When this week’s Cooking Eorzea column goes live, it will be the first day of this year’s Saints Wake event in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. It will also be the start of the end of the year rush through October, November, and through the Starlight Celebration and into the Heavensturn.

It doesn’t honestly feel like the holiday season is starting for me until the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Halloween-equivilent event begins, and then everything happens so fast that I find myself almost unable to keep up with it. I find myself organizing a pair of Secret Smilebringer events in real life, the weather turns incredibly cold, I travel to see people, I shop for sales, and I wonder how I am going to make the next year better than the year that just passed as I somehow also find the time to squeeze in doing the fun little events that happen in game.

Somehow, I will still find time to write this column as we go along through the busy upcoming holidays.

Now, if only I could figure out a costume to wear…

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s side dish comes from the Thanalan region and it has a ‘Medium’ difficulty! While this is the 50th dish in the cookbook, it is only the 49th one I’ve made. I am deliberately waiting to make The Minstrel’s Ballad: Almond Cream Croissants until the very end of the column, since it has an Extreme difficulty rating.

I have never used arborio rice in a dish, let alone making risotto of any sort. I was honestly quite excited to see a dish that often gets featured in cooking competitions on TV, and I was extremely hopeful that I would be able to make it with no issues.

Anyway, here is what the Cheese Risotto is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Arborio rice is an Italian rice used in making risotto and rice pudding. Normally, when I use rice in a recipe, I first cook it in a rice cooker. Making cheese risotto was the first time I’ve ever used rice raw within a recipe, and I honestly found that to be so unique to use. All of this made me want to pick arborio rice as my ingredient of the week for this week!

My Cooking Attempt

First, a shot of all the ingredients used for Cheese Risotto:

First, I peeled and minced up the parsnips. This week’s Cooking Eorzea column was actually the first time I have ever bought parsnips in my life.

Setting the parsnips aside, I next peeled and diced up the onion. I had forgotten how the tears from chopping up the onions sting in my eyes!

Finally, I minced up the garlic.

I then measured out the chicken broth, added in a sprig of rosemary and a bay leaf, and brought it up to a boil.

While the chicken broth heated up, I shredded the Parmesan cheese wedge.

Once it was boiling, I put it on a different burner on low and then I got out another pan and melted butter into it.

Once the butter was melted, I added in the garlic, the parsnips, and the onions. I then blended them all together in the pan while they softened for about five minutes.

Once the vegetables were ready, I added in the arborio rice, and I stirred to coat the rice with the butter and vegetables. I then let it all sautée for a couple of minutes.

Once the rice was ready, I poured in a half cup of white wine and blended it in too. I kept blending it in until the white wine was fully absorbed by the arborio rice.

Next came the longest, most annoying part of the dish. I kept measuring out a half cup of the chicken broth (after I removed the rosemary sprig and bay leaf) and adding it to the main dish. Once I poured out the half cup, I would whisk it all together inside the pan to blend it all together. I would keep mixing it until all the liquid was absorbed. I would then repeat it again and again and again. The longer I worked, the more engorged the rice became, and the longer I had to stir into order to get all the liquid soaked up.

Once I FINALLY got all the broth used up, I took the pan off of the heat and added in the cottage cheese and the shredded Parmesan cheese.

I then sprinkled in pepper and salt on top for seasonings.

I then blended all of that together again.

I then scooped the cheese risotto out into a bowl and added the furikake on top.

And here is this week’s final Cooking Eorzea dish for Cheese Risotto!

I am going to be honest about this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish: I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t because the dish was bad – far from it – it was more the texture. It reminded me of thick porridge, and the parsnips and onions gave it a bit of a soft crunch on top of that. I didn’t care for how it felt in my mouth, to be honest. Additionally, I wish it was a lot cheesier than what it was!

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I would want to make it with a lot more cheese. I would probably also try to mince the parsnips up even more, as the soft crunch got distracting after a short bit. I would probably try to add in even more salt and pepper than I did to see if it enhances the flavor further. I just don’t know if I could get past the texture of the arborio rice when mixed in the other ingredients!

Alright, it’s time to run through the list of people that I want to thank for making this week’s column possible! First, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look- including this week’s one for Cheese Risotto. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X– and you really should look at them!

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. Even though we are far and away into Dawntrail at the moment, it took the efforts of both to create Eorzea as it stands today.

Next Time, In November

Imam Bayildi is the next Side dish that I will be making in Cooking Eorzea!

I have never actually baked eggplants before, and so I am excited to work with it. Please be sure to return in November to see how the dish turns out!

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 49: Cheese Risotto (FINAL FANTASY XIV Online) appeared first on oprainfall.

I wasn’t expecting to go on a months-long hiatus again.

At the end of March, I got seriously injured and I ended up not being able to walk or live independently for months.

While I spent a lot of my recovery in Eorzea, I found myself being drawn into spending as much time as possible in the world of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth. I had tickets to see the orchestra performance in Los Angeles for the North American premiere, and then again to see the show in Munich, Germany a month-ish later, and I thought that I should play the game first.

A large part of why I wanted to see the concert in two places as far flung apart as they were is because I wanted to thank both Hamauzu-san and Suzuki-san for helping me discover my love for the piano through the wonderful music they created for the SQUARE ENIX game Lightning Returns: FINAL FANTASY XIII. I talked a little bit about how amazing the soundtrack was earlier this year for the game’s tenth anniversary, and I wanted to take the time to thank them both in person for helping create my real love for music. It’s hard to explain how important music can be to me now, especially since I listened to so little of it in high school.

The fact that I wanted to thank both of them is a large part of why I pushed myself so hard through my rehab. If I couldn’t function independently, then I wouldn’t be able to make it out to Los Angeles – let alone Munich – to see them both.

I even got both of them, and both Mr. Arnie Roth and Mr. Eric Roth, to sign my FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth program – and you can see that in my final dish image for this week’s Cooking Eorzea.

You can check out my full concert review here. If you get a chance, you should really see the concert live and play the game. I promise you that you won’t regret it, and you can still even get tickets.

What about this column going forward?

I am definitely going to try to get back to doing this column weekly again when I can. I love cooking and Cooking Eorzea has been with me through so much of my life in California. It helped me handle my breakup after I moved here, and it gave me something to look forward to after the apartment fire I had. I can’t imagine not finishing this cookbook out: especially when there are simply so many amazing dishes left to try out!

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The 49th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and hailing from the Hingashi region of Eorzea…is Chawan-Mushi! With a hard difficulty rating, this Cooking Eorzea dish is one that looks deceptively easy to make, but in fact can be quite hard to create if you leave air in the custard or you overcook it on the stove top. This is also the start of the Sides section of the cookbook! It is crazy to think about how much I’ve made so far, and honestly…how much more I still need to create.

Chawan-Mushi also has a lot of different meat options in it, and it reminded me a bit of the Bouillabaisse I made way back in Week 27 because of that.

Anyway, here is what the dish is supposed to look like in the hands of a professional:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s featured ingredient is mitsuba.

It is also probably the second hardest ingredient I’ve had to find for Cooking Eorzea since I started writing it, right behind the mahi-mahi that I had to end up ordering in another state and cooking at a friend’s place. I spent my weekend searching every Asia grocery within a two-hour drive of my phone, and I could not find it anywhere. It turns out that while Italian parsley is quite common…mitsuba is not.

I ended up having to order it online and having it delivered to my home. It was either doing that or do a day trip down to Los Angeles to try to get my hands on some.

Mitsuba, also known as Japanese parsley, is known for its three leaves and for having a slightly bitter flavor.

Honestly, it was because of the sheer difficulty of obtaining it that it stuck out in my mind so much. I didn’t want to compromise on Cooking Eorzea by leaving this ingredient, even if it really is just garnish, out.

My Cooking Attempt

For my first installment in the Sides section of Cooking Eorzea, here are all the ingredients that I ended up using:

I first sliced up the chicken into bite-sized pieces.

I then removed the tails from the shrimp and cut them in half.

Finally, I quartered the scallops.

Once all the meats were set aside, I sliced up the shiitake mushrooms and thinly sliced the kamaboko.

After setting all of those cut ingredients aside, I made the dashi stock. First, I added water to a pot, added a dashi stock packet to the pot, and then brought it to a boil for three minutes.

Once the timer was up, I pulled the packet out and then poured the dashi stock into a measuring cup.

Setting the dashi stock aside, I placed the cut chicken into a small bowl, measured out sake and soy sauce into it.

I then let the chicken marinade for about 10 minutes.

During the 10 minutes, I cleaned the small pot I made the dashi stock in, and then added water to it, inserted a steamer basket into the pot, and then heated it up.

I then started to make the custard. First, I cracked three eggs and then added the dashi stock to the bowl.

I then added the salt, sake, and soy sauce to the custard. I then whisked it all together inside the bowl. I had to be careful to only whisk it just enough to make sure that the ingredients were blended together, but not so much that the custard had too much air and bubbles in it.

Once it was all blended together, I started to filter the custard mix from pot to bowl and back through a fine-mesh strainer so I could remove as much of the bubbles as possible.

At this point, I started to assemble the chawan-mushi dishes. First, I put a layer of chicken pieces down and then topped it with the shrimp layer.

I then added a layer of scallops on top and then a lawyer of shiitake mushrooms.

Finally, I added a layer of kamaboko on top.

I then poured the liquid custard on top of the multiple layers until it was just barely away from the top of the chawan-mushi cup. I also used a toothpick to pop any bubbles that rose in the liquid custard so that it wouldn’t interfere with the custard setting.

Once the bubbles were all popped, I added the lids to the chawan-mushi cups and then added them into the steamer basket. It turned out I could only fit three into the pot at a time, and so I had to cook the fourth one later on.

After replacing the pot’s lid, I let the whole thing steam cook for 20 minutes.

After the timer was up, I removed the chawan-mushi lids and saw that the custard had set.

I then removed the cups from the steaming basket, and then added a layer of ikura and a stem of mitsuba to each one to finish off the dish!

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

The overall dish was incredibly savory, and I was surprised that the custard really worked well with the mixture of chicken and seafood. I couldn’t really taste the soy sauce or the sake, and the ikura definitely reminded me of boba bubbles while I was eating the dish. Unfortunately, the custard didn’t fully cook through, and so it was a bit watery at the end. The fourth cup, the one that I made after these three, I cooked for around 6-7 minutes longer, and that one cooked through.

Overall, it was a very unique and enjoyable dish, and one that I wouldn’t mind making for other people…if I could find mitsuba a little easier again.

Afterword

If I was to make chawan-mushi again, I would definitely let it cook for more than twenty minutes. I had no issues with the custard itself, other than I didn’t let it cook long enough. It was quite enjoyable, and I could see it being a fun side dish for people to enjoy.

This is where I start with the ‘thank yous’…Even if it has been awhile! I want start off by thanking Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. When I wasn’t spending my recovery playing FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, I spent a lot of it in Eorzea.

Next Week

Assuming I don’t get injured again, next week’s dish is Thanalan’s Cheese Risotto!

