're going to boil them for 45 minutes. Any dipshit not entangled in this situation knows what will happen. As the boiling proceeded, Uncle Junkal and I start to see these sausages we packed burst open one after another and the contents boil away into a sorry sorry gruel:
I never read Oliver Twist, but I hope that little bastard wasn't pleading for this swirling bucket of junk. Bad scene. UJ correctly proposed puncturing the boiling sausages and I pulled some of them out to bake, neither of which prevented a massive loss of sausages ...
Was it a TSK? No. ONE god-damned Ishmael of a sausage survived the boiling, still tethered embryonically to his neighboring links; and four or five non-exploded baked sausages survived. But this image of one of the exploded remnants still connected to the links that were baked sums up the grotesquerie. It started out ~6" long (click to enlarge, seriously):
The first cat I had as a kid (she was named Greycloud by my sister) left something quite similar to this on our doorstep one night, which at first I took to be the guts of some rodent, or maybe an opposum, and then eventually realized had a fetus in it. Or maybe this is a phantasmagoria of misremembrance. Anyway, it looked a lot like this.
So, after all that we ate the ones (the sausages, I mean, not Greycloud's entrail-offerings) that survived with some bok choy that UJ stir-fried, and god damn it these are pretty bland sausages. Really no spices, no pepper ... if you're at the point where you're so desperate you're keeping blood for food, add some salt! The recipe itself I think is a crappy recipe. I can't imagine that soondae is normally this bland, given the general spiciness of Korean cuisine. Even the Irish, to whom spices outside of pepper are almost unknown, pack a lot of flavor into their blood puddings. Death to this recipe.
But, the idea was to learn some things about Old School sausage making. I imagine we made something on the par of what an adventurer might get as part of an average meal at a tavern in some medievaloid setting (3 cp). As my experiences elsewhere have shown, poor subsistence farmers and "tavern owners" in regions where subsistence is the main mode of food acquisition don't have the access to meat that folks in industrialized economies enjoy (i.e, they don't eat meat every day). The predominantly meat sausage (as opposed to a largely grain-based filler sausage) as a norm must be a relatively recent development; though probably of course this relates to industrialization and the ability to 'recover' or 'mechanically separate' meats and other edible bits like integument, shredded tendons and glands that can then be economized into sausages as 'meat'. Anyway, there are books written on this stuff, by people with knowledge, not me.
Onward to Stonehell!
Just so you know where I, thoust Spawn of Endra, stand: I think food is Old School. I've been eating food since 1973. I had my lunches in those Little Brown Bags through the 70s and 80s, and even when Hasbro bought out the license to food, I still ate the food I wanted to eat the way I wanted it cooked every day ... several times a day, in fact! Except when I was traveling: then it behooves one to accept the local fare. Anyway ....
So a Cleric and a Bard ... let's get the easy yuks out of the way. There'll be no "Innominus casts Cure Lite Ham", or "Uncle Junkal casts Charm Guests". When we play Lab Lord we skin dead humanoids (and wear the skins as disguises) and fire bomb their temples before you can say boo. When we get together to cook, it's going to be serious. The other day, we attempted to make what must be the staple of the Oldest of the Sausage-Making Schools: Blood Sausage.
I have experience with blood sausage (aka BLACK PUDDINGS! Don't try to test how Old School I am ... I ate the Monster Manual for breakfast in Europe when I was 5 years old!) since I was a little kid visiting family in Ireland. Uncle Junkal's player had some positive experiences with a Korean form of blood sausage, soondae. I never found a suitable recipe for making an Irish version, and we decided to move forward with the soondae following this recipe. And so we hunkered down for a session more than twice as long as our usual gaming session: 9 hours.
Here's the first cogent admonishment:
"We're goin' to Hell! You better know how to make blood sausage fool! It's all you're gonna get!"