As I am sure you won’t be surprised by…I haven’t made this dish before either, and so it will be a brand-new experience for me to explore!

Please tune in to see how it goes!

Have you made chawan-mushi before?

Have you been to the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 48: Chawan-Mushi (FINAL FANTASY XIV) appeared first on oprainfall.

To those who lived this world and knew friendly company therein:
This Reunion is for you.

~FINAL FANTASY VII: Advent Children Complete (2009)

I have a confession to make. Due to work, writing, Cooking Eorzea, basketball games, trying to see all the Best Picture nominee movies before the Oscars this Sunday, and trying to complete the full reward list for the ongoing Moogle Treasure Trove: The First Hunt for Genesis before it expires on March 11, 2024, in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, I have yet to start FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth.

I know, I know.

Considering that I even wrote a full-on article about five things I want to see in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, that is surprising for me. Especially since I somehow found the time to see FINAL FANTASY VII: Advent Children Complete when it came to theaters just before the game’s release and it reminded me just how much I love FINAL FANTASY VII.

I originally played FINAL FANTASY VII all throughout my senior year in high school, starting from before the summer break and playing it until two weeks before graduation when I FINALLY finished the game, 100%, and I was able to turn to Parasite Eve to top off my high school education. The end of Disc One was completely unexpected for me, and I kept falling in love with the characters – and it felt like a mark of pride when I was finally able to cast Knights of the Round chained to a Quadra Materia in order to cast the Summon Materia four times in a row.

A few years later, FINAL FANTASY VII: Crisis Core came out, and I pushed through it to finish the game in the last two weeks before I graduated college. I fell in love with Zack and Aeris/Aerith and their relationship then.

When FINAL FANTASY VII Remake was first announced during Sony’s presser at E3 2015, that – along with the Shenmue III announcement – captured my mind and my heart like I was back in high school. I preordered the SOLDIER 1st Class Edition on my way to dinner with some other journalists during E3 2019, and I finally was able to sit down and play it at release. And when the DLC came out? I jumped on that too. And don’t even get me started on the FINAL FANTASY VII Remake: Traces of Two Pasts novelization.

All throughout the past two decades of my life, FINAL FANTASY VII has slipped in and out of it, and I find myself randomly watching clips of gameplay or reading about the game or looking at merchandise for the game. And not to mention that I have recited Aerith’s “I have 23 tiny wishes” quote more times than I want to admit.

Sometimes, it feels like things slip up and down in priority for me, and there never is enough time to do everything I want. This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe I ended up having to squeeze into my Wednesday night after work and seeing Maestro (don’t spend the money on seeing it in theaters, watch it on Netflix instead). I am also still trying to take care of myself after my heart health issues from last year, and so I am forcing myself to slow down occasionally.

I know that I quoted the FINAL FANTASY VII: Advent Children Complete movie at the top of this week’s column, but I feel like that quote doesn’t just apply to the movie but to anyone who picks up any FINAL FANTASY VII title and wants to visit those characters they love therein. I cannot wait to dive back in and spend some more time with Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Yuffie, and everyone else once again…I just need to find the time to do it.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s recipe, with a rating of ‘Easy,’ comes from Gyr Abania and is called Stuffed Cabbage Roll! This is the 47th recipe in the cookbook, and it looked deceptively easy to make. Basically: I make tomato sauce, set it aside, make the blended lamb filling, set it aside, make a cup of rice, boil a cabbage, and then put it all other before putting it all into the oven.

Anyway, here is what Stuffed Cabbage Roll looks like in the hands of a professional!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Cabbage is a leafy plant that is grown for its very dense leafy heads. They are a very old crop, and are high in dietary fiber, Vitamins (A, C, K), calcium, iron, and other things. I also don’t really care for them because of how bland they are. Whenever I’ve had cabbage, I’ve always thought that it does not have much flavor to it. When I saw that this week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe was to have cabbage as a central ingredient, I had to give it a chance to see how good it can be in a recipe. Therefore, I had to make it this week’s featured ingredient of the week! (Spoiler, I didn’t really care for it.)

My Cooking Attempt

For my Stuffed Cabbage Roll attempt, here are the ingredients I used:

In a pan, I added together the can of crushed tomatoes and the tomato sauce.

I then added in sugar and white vinegar…

…Salt and basil…

…oregano and thyme…

…And finally pepper.

I then whisked it all together and brought the tomato sauce to a boil. The sauce became really, really fragrant in an amazing way as it started to heat up.

I lowered the temperature and I let the tomato sauce cook while I chopped up three-quarters of the onion and then peeled the garlic. Instead of immediately mincing the garlic like I usually do, I instead set the cloves aside temporarily.

After about twenty minutes, you can how the tomato sauce started to thicken up.

Once the tomato sauce was done, I set it on a non-active burner to cool down while I also preheated the oven to 375.

I replaced the pan with a large pot and filled it with water and let it heat up.

While the water was heating up, I started to make the cooked rice in my rice cooker.

I then turned my attention to the featured ingredient of the week, and I removed a leaf from the outside that was fairly dark.

I then chopped off the bottom half-inch or so of the stem.

At this point, the pot was boiling and so I carefully dropped the cabbage into the pot, and I let it sit there for about 10 minutes to soften up. I won’t lie: boiling cabbage does NOT smell great, and I ended up lighting a candle in order to deal with the odor.

When my timer went off, I removed it from the pot very carefully, put it into a strainer, and I washed it all over with cold water.

Once the cabbage was mostly chilled down, I pulled what I thought were 10 leaves off of the cabbage. (Spoiler alert: it turns out that I cannot count reliably to 10, as I ended up only taking nine off the cabbage head.)

I then chopped up the remaining cabbage head, and I placed them into the bottom of my deep baking pan.

Setting the deep baking pan aside for the moment, I minced up the garlic, set that aside, and then got out a smaller pan and added olive oil to it.

I added the chopped onion to the pan, let it cook for about five minutes, and then added the garlic in and I let it cook as well.

Right as the garlic went in, the timer for my rice cooker went off, and I pulled a cup of rice out to use.

Once the garlic and onion blend was done, I added it to a bowl and I let it cool down.

Once I thought the garlic and onion was cooled enough, I added in the rice, ground lamb, the salt, the pepper, the oregano, and the basil.

I then mixed it all together by hand. Unfortunately, the rice, garlic, and onions hadn’t quite cooled down enough as I felt more than a bit uncomfortable with how warm it all was until it was all blended together.

Once it was all blended together, I portioned out the blended lamb meat filling into 10 portions.

Finally, time to put it all together! Moving back to the cutting board, I pulled out one of the previously separated leaves, and I made a one-inch cut into the stem.

I placed a portion of the mixed lamb filling onto the cabbage leaf, and I started to roll up from the bottom over the mixed lamb filling while also tucking in the sides.

Here is what a completed cabbage roll looks like.

I then placed it seam-side down into the deep baking dish. As I was working through my cabbage leaves, I realized that I did not have 10…but only nine. It turns out that I screwed up early on and that I did not pull enough cabbage leaves off. Thankfully, it only changed the overall portion size and not the heart of the recipe itself. The left-over mixed lamb ended up going in the refrigerator to be used for a burger the next day!

I then retrieved the tomato sauce I made at the start, and ladled it over the cabbage leaf rolls.

I placed the entire dish into the preheated oven, and I let it bake for 45 minutes to finish this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish off!

And here is what the final dish looks like for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

Naturally, with the release of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, I had to dress this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish up with the game’s merchandise as best as I could.

The Stuffed Cabbage Roll was really interesting to eat, actually. I tried the mixed lamb filling and the tomato sauce by themselves, and both of them had a really pleasant and seasoned taste that I thought would be great on a dish by itself. But together? Those two pieces really elevated each other and complemented each other perfectly! The seasoning really cut through the meat and the tomatoes, and I honestly adored it. The only part I didn’t care for, actually, was the cabbage leaf itself. The cabbage was fairly bland, and I had a hard time cutting through it. I ended up eating only a bit of the cabbage by the time I got to the third roll in the picture above, and instead I scarfed down the lamb filing and tomato sauce!

Afterword

If I was to make the Stuffed Cabbage Roll again, I would first of all remove TEN, not nine, but TEN cabbage leaves. It is ridiculous that I couldn’t count to 10 properly. Other than that, there weren’t a lot of things that I would do differently as the dish came out pretty much as expected. This is also a dish I could make for several people to enjoy, as two or three stuffed cabbage rolls seemed to be the perfect potion size for a person!

Lets talk ‘thank yous’, like I do every week! For starters, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, as my cooking journey wouldn’t exist without her. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look- I only hope that I can do these photos justice on occasion with my own attempts. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X, and I owe him a debt for his help.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online throughout the game’s entire life. Dawntrail is coming, but it wouldn’t be possible without all the hard work that everyone had previously put into building this game. I am excited to see what will be announced at PAX East on March 23, 2024 at noon ET.

Next Week

Next week, we close out the Main Dish section of Cooking Eorzea with the Trapper’s Quiche recipe! I actually like quiche, so I am hoping this will be good. And I won’t lie, I am excited about moving onto Side Dishes and seeing what all is in store for the future with me!

Do you like cabbage as used in this week’s Cooking Eorzea entry? 

What do you think about FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 46: Stuffed Cabbage Roll appeared first on oprainfall.

I have been ridiculously excited about making Starlight Dodo for a very long time as part of Cooking Eorzea. I love both the Starlight Celebration and Christmas, and it is something that I look forward to every year. While it is not my absolute favorite holiday (that is New Year’s Eve!), it is my second favorite. Both Eorzea and real life (admittedly, rarely) become covered in snow, the music changes to holiday cheer, and people show affection for each other by giving gifts. I myself run a Secret Santa for my college friends, and I have every year since 2010. After all the names are drawn and gifts are shipped around the world, we all get together online, hang out, catch up, and open gifts. It is one of the core ways that we all keep in touch with each other, even as each of us get married and have children and develop careers.

And as for me? I secretly (at least, until this goes live) listen to Christmas music year-round on my phone. It’s that little random pop of happiness and joy that I get to experience whenever I want, even in the hundred-degree-plus California summers. It always lifts my mood up, and it puts me in a happy spirit with plenty of Love, Eorzean Style, even when I wasn’t expecting to be.

I think there is something really unique about Starlight Celebration in Eorzea and Christmas in real life, and this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish really kept me in the holiday mood all week long while preparing to make it and as I am writing this column. Plus, stay tuned at the very end to learn a bit about how KFC became a Japanese Christmas tradition as I explain why I chose the decoration I did to accompany this week’s dish!

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

Starlight Dodo is the 46th recipe in the cookbook, and it has a difficulty rating of ‘Medium.’ While this dish comes out of the Black Shroud region, I think this dish belongs to Eorzea as a whole due to its connection to the Starlight Celebration. Personally, I was afraid of catching the duck dish on fire more than anything else after my prior experience with making the Meat Miq’abobs when making this dish. Thankfully, I wouldn’t be working with open flames over a grill, and the recipe including using a baking sheet to catch the duck grease before it can drip into the oven.

Here is what Starlight Dodo looks like in the hands of a Starlight Celebration-seasoned professional chef!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

While I had previously featured duck breast as my Featured Ingredient of the Week for Meat Miqa’bob way back in Week 12, this time I was working with the whole duck for the recipe and preparing it the dish. Duck meat is a high-fat, high-protein lean meat that can be prepared in a variety of ways. I ended up having to visit several supermarkets to find one that sold whole duck, as the shop that I went to back in March 2022 didn’t have it for sale anymore. I won’t lie – the bird kind of freaked me out at first to work with, and I dreaded cutting off the head and neck of it.

With the whole duck being such a central ingredient to making Starlight Dodo, I knew it had to be my Featured Ingredient of the Week for Cooking Eorzea!

My Cooking Attempt

Starlight Dodo wouldn’t be Starlight Dodo without a variety of ingredients being used. For this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, these are what I used:

This was a two-day recipe, due to me needing to let the duck rest for a day before cooking. On the first day, I removed the head and neck of the duck with my cleaver.

I then trimmed off the excess fat around the neck and cavity. Duck meat, as I mentioned earlier, is very fatty already and so it doesn’t need the excessive fat unconnected to meat in order to be flavorful.

Setting the duck aside for the moment, I brought several cups of water up to a boil in a pot.

I then scooped out the boiling water and poured half of it over the duck breast while it was suspended over my sink, and then flipped the bird over and poured the rest over on the other side. The boiling water is to help tighten the skin around the duck.

I then heavily salted the entire duck and tied the back feet together with butcher’s twine.

I then placed the duck in the refrigerator for around 22 hours on a wire sheet and baking tray setup.

Just before I was ready to pull the duck out, I crushed several garlic cloves, and I sliced the shallot into halves.

I then halved both the lemon and the orange.

I pulled the duck out of the refrigerator, and I patted it dry all over with paper towels. Once that was done, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

I coated the duck with pepper next.

I then jammed half an orange into the duck cavity, followed by the garlic. I made sure to push the orange half as far into the duck as I could, and I tried my best to spread the garlic around inside afterwards.

I then inserted some of the lemon and the rosemary sprig inside.

As I tried to insert the shallot halves, I realized that I was quickly running out of room inside the duck cavity.

I ended up having to halve the orange and lemon halves into quarter slices, and then work furiously to cram all of those and the remaining shallots into the duck. It was more than a little miraculous that I did not destroy the duck in the process!

With that accomplished, I put the duck into the oven for an hour.

I then pulled it out, flipped the duck over, and put the duck back into the over for another 25 minutes. You can tell from these pictures already how the skin was starting to really crisp up.

While the duck was roasting for a second time, I started to make the glaze. I added together molasses, honey, and orange juice in a bowl before blending it all together. This took a lot longer than I expected it to, but it finally became a solid glaze in the end.

When I removed the duck for the second time, I coated the underside with the glaze and put it back in for another 25 minutes to roast.

When the timer went off, I pulled the duck back out, flipped it over, painted the breast-side with glaze, and then put it back into the oven again for 20 more minutes.

I finally pulled the duck out one last time, coated it all over with glaze one last time, and then put it back into the oven for another 10 minutes to try to cook the meat thoroughly through.

I pulled the duck out, and checked the temperature with a meat thermometer in the duck breast to make sure the entire dish was at the proper temperature. It registered 180 degrees Fahrenheit, which was more than enough.

I then wrapped the entire duck up in aluminum foil for 15 minutes to let the meat rest and finish cooking.

Once it was done, I pulled the aluminum foil off to serve it.

And here is what Starlight Dodo looks like when it is finished!

While this final dish photo seems to be an incredibly weird juxtaposed product placement at first, it is worth talking a bit about before I discuss how the dish tasted. In the 1970s, Kentucky Fried Chicken came to Japan and started a marketing campaign in 1974 that KFC’s fried chicken, paired with a bottle of wine, should be used for Christmas parties. Titled “Kentucky for Christmas”, it was a massive marketing success and eating KFC became a Japanese Christmas tradition that still exists today.

In FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, the yearly Starlight Celebration event is more or less a stand-in for Christmas. In game lore, the event dates back to Ishgard during the Dragonsong War when children were orphaned in Coerthas. Ishgardian knights would give those orphans a place to stay inside their barracks, even though it was forbidden, during the winter. The children would be dressed in scarlet uniforms to be snuck in and hidden. After the harsh winter was over, the children would pay that kindness shown to them forward by wearing scarlet uniforms and giving gifts to other children during the coldest week of the year. They gradually became known as Saint’s Little Helpers, and the captain of the knights that helped those orphans so long ago became known as ‘Saint of Nymeia’. The Starlight dodo, according to FFXIV lore, is a dish prepared at the end of the year as an offering to the Twelve.

Finally, back in September 2023, FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and Kentucky Fried Chicken announced a crossover promotion for Japanese KFC restaurants that included stickers, a specialty box, and a Japanese region-only emote for eating chicken.

So, this week’s dish photo is a blending of Japanese Christmas traditions with Eorzean Starlight Celebration lore, topped off with a crossover real-life event between FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and KFC to link it all together in a harmonious and layered holiday-oriented way.

As for the Starlight Dodo itself? Absolutely fantastic. It turned out that the orange and lemon really infused itself with the meat, and I could taste both fruits in each duck breast bite. The skin had an orange flavor to it too, and I loved how crispy it was and how well it went with the duck meat. I could faintly taste the rosemary at times too, though I couldn’t pick up any of the shallot in the overall flavor. The duck breast itself was extremely succulent, and it just fell apart beneath my fork and knife. This was an excellent dish, and one that definitely is fit for a Starlight Celebration.

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I would probably halve the orange and lemon into quarters, and try to slide them in sequentially, instead of starting off with a whole orange half and cramming everything else in around it. The recipe called to only halve the orange and lemon, but I just had such a hard time making that work with everything else that I needed to fit into the duck cavity. Otherwise, it was absolutely perfect.

In keeping with this belated Starlight Celebration holiday, I should give out some thank yous! First off, I need to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and giving me this wonderful Starlight Dodo dish to make for Cooking Eorzea. I also need to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. I think it is important to show that my attempts can sometimes look quite like what the professionals create, even if I am not a professional myself. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for Cooking Eorzea on short notice, and you should check his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. The Starlight Celebration and Cooking Eorzea simply wouldn’t exist without both of them putting in the time to make it happen.

In Two Weeks

Unfortunately, there will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, as I will be covering an event down in Los Angeles for oprainfall.

However! When Cooking Eorzea returns, I will be making Stuffed Cabbage Roll from the Gyr Abania region. It is a combination of cabbage, ground lamb, rice, and several other ingredients, so please look forward to that!

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 45: Starlight Dodo (FINAL FANTASY XIV Online) appeared first on oprainfall.

I love music. In my early thirties, I picked up learning the piano and I fell in love with it. One of the saddest things I had to do when I moved to California was to give my weighted keyboard away (I actually donated it for children to use), because I always liked sitting down when I have had a bad day and let myself get lost in playing pieces such as Melodies of Life from FINAL FANTASY IX. Music can tell stories and everything about the composer and performers themselves through the tempo, the instruments used, and even how loud (forte) or soft (piano) it is. It is this real love for music that causes me to attend as many video game concerts as I can- especially FINAL FANTASY XIV Online ones, as I simply love Masayoshi Soken and his works with Love, Eorzean Style.

Most recently, I attended the debut of the latest NieR concert series, NieR: Orchestra Concert 12024 [the end of data] in Los Angeles on January 27, 2024. I only picked up the NieR series (along with SINoALICE!) only in the past few months in order to appreciate what I was going to be seeing. You can check my full review out here, but in short: it reminded me once again of the power of music when it comes to storytelling. While 2B, 9S, Kainé, and everyone else – up to and including the Lighthouse Lady in Seafront – are amazing in themselves, the music in the NieR games really lift everything up to another level and help shape it into something more than just the sum of the parts.

If you can attend a performance of NieR: Orchestra Concert 12024 [the end of data], then you should. If you can also attend A New World: intimate music from FINAL FANTASY, then you definitely should do that too. But if you can’t attend either, you should instead put on your favorite video game OST and listen for a while to see if you can discover something new about a world you love- especially if that world happens to be Eorzea.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is for Rare Roast Beef! This is the 45th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and it has a ‘Medium’ difficulty rating. This dish requires two full days to be prepared in the refrigerator, and then several hours in the oven to cook. Hailing from the Azim Steppe in the Othard region, it is a dish that I am excited to make.

I have also never worked with (as it is a familiar refrain for long-time readers of this column!) bottom round roast before, and so it was a new adventure for me. Here is what the dish is supposed to look like in the hands of a professional!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

I have never heard of whole-grain mustard seed before this week’s Cooking Eorzea ingredient list, as I am just used to the whole paste version like yellow mustard, dijon mustard, etc. It tuns out that whole-grain mustard is mustard that is ground some, but not enough to break down the mustard seeds. It is a much rougher, more…well…seed-filled mustard than what I am used to. I tried a small sample of it too, and it was pretty good! It was somewhat spicy, and it had a bit of a crunchy texture to it too. All of this made whole-grain mustard this week’s Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

There were a lot of fresh vegetables that I’ve used for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

I first made the seasoning for the round bottom roast by combining the salt, pepper, dried rosemary, and dried thyme together in a small bowl.

I then rubbed the blended seasonings into the bottom round roast. I then set the seasoned bottom round roast on top of a wire rack on a baking sheet and placed it into the refrigerator for 48 hours.

Two days later, I pulled the round roast out and let it sit for an hour to warm up to room temperature.

While the bottom round roast warmed up, I chopped the fennel bulb and celery stalks into large chunks.

I also sliced up the shallots and the carrots!

I lined a deep baking pan with the various vegetables, and I added the two sprigs of fresh rosemary and fresh thyme to the pan as well.

Once the baking pan was prepared, I moved the oven rack to the bottom third of the oven and preheated it to 225 Fahrenheit.

While the oven was heating up, I minced both fresh garlic cloves and mint leaves.

I added the minced garlic, minced mint leaves, ground fennel, whole-grain mustard, and olive oil together in another small bowl before blending it together.

I rubbed the blended mixture all over the bottom round roast and placed the roast, fat side up, on the deep baking dish.

By now, the oven was ready and so I put the deep baking pan into the oven for three hours. Once the timer went off, I pulled it out and checked the internal temperature.

Once I was sure that the meat was properly cooked, I loosely wrapped it up in aluminum foil and set it aside for 30 minutes. I also preheated the oven again, but this time to 500 Fahrenheit.

I used a pair of tongs to remove all of the cooked vegetables from the pan, and I put them into a bowl. I ended up snacking on them, and they were really good. I tilted the pan, as you can see below, to gather together all of the drippings to use in the gravy.

I added the pan drippings to a small pot, sliced off some butter, added that as well to the pot, and then heated it all up in order to start making the gravy.

When both were melted and blended together, I added in the flour.

I whisked it all together until it was blended, and then I started to add the beef broth in by small amounts at a time before continuing to mix it together. I did it this way in order to help the gravy become thick.