And we're off! Most of the stuffing is sweet rice and sweet potato noodles, and of course blood. Here we see two little gelatinous blobs of congealed pig blood from a blood farm in Washington state:
The one on the bottom separated along a stratum of fat or plasma and one half fell on the floor. Luckily we could clean it, but this was only the beginning of the bloodshed. (Does Raggi have a module where there's a tool shed literally full of blood? Probably.) Uncle Junkal started to work the stuff with a +1 potato masher and eventually added Bigby's Squelching Hand.
Then of course we have the guts. Again we are using pig parts, obtained from a local butcher. These are called 'casings' in the lingo of the pros, not intestines or guts, if you need to impress somebody or pose as an international sausage expert (and after this experience, I don't recommend posing at this kind of thing; the truth will out). These are cheap, $1.79. Cheaper than an Old School pdf.
Here's some dialog that accompanies this screenshot from the video:
SOE: "That's something like 8 or 10 feet, the [butcher] lady thought, of guts shoved onto a ... industrial automotive funnel. And then we're going to squeeze into that -- with a dowel that we bought -- chopped with a machete ... fans of machetes will recognize that style of chopping (if I can get it into focus) ...
but we're going to use THIS end, obviously [the flat squared-off end].
UJ: "That'll be interesting, I'll film you doing that.
SOE: "Excellent!"
Of course it was all high hopes at that point. Crueler realities lay ahead. Once these were packed and made to look all sausagey (I mean those DO look like real sausages, right?):
and the boiling process began, what was meant by "don't pack the stuffing too tightly or the sausage may split open during cooking" became clear. You've got token quantities of blood, and you've got under-cooked rice and glass noodles as stuffing ... then you're going to boil them for 45 minutes. Any dipshit not entangled in this situation knows what will happen. As the boiling proceeded, Uncle Junkal and I start to see these sausages we packed burst open one after another and the contents boil away into a sorry sorry gruel:
I never read Oliver Twist, but I hope that little bastard wasn't pleading for this swirling bucket of junk. Bad scene. UJ correctly proposed puncturing the boiling sausages and I pulled some of them out to bake, neither of which prevented a massive loss of sausages ...
Was it a TSK? No. ONE god-damned Ishmael of a sausage survived the boiling, still tethered embryonically to his neighboring links; and four or five non-exploded baked sausages survived. But this image of one of the exploded remnants still connected to the links that were baked sums up the grotesquerie. It started out ~6" long (click to enlarge, seriously):
The first cat I had as a kid (she was named Greycloud by my sister) left something quite similar to this on our doorstep one night, which at first I took to be the guts of some rodent, or maybe an opposum, and then eventually realized had a fetus in it. Or maybe this is a phantasmagoria of misremembrance. Anyway, it looked a lot like this.
So, after all that we ate the ones (the sausages, I mean, not Greycloud's entrail-offerings) that survived with some bok choy that UJ stir-fried, and god damn it these are pretty bland sausages. Really no spices, no pepper ... if you're at the point where you're so desperate you're keeping blood for food, add some salt! The recipe itself I think is a crappy recipe. I can't imagine that soondae is normally this bland, given the general spiciness of Korean cuisine. Even the Irish, to whom spices outside of pepper are almost unknown, pack a lot of flavor into their blood puddings. Death to this recipe.
But, the idea was to learn some things about Old School sausage making. I imagine we made something on the par of what an adventurer might get as part of an average meal at a tavern in some medievaloid setting (3 cp). As my experiences elsewhere have shown, poor subsistence farmers and "tavern owners" in regions where subsistence is the main mode of food acquisition don't have the access to meat that folks in industrialized economies enjoy (i.e, they don't eat meat every day). The predominantly meat sausage (as opposed to a largely grain-based filler sausage) as a norm must be a relatively recent development; though probably of course this relates to industrialization and the ability to 'recover' or 'mechanically separate' meats and other edible bits like integument, shredded tendons and glands that can then be economized into sausages as 'meat'. Anyway, there are books written on this stuff, by people with knowledge, not me.
Onward to Stonehell!
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