When all the beef broth was blended in, I brought it up to a boil.

I then lowered the temperature, and then let it simmer until the gravy was properly thickened. Once that was done, I added in some salt and pepper for seasoning.

I whisked the gravy all together again to blend the salt and pepper in. Once that was done, I set the gravy aside.

Moving the oven rack to the top third of the oven, I unwrapped the bottom round roast and place it, fat side up, back into the oven for the fat to crisp up for eight minutes.

Pulling the bottom round roast out of the oven, I wrapped it up again in more aluminum foil for five more minutes to let it finish up.

Once the time was up, I sliced the meat. I was EXTREMELY happy that the meat was cooked properly on the inside! Finally, I topped the rare roast beef off with some of the previously made gravy.

And here is how this week’s Cooking Eorzea attempt turned out!

The Rare Roast Beef was absolutely tender and delicious. The seasonings from the outside rubs really came through on the meat, and the gravy did not overpower the meat, but instead complimented it. The roasted vegetables from earlier were about a third gone at that point, as I kept snacking on the shallots and celery. I was surprised at how, well, perfect I got the dish. This looked visually impressive while it was also relatively simple to make!

Afterword

If I was to make the Rare Roast Beef again, I would definitely make it for someone else. I got the recipe absolutely right the first time around, and I was completely pleased with how it turned out. My only issue is that, well, you have to plan it a couple days in advance in order to let the meat sit and season in the refrigerator. I cannot recommend this Cooking Eorzea dish enough!

Let’s talk ‘thank you’s’! I want to open by thanking Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, as this column wouldn’t exist without it. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look and for being willing to work with me on this project for so long. Furthermore, I additionally owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series, and you can check his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. Dawntrail is coming in just a few months, and I am really, really excited for it and whatever SQUARE ENIX will be showing off at PAX East!

Next Week

Assuming I can find a whole duck of appropriate size, we are going to be celebrating a belated Starlight Festival by making the Starlight Dodo dish. I actually love the Starlight Festival, with it having started as gift-giving by Ishgardian Knights to orphans during the Dragonsong War, and its evolution into modern Eorzea with the Saint of Nymeia and Saint’s Little Helpers. It is a magical event, and one that I am happy to celebrate in Cooking Eorzea…even if it is a couple months late!

What is your favorite video game OST to listen to ad nauseum?

What is a dish that you cannot believe that you’ve made perfectly in the past?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 44: Rare Roast Beef (Operation Rainfall) appeared first on oprainfall.

A lot has been happening lately. I’ve come down with a rather bad sinus infection, and so I’ve been trying to navigate and treat that while also carrying on my work life, my cooking, and everything else. I hate being sick, and I have had a lot of trouble handling the late-night coughing fits despite taking a cornucopia of medication.

All of that set aside, it hasn’t stopped me from watching Fan Festival 2024 in Tokyo! We got a look at a bunch of new content for the upcoming expansion, and everyone found out about the new Pictomancer job. I love how colorful the job looks to be, and I hope that it has a complexity to it that makes it easy to play but difficult to properly master. It is a bit weird moving on from the storyline that was started way back when in 1.0, but I am ready to experience the ‘vacation’ that we are being promised in Dawntrail. 

I’m honestly really excited for it, and I hope that it brings a lot of new players on board – especially with all the new Xbox Series X and S gamers hopefully coming on board.

Change and new things are ahead for us all, and I am ready to see what SQUARE ENIX has in store for us with all the Love, Eorzean Style that I can muster up. Especially once I am feeling better. If only ‘Cure’ and ‘Esuna’ spells worked in real life…

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

Pork Kakuni is the 44th recipe in the cookbook, and it has a difficulty rating of ‘Easy.’ Coming out of the Far Eastern archipelago of Hingashi, this is a dish that will take several hours to make. I’ve never worked with pork belly before as an ingredient, and so I am excited to see just how tender it is while it cooks in a pot with vegetables and then in a braising sauce.

Anyway, here is what the dish is supposed to look like when it is made by the hands of a professional!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Pork belly is a fatty, boneless cut of pork that comes from the belly of a pig. Pork belly is a long cut of meat that has layers of fat surrounding the meat itself. I’ve never actually worked with pork belly before, and I’ve never bought it. This meat was surprisingly tough to cut through the fat of, and I needed to use a second knife to separate the last bits of fat away for each cube. This ingredient became my Featured Ingredient Of The Week after I worked with it and realized just how delicious and easy to prepare it was!

My Cooking Attempt

The ingredients list for Pork Kakuni surprisingly did not require me to add any spices or seasonings to the dish:

First, I removed the fresh ginger root’s skin by using a spoon to gently scrape it off. Once I finished scraping it, I measured it down to three inches, cut it, and then cut it in half again.

I then prepped and quartered the fennel bulb before preparing and slicing the scallions in half.

I then sliced the pork belly into large cubes.

I layered a large plate with paper towels and then heated a teaspoon of olive oil up in a pan.

Once the pan was hot, I added in the pork belly cubes and I let each of the sides brown. I kept having to rotate them in the pan to make sure each side had an opportunity to sizzle!

When the pork was done after about 10 minutes, I removed the pork belly from the pan, placed them onto the paper towel-covered plate, and then gently pressed each piece of pork belly to dry it.

I then added the pork belly, the quartered fennel, the halved ginger root, and the sliced scallions to a pot. I added just enough water to cover up all of the ingredients.

I brought the pot up to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, and then let it cook for two-and-a-half hours.

When the timer rang, I pulled the pork out and patted it dry. I then set the remaining soup aside to enjoy for a separate meal since there is no reason to waste a good soup. As for the pork belly, it was extremely tender and I had to be extra careful to not let it fall apart in my hands.

Setting the pork belly aside, I started to make the braising sauce. First, I got out a small saucepan and emptied the bottle of dashi stock into it.

I then added in sake and mirin to the dashi stock.

I then measured out the soy sauce and added it in too.

Finally, I added in the granulated sugar and compacted brown sugar to the braising sauce!

I then whisked it all together with a spatula until it was well-blended, heated up the braising sauce, and then added in the pork belly.

I brought the saucepot up to a boil, lowered the temperature, and then let the entire dish simmer for an hour. Every so often, I turned the pork over to make sure that every side was well-coated as the Pork Kakuni finished up!

And here is this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish! With the brand-new announcement of Pictomancer during the Keynote in Fan Festival 2024 in Tokyo, I felt like the inspiration of the job from FINAL FANTASY III (in actuality FINAL FANTASY VI, for reasons that are far too long to get into here) would be a fitting decorative piece for this week!

The Pork Kakuni was fantastic, and I ate most of it in one sitting. The pork belly was incredibly tender and kept falling apart on my fork, and I could absolutely taste the ginger root and fennel in the pork. The braising sauce was salty and savory, and it paired really, really well with the pork belly. This was an incredibly easy dish to make that was insanely delicious, and it looks far more fancy than it actually was to make!

Afterword

If I was to make the Pork Kakuni again, I absolutely would do it when I have plenty of time to do it. It is an amazing, but long-cooking dish, to make. I cannot stress about how easy it was to make and how delicious it was!

Now, ‘thank you’ time! First, as always, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how professional attempts looks like. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for Cooking Eorzea on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I watched the Keynote address, and I am honestly excited for Dawntrail. It looks to be an amazing expansion and I cannot wait to see what is next for the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn! And more importantly (for me), I cannot wait for what new dishes I will be able to hopefully make for Cooking Eorzea.

In Two Weeks

I have company coming this weekend, and so there will not be a Cooking Eorzea dish for next week. It’s hard explaining to someone that we need to shop around for random ingredients at multiple grocery stores. Fun fact: I have yet to be able to buy all the ingredients for any dish at just one store so far, which is a bit crazy.

Anyway, when this column comes back, Rare Roast Beef will be on the menu! I looked at the recipe already, and it looks like it will be hearty and amazing. So please come back then to check out the next installment of Cooking Eorzea!

Have you made a dish with pork belly before?

What was your favorite announcement from Fan Festival 2024 in Tokyo?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 43: Pork Kakuni appeared first on oprainfall.

My favorite holiday is New Year’s Eve. It is the one time of the year when everyone is looking forward to the future together and wanting to make the following year the best one possible. It is about noisemakers and resolutions, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, Auld Lang Syne, dancing and music, and spending time with people who matter.

These past 12 months have been an incredibly trying time in my life between my health issues and work and my sport activities. I’m definitely in a different place mentally than I was when I started the year out, and I have fallen a bit more in love with FINAL FANTASY XIV Online during that time period too.

For this coming year, I’ve also been trying to figure out what I want to do as a resolution – and I think it will be threefold. First, I will set a goal to lose 30-40 pounds this year as I focus on my health (boring, I know!). I’ve already been working on doing more cardio, moderating my diet, and making better life choices. I am still worried about my heart, and continuing to take proper care of myself – and even stepping it up – will go a long way towards that.

Second, I will continue to write Cooking Eorzea as much as possible. I love my (mostly!) weekly cooking column, and I want to keep writing it.

And as for my final resolution: I want to see Hikaru Utada’s SCIENCE FICTION tour in 2024. A lot of you may be saying “that name sounds familiar, but how do I know that person?” Hikaru Utada (pronouns: she/her, they/them) wrote and sang the title themes for multiple KINGDOM HEARTS games that started with Hikari/Simple and Clean in 2002 and most recently with Chikai/Don’t Think Twice for KINGDOM HEARTS III. She has been releasing music since 1999, and she has not toured since 2018.  I love her music, not just because of KINGDOM HEARTS, and I have not been abroad since I went to Rome in 2019. It will be a good chance to see a bit more of the world and to see an amazing artist perform live – if I can get tickets.

That means that I am setting reasonable, obtainable resolutions (taking care of myself and writing Cooking Eorzea) and a slightly unreasonable resolution (going to see Hikaru Utada perform) for 2024. All of these resolutions will be goals that I hope to achieve with Love, Eorzean Style.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The 43rd Cooking Eorzea recipe is a ‘Medium’ difficulty recipe from the Norvrandt region, and it is a two-day recipe to make! This proved to be a bit of a problem, because I had to find the same approximate time over two days to make the dish. I ended up having to get up around 5 AM to make the pizza dough one day and then at the same time the next to finish making the pizza. I had also never made pizza from scratch before, and so it was an interesting dish to make!

Anywhere, here is what the whole pizza pie is supposed to look like:

And here is what a pizza slice looks like in the hands of a professional chef!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s featured ingredient of the week is basil! It ordinarily would be something like San Morzano tomatoes, but I immediately was drawn to the basil plant because…well…it is the first plant that I am going to try to take care of since I had a fire in my apartment. Ordinarily, I use fresh basil leaves by themselves, but I didn’t have an option for this week. As this column goes to publish, I will have the basil plant sitting in indirect sunlight and I am already planning on potting it properly to hopefully grow out!

My Cooking Attempt

Pizza doesn’t come ready-made! Instead, I had to gather together all of the ingredients needed to make it, first:

The (very early) morning before I made the final dish, I put the bread flour, active dry yeast, sugar, salt, ginger powder, and onion powder together in a bowl.

I then added the water and the olive oil together in a bowl and whisked them together.

I then added the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients.

Once that was done, I placed the bowl into the stand mixer, and turned it on.

However, the pizza dough wouldn’t come together despite me waiting several minutes, and I realized that it was probably because I forgot to mix all the dry ingredients together before I started. So, I ended up having to throw the batch out and I started it all over again. This time, I blended the dry ingredients together.

I started the stand mixer at low, and this time, it started to turn into a dough ball! I then started the mixer to knead the dough up for another five minutes.

While the dough was kneading, I scattered all-purpose flour across my silicone mat.

I shaped the raw dough from the bowl into a proper ball shape.

I then sprayed nonstick spray into a large bowl, put the dough ball inside, covered it with wrap, and then put it into the refrigerator for 24 hours to rise.

A bit before the dough was ready, I started on the sauce. First, I minced up the fresh garlic.

I added olive oil and butter together into a saucepan, and I let them melt together. Once that was done, I added in the minced garlic, and I let the garlic brown for a few minutes.

This is how the garlic looked when it was done.

I added in the whole San Marzano tomatoes, and I mixed it together with the garlic, butter, and olive oil.

Once it was well-blended, I added in the oregano, red pepper flakes, onion powder, and sugar.

I then changed the temperature, blended the seasonings in, and I let the pizza sauce cook for about 45 minutes. Every so often, I would stir and I would lightly mash the whole San Marzano tomatoes into the pizza sauce.

As the pizza sauce was cooking on the stovetop, I laid out a fresh scattering of all-purpose flour on my silicone mat and I preheated the oven to 475 for the pizza itself.

At this point, it was time to remove the pizza dough from the fridge. The 24 hours that passed had really been kind to my pizza dough, as it had definitely grown in size! First, I punched it down and then I stretched it out across the mat.

I then divided it up into three pizza dough balls, covered them in a kitchen towel, and let it all rest for a half-hour.

While the dough was rising again, I oiled up my new cast-iron skillet.

I then generously scattered onion powder and garlic powder along the inside of the cast-iron skillet.

A half-hour after I covered the dough, I uncovered it, selected a single dough ball and then punched it down.

I then tried to stretch out the dough ball to be larger than the skillet size, but I ended up having to steal dough from one of the other dough balls in order to have enough.

At this point, my pizza sauce was ready, and I added in some salt and pepper to taste! I then set it aside and then added the pizza dough into the previously prepared cast-iron skillet.

I then scooped out the pizza sauce and then laid it out over the pizza dough.

Once the pizza sauce was spread out, I added the fresh mozzarella on top and then I brushed the crust with olive oil.

At that point, I baked the bottom crust on the stovetop for about five minutes.

I then baked the pizza in the oven for about 12 minutes.

Once the timer was up, I pulled the pizza out and sprinkled Parmesan cheese on top of it. I then put it back into the oven to bake for another three minutes.

While the pizza was baking for a second time, I plucked fresh leaves off of the basil plant. Once the pizza was done, I added it to the pizza.

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea column! The red and gold confetti came from June’s FINAL FANTASY XVI Pre-Launch Celebration and August’s FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 events.

And here is a single slice from a side angle!

So, it turns out that I burned the bottom of the pizza in the skillet, and it had blackened. Other than that, it was absolutely fantastic! The pizza sauce was incredibly flavorful, and the cheese pulled apart as I ate it. I ended up eating everything but the bottom burned crust, and I loved the slight fresh pop that the basil leave added. The dough was fully cooked through too, and it was definitely a fluffy and fully done crust. The pizza was simply delicious, and it was incredibly filling.

Afterword

If I was to make this pizza dish a second time, I would definitely not burn the pizza bottom if I could. Otherwise, I would have probably let the dough sit in the refrigerator for awhile longer before I used it. Otherwise, this dish turned out extremely well and I was quite happy with how it turned out!

The final thank you’s for this year’s Cooking Eorzea column! I want to first thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look, and responding to my continual photo requests throughout the year. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice and for his photoediting work. You should check him and his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in 1.0 and in A Realm Reborn. Eorzea was shaped by both of them, and my life is so much better off because of it.

Coming in 2024

When Cooking Eorzea returns at the start of 2024, I will be making Pork Kakuni from the Higashi region.

I am pretty excited to be working with pork belly, and the dish looks simply fantastic to make and eat. So please look forward to it!

What toppings do you like to put on your pizza?

What are your New Year Resolutions?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 42: Pizza appeared first on oprainfall.

This week’s Cooking Eorzea column was the hardest column yet, and I seriously struggled with making it. It wasn’t the cooking skill, it wasn’t the timing in my life. To put it simply, I couldn’t find Mahi-Mahi with the skin on to use as an ingredient. The fact that I was able to make this dish at all was one of the biggest surprises of this year for me, and it took several unexpected turns to bring it to the finish line.

I reached out to every grocery store and every fish market that I could get ahold off within roughly a 40-minute drive of myself, and I simply could not source it. It was incredibly frustrating to talk to managers and employees who told me that they could not special order it with the skin on, and that they could not give me any advice on where I could find some Mahi-Mahi fillets with the skin on as none of them were carrying it at that time.

This dragged on for weeks, and it was the most frustrating experience I have had so far with writing Cooking Eorzea. I ended up emailing Ms. Rosenthal and Insight Editions, and I apologized to them both for how long my column was taking to write. Ms. Rosenthal responded and told me that this was not Mahi season, and that it would be easier to find from May through September.

I won’t lie, it started to break me. As November started to stretch on, I was thinking about skipping this recipe and coming back to it. With Thanksgiving approaching and me going back to see family in my home state, I reached out to one of the handful of fish markets in my hometown to ask.

And surprisingly, somehow…the first place I called said that they could get Mahi-Mahi with the skin on for me.

With that set up, I needed a place to cook since I was going to be on the opposite side of the country from my kitchen. I asked a pair of dear friends of mine if I could cook them dinner. This would be the first time I’ve cooked a Cooking Eorzea dish for someone since the Bouillabaisse recipe in July 2022, if you’re curious. My friends said ‘yes’, and I ended up borrowing their kitchen, their kitchenware, and a handful of ingredients to make the Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi with.

I had forgotten that I love cooking for others with Love, Eorzean Style. Cooking for friends, having dinner and conversation with them, and just seeing people that I haven’t seen in months was a special memory to have. If I hadn’t had such a hard time finding Mahi-Mahi, I wouldn’t have cooked for them. I really want to cook for other people more often here on out, if I can.

And hopefully, some of the upcoming recipes will let me do just that.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The most difficult recipe to make so far, the 42nd recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook is for Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi. That is a bit ironic, since it is an ‘Easy’ rated La Noscean dish, and it truly was the easiest dish to actually make after the Nutrient-Rich Porridge that I made back in Week 5.

Anyway, here is what Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi looks like in the hands of a true chef:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Like there could be any other possible featured ingredient for this week’s Cooking Eorzea.

Mahi-Mahi is a ray-finned fish that lives worldwide in temperate, tropical, and sub-tropical waters. They have a single, long, dorsal fin and they can live for up to five years. They are a carnivorous fish and they can swim up to 50 knots at a time. They are also, per Ms. Rosenthal, easier to find from May through September in seafood markets!

I thought obtaining birch syrup and lotus root was difficult, but Mahi-Mahi proved to be more difficult than both of them combined. I knew after a couple of weeks of searching for this fish that I would have to make it my Ingredient of the Week once I was able to finally make this dish!

My Cooking Attempt

It was really strange cooking at someone else’s home, even if they are a pair of close friends of mine. I ended up using their salt, pepper, and pre-minced garlic. Also, because I was so far away from my own kitchen, I ended up having to use their pans, utensils, and stove top to make this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. I also couldn’t bear to bring the Endwalker Hydaelyn/Zodiark shakers with me on multiple plane flights, so I had to leave them out of this week’s column.

First, I zested the lemon. It was super weird using a zester that wasn’t my own, and I kept having to shake the zest loose from the metal device in order to get as much as possible out of it.

I then sliced up half of the lemon and set those slices aside for later.

I then ground out pepper, salt, and used the zested lemon to coat the four Mahi-Mahi fillets.

I turned on my friends’ stovetop, and I added some olive oil to their pan, and I started to swirl it around. The pan heated up fairly quickly, to my surprise!

Once the pan and the olive oil was properly heated, I added in two of the Mahi-Mahi fillets, skin down. I let them sizzle for about four minutes, and then I flipped them over and let them cook for another four minutes.

After taking the temperature to make sure they were cooked properly, I set those two Mahi-Mahi fillets aside and repeated the process with the other two Mahi-Mahi fillets.

Once I pulled out the last Mahi-Mahi fillets once they were also at the proper temperature, I added in the butter, and I let it melt down.

Once the butter was melted down, I added in the minced garlic, and I let it cook for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately, it started to burn during that time. It turns out that I misgauged the temperature of the pan. After the garlic somewhat burned, I added in the all-purpose flour.

I blended it all together, and it definitely was a burned mess.

I then added the vegetable broth and the sake…

…And then the lemon juice before I blended it all together.

Finally, I added on the lemon slices, and I allowed them to all heat up.

I then ladled the ‘sauce’ and the lemon slices onto the Mahi-Mahi fillets. I ended up having to smear the sauce onto the fillets, as it was just so gummy and solid.

And here is the final Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

Despite burning the garlic, I was shocked at how amazing this dish tasted. The Mahi-Mahi skin was perfectly crispy, and the fish was cooked through and hot. The citrus from the lemon juice and the spark from the sake really complimented the fish well, and I just fell in love with how light and delicious this whole dish was. My friends loved it too, and they actually made fresh mashed potatoes with the rest of the butter that I didn’t use as a side dish.

I ended up using a mixture of FINAL FANTASY XI Online and FINAL FANTASY XIV Online coasters for this week’s dish, simply because I have been drawn more and more back into Vana’diel lately and I am trying to figure out if there is some way I can belong to both that realm and Eorzea at the same time again.

Afterword

The biggest issue with cooking in someone else’s kitchen is that you don’t know the little ‘quirks’ that it has. I didn’t know how quickly my friends’ pans or stove heat up, and so I ended up burning the sauce. Thankfully, it didn’t impact the flavor, but it still looked fairly ugly in the end. I would absolutely make this dish again, but I would be more cautious with the temperature I set things at when I am cooking in someone else’s home.

So, ‘thank you’ time!. I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and for jumping in to advise me that I was looking for an out-of-season fish. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes should look, and for being patient with how long this week’s column took to write. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his art out over on X. I also owe my friends a real, serious, thank you for letting me use their kitchen and their equipment to make this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. Without their love and support, I would not have been able to make this week’s dish.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I still love this series, even if I struggle with winning the Fall Guys content in the Golden Saucer.

In Two~ish Weeks

Next up: Pizza!

I have never made pizza dough before, and so this will be a real adventure for me. I have had plenty of experience making dough from the breads section of the cookbook, and so I am really hopeful that it will serve me well with this upcoming recipe attempt!

Have you ever struggled to obtain a cooking ingredient before? What was it?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 41: Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi appeared first on oprainfall.

Ever since I was described as a “brave little spark” during the concert at FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024, I’ve been playing with those words from Flow in my head and how I can live up to them. I know it’s just lyrics from a song inside of an expansion pack of a video game, but they just stood out so clearly in my mind.

Brave. Little. Spark.

I ultimately decided that, for me, it means that I should be trying to push harder to achieve my dreams and try daunting things. I want to write more about FINAL FANTASY because I have a real love for this series and how much it shaped me – especially FINAL FANTASY XI Online. I ended up publishing on Tuesday a lengthy piece about what enemies from FFXI that I want to see in the ECHOES OF VANA’DIEL raid series. I started going back to kendo for the first time since I had to get my wisdom teeth out, and even though I was clearly out of shape, I still tried to hold my own. I am taking a microtrip in the near future to see a genre of music that I’ve never experienced before, and I am trying out realistic sports simulator video games for the first time ever, just so I can write about them. I’m even starting a new book at the moment!

Cooking Eorzea, in a lot of ways, is me trying to achieve my journalistic dreams while also trying hard, new things. I am making a different dish each week, sometimes from crazy ingredients (sorry Victoria if you’re reading this!), and I push through until the end no matter how it looks like it will turn out. I do it all with Love, Eorzean Style, sure, but it still is daunting at times.

I want to live up to those three words and do my best to embody them, because I genuinely want to be a ‘brave little spark.’

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The 41st recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, Mole Loaf hails from the Thanalan Region with a ‘Medium’ cooking difficulty level. I will be honest: the recipe itself seems fairly simple, and I don’t think that I can screw it up too badly as long as I am paying attention to what I am doing. And unlike last time, there is not much chance that I will risk smoking myself out of my apartment!

Anyway, here is what Mole Loaf looks like when a real, professional chef makes it:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea featured ingredient of the week is…ground lamb! From my research, ground lamb is made from lamb meat from the neck and shank, and with trimmings from other parts of the animal. I was surprised at how lamb has a lot of protein in it, and it has a lot of Iron, Zinc, Vitamin B12, and more. Overall, ground lamb is a fairly good alternative to ground beef, and it is something new that I have yet to eat or work with. As a result, this was an easy pick for Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

In the ingredients for this week’s Cooking Eorzea, sake makes a return!

First, I chopped up the onion and minced the garlic.

I then added a teaspoon of olive oil to a heated pan and started to brown the onions.

As I let the onions brown while occasionally stirring them, I broke open both 12 oz. packages of lamb meat and I measured a full pound. I was SO excited that I measured out the exact 4 oz. I needed on the FIRST TRY!

By this point, the onions were browned, and I moved them into a separate bowl to cool down.

I added the ground lamb, salt, pepper, and panko to the onions before setting it all aside temporarily.

I got out another small bowl, cracked an egg, and added soy sauce, fish sauce, ketchup, and tonkatsu to it. I then whisked it around before realizing there was a small bit of eggshell that somehow snuck in that I had to fish out.

Once the eggshell was fished out and the wet ingredients were blended together, I added it to the other bowl.

I then blended it all together by hand. It was really sticky and wet, but it held together surprisingly well. I ended up not having to add in anymore panko to the bowl.

I molded the blended ingredients together into five almost equally-sized patties.

I added a tablespoon of oil to a larger pan, heated it up, and then added the five patties to the pan. I let them cook for about four minutes to brown on one side.

Once they were browned on the bottom, I flipped them over and let the other side brown for another three or so minutes.

I then added in some water, covered it with a lid, and let the patties finish cooking through while the water evaporated.

When the water finished evaporating, I waited a bit longer and then I pulled the lamb patties out once they seemed fully cooked.

With the pan still hot, I added in ketchup, tonkatsu sauce, sake, and water together to make the topping sauce.

I then blended it all together, along with the lamb patty juices, in the pan until the sauce started to thicken up when I drew my spatula through it.

Finally, I poured the sauce into a small bowl and then ladled it onto the patties.

And here is the end result of this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish!

This was an interesting dish to eat. The recipe said to ladle the topping sauce on generously, which is what I did. There was definitely some oil and fat leftover from the lamb patties that got blended in, as you can see in the final dish picture above. The whole dish tasted mostly like tonkatsu and ketchup from the topping sauce, to be completely honest, as it really overpowered the lamb patties. I ended up not coating one of the lamb patties with the sauce and just ate it as it was to see how the lamb patties tasted. They were surprisingly mild, even with the onions and the garlic and whatnot added in. The lamb patties were delicious on their own, but the sauce just overpowered that flavor so much.

Afterword

I think that if I made this dish again, aside from making sure that I got every bit of eggshell out before I blended wet ingredients together, I would just not work with the topping sauce. It was seriously that strong. The patties were delicious though, and they would make an excellent burger instead. Thankfully, the entire dish was fairly easy to make!

So…Thank yous time! First up? Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. Second, I want to thank the staff at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from the cookbook to show how these recipes look in the hands of a professional. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both 1.0 and in 2.0 and above. It’s hard to not love their work, honestly.

Next Week

Next week on Cooking Eorzea, I will be making Pan-Fried Mahi-Mahi from the La Noscea region! That’s right: a fish dish AND I won’t have to deep fry it. I am stupidly excited about it, to be honest!

What does being a brave little spark mean to you?

What do you think of ground lamb?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 40: Mole Loaf appeared first on oprainfall.

Shortly after I got back from New York City, I developed a bad pain in the left side of my face. I went to the dentist, who told me that I had infections behind both of my left side wisdom teeth and that I had a badly cracked bottom left molar. The dentist explained to me that I should get all four wisdom teeth out, and then once I was sufficiently recovered from that, I could get my cracked tooth crowned. Being in my mid-30s, this was quite distressing to me because I live alone and I had almost no one to assist me with it. I ended up having to recruit a friend’s daughter to ferry me home from oral surgery, and I spent the next few days off work and recovering.

It was during that time that I finally decided to start NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22474487139… on my Xbox Series X, since I was attending NieR: Orchestra Concert 12024 [the end of data] in 2024, and I have never played any of the games before. I hate the fact that I often do not start particular video games until there is an unmovable event in my near future that forces me to play that particular game next, and the NieR franchise was the latest example of this.

It was about 10 hours in that I realized the absolute madness and genius of YOKO TARO, and the insane, amazing, wonderful world that he creates in his games. I ended up playing through this game to unlock all five endings and I did all of the different side quests throughout. I am currently playing SINoALICE on my phone before the servers go down, and then I am going to dive into NieR: Automata [Game of the YoHRa Edition] before I see the concert.

It’s honestly amazing to me how there are simply so many good games out there on my shelf that I have yet to start, especially when there is a gem like the NieR series out there. If you haven’t had a chance to play something by YOKO TARO, then do yourself a favor and do so. It helped me get through my wisdom teeth and crowning processes, especially until this week when it was all done, and I could finally start making dishes for Cooking Eorzea again with Love, Eorzean Style.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is the 40th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and it comes out of the Coerthas Region with a cooking difficulty of ‘Medium.’

I was really nervous (and what turned out to be justifiably so) working with peanut oil again, as I did not want to risk burning my home since I was going to try to not make this dish on the stove like I did the Battered Fish recipe previously.

Here is what the Deep-Fried Okeanis is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Red potatoes are a unique food that contains 10% of the recommended daily Vitamin B6 amount, are naturally gluten free, and the skin is loaded with fiber, iron, B vitamins, and potassium. I was shocked when researching red potatoes just how healthy they were and how easily I could integrate them into my own daily diet without much issue. I grew up on russet potatoes, and so this kind of potato never really entered my attention until I started eating them at restaurants as an adult. To be completely honest though, I never thought about cooking with them until this week’s Cooking Eorzea column. It is because of all the wonderful nutrients inside of red potatoes that I made them this week’s Featured Ingredient!

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s Cooking Eorzea shared a lot of similarities with Week 7’s Crab Croquette recipe:

First, I preheated both the oven and a pot of water.

While both of those were getting ready, I got out the boneless pork chops and I flatted them out with the meat hammer. I had to use a lot of strength to break down the meat and flatten it out, and I was afraid of bothering the neighbors with how loudly the banging was.

After I put the hammered pork chops into the refrigerator, I peeled and chunked the red potatoes.

After the potatoes were sliced up, I blended together the olive oil, rosemary, oregano, garlic powder, and onion powder together into a seasoning blend.

As I started to lay the potatoes out into the tray, it was then that I realized that I skipped a step: I forgot to put the sliced red potatoes into the pot to cook. So, I put the seasoned raw potatoes into the refrigerator, and I did the process again with more red potatoes.

After slicing the red potatoes up, I placed them into the boiling pot of water to cook for eight minutes.

While the potatoes were cooking, I made another seasoning blend for the potatoes.

When the timer was up, I scooped out the cooked potatoes and blended them in with the seasoning. The potatoes were incredibly soft, and I had to take great care not to accidentally mash them.

I layered the baking tray with the potatoes, and then I covered the seasoned red potatoes with both salt and pepper.

I then placed the potatoes into the pre-heated over for 20 minutes to bake.

After the timer went off, I pulled the potatoes out, turned them over, and then put them back in for another 15 minutes.

While the potatoes were cooking some more, I added the peanut oil into a large pot and I started to heat it up.

On a separate plate, I added together garlic powder and all-purpose flour and blended them together.

In a bowl, I added together fish sauce and two eggs before whisking them together.

At this point, the red potatoes were done and so I pulled them out of the oven and set them aside on top of the warm stove to keep warm.

On a second and final plate, I scatted out two cups of panko onto it.

Here is what the three dip stations looked like all together.

With the dipping stations prepared, I then got the boneless pork chops out of the refrigerator and coated them all with salt and pepper.

Once the peanut oil was at the proper temperature, I dipped the boneless pork chop first in the flour/garlic mixture…

…I then dipped it into the wet mixture and shook off the extra back into the bowl…

…And finally coated it entirely with panko.

I then put it into the pot of oil…And the entire thing immediately started to smoke up badly enough that it ended up setting off my fire alarm. I immediately hauled the pot to the concrete outside and threw open all of my windows and my doors to air out the apartment. To say that I was freaked out was an understatement.

I was supposed to let the meat deep fry for only four minutes in total, while flipping it midway through. Somehow, I did manage to pull the entire thing out after four minutes, and it was completely black. It turned out that the panko had burned, unfortunately. I am not quite sure why, since the thermometer had displayed the correct oil temperature.

I then laid it on a bowl covered with paper towels to drain the oil onto.

After most of the smoke had left my apartment, I sliced the lemon into quarters as the final step.

And here is the final Deep-Fried Okeanis dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

Aside from the completely burned panko coating, the Deep-Fried Okeanis itself was absolutely delicious. Somehow, the meat itself was perfectly juicy and cooked, as you can see in this photograph below – especially after I squeezed out the lemon slice onto it. I was really, really surprised that it was edible at all with how blackened the outside was.

The seasoned red potatoes had a real restaurant-quality to them. The seasoning was perfect – especially the rosemary – and I loved just how crispy and well-cooked they were. I ended up eating all of them in one sitting while sitting on my porch outside. I cannot overstate how good they were, and that is a side dish that anyone can make easily.

Afterword

Obviously, burning the panko was not the way to go. I still am not quite sure why so much smoke appeared after I added the coated boneless pork chop to the pot. I ended up making the rest of the boneless pork chops on a skillet, though that was obviously not ideal for the recipe. Overall, if I was to do this recipe again, I would definitely do it on top of the grill like I did Week 36’s Battered Fish recipe, just to avoid the smoke issue again.

Soooo…’thank yous’! First up, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look…because the blackened result I had this week was obviously not ideal. I also owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X. Next, I want to thank YOKO TARO for the crazy wonderfulness that is the games that he keeps coming up with and for integrating those characters and worlds into FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. You can check him out on X and on Instagram.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. None of this would be possible without both of them putting their hearts into creating Eorzea for us all to experience.

Two Weeks From Now

While there will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, there will be Cooking Eorzea the week after! This next dish will be Mole Loaf from the Thanalan Region, so please look forward to it!

Have you ever successfully deep-fried pork before?

What do you think of the NieR franchise?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 39: Deep-Fried Okeanis appeared first on oprainfall.

It’s hard to believe that FINAL FANTASY XIV Online: A Realm Reborn has turned 10 years old. Ten years ago, I was just starting my life over again after having moved in northern Florida for a new job. My heart was broken from a woman, and I didn’t know anyone where I lived. I remember seeing the news about ARR launching, but I was too busy trying to piece my life back together into something resembling a decent shape. In 2023, my heart is still (a little bit) broken over a woman, and I am still trying to adjust to life in California. I would never have imagined I would be living here a decade ago, admittedly.

I am a completely different person internally and physically, though. I am (mostly) happy with where I am in life and who I am.

I also quite surprised with how much Eorzea has grown and changed in that time too – especially with Dawntrail coming next year. If you weren’t around for 1.0, and heading into 2.0, then you probably don’t realize just how dire of a situation the game was in. I honestly think that if it wasn’t a numbered FINAL FANTASY game, and if it was any other company besides SQUARE ENIX, then the game servers would have been shuttered for good. It certainly would have been impossible to imagine where the game is today with FAN FESTIVAL events being held around the world.

For this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, I picked two items to show off my final creamy pasta dish with: an acrylic block showing off the art from FINAL FANTASY XIV Online: A Realm Reborn, and a collaboration coaster with PARCO, a major Japanese department store, for FINAL FANTASY‘s 35th anniversary. In other words: the past and the present of the game. In an alternative timeline, this PARCO-collaboration coaster could have been the first new FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise that we got in a very long time to celebrate a long-shutdown MMORPG, instead of being one of the latest pieces to come out in celebration of a well-regarded title.

I wonder where I will be in 10 more years, where I will be living, and what variables and constants there will be then too. I also wonder where FINAL FANTASY XIV Online will be then. Either way, I will hopefully still be playing the game with Love, Eorzean Style.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is another pasta dish: Creamy Salmon Pasta. Hailing out of the Norvrandt Region with a difficulty rating of ‘Easy,’ this is the 39th recipe out of the cookbook. Much like last time’s Boscaiola recipe, this dish is pasta-focused, and that allowed me to focus my attention on trying to make the al dente pasta closer in time to when the overall dish would be completed.

Before making the Creamy Salmon Pasta, my thought was: “Wow, this has a lot of flavors going on!” and I was excited to see how it turns out.

Anyway, here is what a professional attempt looks like for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Lemongrass can grow up to 6.5 feet high and they are used to make citronella oil – which is used in both insect repellant and soap! It has a very strong scent to it, and I was quite impressed with how easy it was to work with once I got the thick outer layers off.

This is a unique ingredient, and while I don’t have a ton to say about it…the fact is it was such a strong aromatic ingredient that I decided to make it the Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish shared a few key ingredients with the prior Boscaiola dish:

The first thing I did was that I started to get the pasta water boiling, since it took such a long time to heat up last week.

While the water was heating up, I chopped up the garlic cloves after shaking them loose of their casings.

Setting them aside, I removed the gai lan leaves from the stems and then chopped up the leaves.

At this point, the water was ready and so I added in the salt, whisked it in, and then added in the pasta. During the next bit, I was stirring the pasta every few minutes while waiting for it to be al dente-ready.

As the pasta was cooking, I zested my lemons. Each lemon is roughly a teaspoon of zest. Thanks to prior Cooking Eorzea columns, I knew this already and so I didn’t buy extra lemons to waste.

When the pasta was ready, I strained out the pasta water and then saved a cup of it to thin the sauce out, if necessary, later on.

Turning my attention back to the other ingredients, I cut off the root end, peeled the outer layers of the lemongrass stalk off, and then smashed the bulb with the butt of my knife in order to break it up so the aromatics could blend in with the overall dish.

I heated up a frying pan with the butter and olive oil in it, before adding in the lemongrass stalk and garlic. I let it cook for around three minutes so the garlic could start to brown.

I then added in the flour, and I whisked it all together until the flour was blended in.

I then added in the lemon juice and the fish sauce and blended those ingredients together with the dish too.

I added in the heavy cream…

…And the lemon zest before whisking it all together.

At this point, I pulled out the smoked salmon and set it aside so I could easily grab it when it was time.

I then added the pepper, thyme, and oregano to the frying pan, and I blended all of those spices together. It was here that the scent of the sauce really took off and you could smell it through the kitchen!

I added in the grated parmesan cheese next, and it really started to thicken the sauce as it blended in – as you can see in the below picture.

I added in the gai lan leaves, and I had to actually be careful to not knock them out of the frying pan as they were blended in. I kept going until they were well-mixed and had started to wilt. Once they were at that point, I removed the lemongrass stalk pieces.

All of the prior steps took place over just a few minutes, and so I was able to add in the still warm and al dente pasta to the dish and start whisking it in with a pair of tongs. It was a lot harder to blend the pasta in than you would think.

I realized that the issue is that the sauce is probably too thick, and so I added in a bit of the reserved pasta water, and it definitely made the dish easier to work with afterwards.

Finally, I added in the smoked salmon pieces, and I blended the entire dish together to finish it off!

And here is the final Smoked Salmon Pasta dish!

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish was honestly a complicated one to parse out the flavors in. It was very, very good – let me be clear, just a very complex flavor profile. The smoked salmon provided saltiness to the dish, but it was cleverly balanced out by the acid in the lemon juice and zest and the creaminess of the parmesan cheese. I loved how the spices and lemongrass/garlic aromatics clearly added a lot of flavors to the dish, while the slight bitterness of the gai lan leaves worked well. There is honestly a lot going on here, and it was super good!

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I am not sure what I would change. Everything went off pretty flawlessly. And I would make this dish again, though it is definitely not something that children or people who don’t like flavor complexity would enjoy. This was just a genuinely surprising, and easy to make, delicious meal. Maybe I would zest my lemons beforehand and crush my lemongrass while the pasta was cooking al dente?

So it’s time to thank the people who make Cooking Eorzea possible! I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and I want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. I would like to think that a lot of my dishes, despite my lack of culinary degree, comes fairly close to the professionals on occasion! Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. It’s been ten years since FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn launched, and I cannot help but wonder where my life will be in another ten years when the expansion turns twenty.

Next Time

I am attending DragonCon and PAX West this weekend, I have company coming the week after, and I unfortunately am getting my wisdom teeth out a few days after that. A very, very busy time in my life…and I obviously cannot make anything other than basic soup while my mouth is healing up from the oral surgery.

Cooking Eorzea will return before the end of September though, with Deep-Fried Okeanis!

Did you play FINAL FANTASY XIV Online ten years ago when it re-launched?

What is your favorite piece of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 38: Creamy Salmon Pasta appeared first on oprainfall.

Lots and lots and lots of traveling.

If you keep up with everything I write for oprainfall, then you’ll notice that I’ve recently been to Las Vegas two weekends in a row for 1) FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 where the Dawntrail expansion was announced, seeing amazing cosplay, participating in a panel interview with Naoki Yoshida, and attending Eorzean Symphony- FINAL FANTASY XIV Orchestra Concert 2023, and for 2) EVO 2023 when I watched the best of the fighting game world compete in an environment that is for anyone who likes video games.

The last two weekends have been crazy and fun and amazing to report from while surrounded by people who love what they are fans of. It therefore was a bit of a shock to me when I got back home and got back to my day-to-day life…which includes Cooking Eorzea and learning to cook. After EVO 2023 though, I definitely found myself looking forward to trying to source the ingredients I needed and trying to pull this dish together so that I could make this week’s Friday publication deadline.

Learning to cook through this FINAL FANTASY XIV Online cookbook is a part of who I am as a person now and this is something I want to make time for even though it takes around 10-15 hours of my week every week. And it is something that I will keep pursuing with Love, Eorzean Style. I guess, in addition to being a fan of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and EVO, I am also now a cooking fan, and I want to surround myself with more people who feel like I do. Maybe a cooking convention will be in my future someday too…

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is for Boscaiola, which is a dish that features a ton of different mushrooms and hails from The Black Shroud region of Eorzea. With an ‘Easy’ difficulty rating and it being the 38th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, I was excited to try out my first pasta dish!

The only thing is that I have never crushed tomatoes by hand before, and so this was going to be quite the adventure to do.

Anyway, here is what Boscaiola is supposed to look like in the hands of a professional:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

The King Oyster Mushroom is, let’s face it, BIG. I was shocked when I saw it in the store just because of how big it is. It has little taste or smell in its natural state, but that definitely changed when I cooked with it. I was so used to working with cremini or shittake mushrooms that I was absolutely surprised at how big the King Oyster Mushroom was, and how easy it was to slice and work with for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. As a result, it easily became the Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

Boscaiola is a mushroom-heavy dish, and you can tell because there are FOUR different types of mushrooms that I ended up using:

I have never crashed tomatoes before by hand, and so it was a completely new experience for me. First, I cut a cross-shape into the bottom of each tomato, and then I placed them into a boiling pot of water. This was to help loosen up the skin and make it easy to pull off.

I let the tomatoes sit for a minute in the boiling water, and then I placed it into a cold bowl of water to cool down.

I then peeled each of the tomatoes and then crushed them by hand. It turned out to be quite easy to do, and I was able to make the fresh tomato sauce.

And here is the final result of the tomatoes crushed by hand:

I added hot water to the dried porcini mushrooms, and I set them aside for around 10 minutes to hydrate back up.

While the porcini mushrooms were hydrating, I sliced the shallots and then I minced the fresh garlic.

After the mushrooms were hydrated, I strained the water out of them and then pressed out any extra liquid.

I then roughly cut up the porcini mushrooms and set them aside.

I then sliced up the king oyster mushroom before setting that aside as well.

I removed the stems from the shiitake and cremini mushrooms and then sliced both of them up.

I chopped up fresh thyme and fresh rosemary after stripping it off of the stems.

I sliced up the fresh bacon and finally set it aside too.

I set aside all of the sliced and minced ingredients and I started to make the al dente pasta. First, I added salt to a tall pot of boiling water.

I then emptied the box of spaghetti pasta into a pot, and I let it cook for seven minutes while stirring occasionally.

Once the timer was up, I strained the pasta out from the water. I made sure to pull a cup of the pasta water out of the pot, and I set it aside to use later on in the dish.

I then got another pot out, heated it up, and I fried the bacon in it for around five minutes until it was cooked through.

I removed the bacon, set it aside on a plate, and then I cooked the sliced shallots and minced garlic in the pot and bacon grease for two minutes until they were softened up.

I added the porcini mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, and king oyster mushrooms to the pot. I let them cook for around 10 minutes until they were all browned.

While the mushrooms were browning, I saw that the pot was starting to dry out and so I added in a bit of olive oil and stirred it in.

I added in the rosemary, thyme, and bacon into the pot.

I then stirred it all together before adding in the crushed tomatoes and one-fourth a cup of the reserved pasta water.

I blended it all together and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Once that was done, I added in the grated Parmesan cheese and the heavy cream.

I blended it all together, and then started to add in the remaining pasta water in small increments so that it could help thin out the sauce.

Finally, I added the pasta back in and I blended it all together to finish off the Boscaiola.

And here is this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish!

This was an amazing dish. It felt genuinely very ‘earthy’ from all the different mushrooms in it, coupled with the occasional pop of bacon. If there was one thing that I had an issue with, it is probably that there is too much spaghetti in the dish. That is a personal issue more than anything, as I know spaghetti dishes are supposed to be mostly pasta. I also could not really taste the heavy cream or the parmesan cheese, even though it was added late and it clearly lighted up the color of the sauce.

In other words, this is a Cooking Eorzea success!

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I would absolutely make the pasta al dente towards the very end while everything is simmering for 10 minutes. The pasta was a bit chilled from having sat out so long, though it didn’t affect the al dente aspect, and it warmed right back up when put it with, and blended with, the other ingredients. I would definitely make this dish again, but I would probably use a lot less pasta so I can enjoy the sauce more.

Let’s thank people that helped lay the groundwork for Cooking Eorzea! I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes (especially this week’s recipe!) are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. If you didn’t or couldn’t attend FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024, then you missed out on seeing how absolutely wonderful the community as a whole is, and how much we owe these two men for sheparding FINAL FANTASY XIV Online to where it is now.

Two Weeks From Now

There will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, unfortunately.

That said, in two weeks, there will be Creamy Salmon Pasta! It is another pasta dish, and one that has (you guessed it!) salmon in it.

So please return back on September 1st for another installment of Cooking Eorzea!

Have you crushed tomatoes by hand before? What is your favorite type of mushroom?

And what are you hoping to see in Dawntrail?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 37: Boscaiola appeared first on oprainfall.

I have been writing about video games and anime since 2015, and I have attended events ranging from E3 and GDC to Dragon Con and MetroCon. I have a full collection of badges that I keep in my bedroom, and I find myself having to upsize the container every so often just to fit it all in. As I write this instead of packing, I will be heading to Las Vegas tomorrow to cover FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 on behalf of oprainfall – and by the time that this column goes live, I will be reporting from the event itself (alongside my editor who will be reading this shortly – hi Leah!).

Despite how many industry events I attend and media meetings I take, I still feel a twinge of nervousness inside before I go. I worry about making a good impression on the people I am going to meet, I worry about the type of coverage I am going to write – and if I will in fact have enough to write what I need to do to begin with. I even worry about things like how I dress and if I am going to look like I am falling apart before the end of the day or if I have done enough research on whatever company/game(s) that I am going to see so that I can hold a real conversation with the developers or publishers. Even when I am cooking a new dish for Cooking Eorzea (with Love, Eorzean Style), I feel a bit nervous too, as I want to make sure that I do a good enough job (good or bad!) to be able to put out a new column on time.

I love what I do for oprainfall. I love the fact that I can attend all of these industry events and conventions and that I can write about all of these amazing things I love and share them with everyone else. I ultimately just take a deep breath, try to let out the nervousness with each exhale, do the best that I can when I am out there, and trust in myself and my writing. It’s a skill that I’ve developed over the years, and it honestly works for me.

If you see me out there this weekend in Las Vegas, be sure to say “hi.”

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

With a difficulty rating of “Medium” and being served in La Noscea, this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is Battered Fish! The 37th recipe out of the cookbook, I had zero desire to cook with oil in my apartment again after the fire last year. As a result, I decided that I would deep fry the French fries and the cod fillets in a pot over a grill that was surrounded by concrete.

Anyway, this is how the dish is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Cooking Eorzea‘s featured ingredient of the week for this week is the Amber Ale, which I used to help make the fish batter. Amber ale is made using amber malt and crystal malts to create a beer that has an amber color to it. I picked up two bottles of a local brew to use for this week’s column, and I was surprised at how non-bitter it was, unlike a lot of beers out there. It had a pleasant, yet different flavor to it than I expected. I am by no means a beer connoisseur, as I actually do not drink a lot of alcohol in the first place. But I actually enjoyed it, and the flavor definitely came out in the batter at the end of the dish!

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish had only a handful of ingredients, and the majority of them were used to help prepare the batter or the French fry seasoning:

I first peeled the potatoes.

I then cut the peeled potatoes into thick strips and put them into a bowl of cold water to rest for a minimum half-hour.

While the potato slices soaked, I made the spice mix for the French fries out of garlic powder, salt, cayenne pepper, turmeric, and pepper.

I then hauled the entire kit out to the patio grill, and I started to mix the fish batter. I added flour, garlic powder, turmeric, cumin, cayenne, amber ale, and nine teaspoons of lemon juice into a large bowl.

I whisked the batter together, but it was very, very thick. I added in some water to help thin the fish batter out.

I whisked the batter again, and this time it was much better.

Setting the batter aside, I sliced up the cod and then I salted and peppered it on both sides.

After setting the cod fillets aside, I added peanut oil to my tall pot and started to heat it up on the grill to 300 degrees. This…was a bit of a mistake. It turns out that it is quite difficult to heat up a pot of peanut oil on the grill top, and the entire dish, from the moment I started to heat the oil, took around three-and-a-half hours to complete. Most of it was spent heating up the oil to the 300 degree mark.

When the deep fry thermometer was around 250 degrees, I added flour to the cod fillets and then I started to thoroughly dry each of the French fries with paper towels.

Once the oil was ready, I did my first fry of the day by carefully lowering the French fries into the oil to fry for about five minutes in two batches. Once the time was passed, I carefully pulled them out.

I then placed the French fries onto a wire rack, and I let them drip dry oil out over paper towels. Some of them had definitely browned more than what they should have been, but thankfully it was only a few.

Once the oil heated up some again, I started to dunk the cod fillets into the batter and then dropped them in small batches into the oil to cook.

After three minutes, I flipped the fish over to ensure that the batter cooked evenly on both sides. Once the timer was out, I pulled the fish out and did the next batch.

After yet another lengthy delay in heating the oil up again, I dunked the French fries in for two minutes a time in more small batches for the second fry. This time, they were nice, crispy, and properly browned.

While one of the small batches was frying, I sliced up a fresh lemon so I could squeeze the slices out over the fish.

After laying the French fries back out over the wire rack, I generously seasoned them with the spice mix.

And here is the full dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea! By the time this dish was done, it was almost noon and it was in the 90s. The sun glare messed with the protective sleeves of the Triple Triad cards, unfortunately, but they are authentic from the 2016 FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Fanfest. I thought it was fairly appropriate to use, seeing as this Battered Fish recipe is one that would be served at the Drowning Wench, that Triple Triad is a game that is played there, and the fact that this week’s Cooking Eorzea column will be going out on the first day of this year’s Fanfest!

The dish itself was absolutely fantastic. The cod was cooked through perfectly, and the batter was definitely flavorful and perfectly crispy. I loved how the lemon slices, when squeezed out, really added another dimension of citrus to the fish. The French fries were also perfectly crispy and fluffy throughout. The seasoning was amazing, and it had a soft afterburn sensation once you ate them. Most surprisingly, I could taste the Amber Ale in the batter itself. I thought that the seasonings would cause it to lose its flavor, but it definitely did not. This was a beer-battered fish recipe that truly worked.

The Battered Fish was a very, very good dish that I was very happy to have made and that I would recommend for anyone else to create if they can.

Afterword

If I was to make Battered Fish again, I would probably have to have a dedicated outside heating apparatus to heat the oil up much quicker. It was beyond annoying that it took four hours to make this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, and the majority of that time was spent heating up the peanut oil to the necessary temperature. I wouldn’t alter the dish itself otherwise, honestly. It was just so great to eat.

Sooooo…’thank yous’. As always, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. By the time that this week’s Cooking Eorzea column goes live, I will be covering this FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 in Las Vegas on behalf of oprainfall, and I will be surrounding myself in everything Eorzea.

Three Weeks From Now

There will be no column next Friday or the Friday after, as I will be attending FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 and then Evolution Championship Series the following weekend. Yep, I am spending two weekends in a row in Las Vegas!

Once I am back, I will be making the Boscaiola recipe though, so please look forward to it!

Are you attending FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024? What do you hope will be announced at the fan convention?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 36: Battered Fish appeared first on oprainfall.

Life has been insanely busy since I last had the time to write a Cooking Eorzea column. I was invited by SQUARE ENIX to attend and cover the FINAL FANTASY XVI Pre-Launch Celebration. I attended and reviewed The Game Awards 10-Year Concert with Fireworks. I also attended the U.S. Open, and I watched the entire golf major in person. When I wasn’t in Los Angeles, I was in San Francisco. I attended the NIS America’s Press Tour, demoed two games and conducted a game director interview. On top of that, I somehow managed to include an extended visit to my family in there while also completing the Endwalker expansion. As I write this week’s Cooking Eorzea column, I am one Main Story Quest (MSQ) away from completing the storyline through the current update, Patch 6.4. In the coming weeks, I am attending several more industry events that I am ridiculously excited about.

I first saw that quote a few weeks ago, and it has stuck in my head. Has my journey – not just in journalism, but in life – been good? Has it been worthwhile?

For journalism, the answer is yes. I have met people who make amazing games that I absolutely enjoy with Love, Eorzean Style. I am able to write about the games – like Lunar and FINAL FANTASY – that I idolized as a kid. I still want to be willing to make the choices Alex from Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete made at the end of his journey, and FINAL FANTASY XI Online: Chains of Promathia expansion shaped who I am as a person more than almost anything else out there.

Moving out here for a relationship that didn’t work out is definitely one of the lowest parts of my life, and I can safely say that that isn’t a good part of my journey. It has fueled my writing (especially Cooking Eorzea!) though, and it has made me experience places that I would never have spent much time in otherwise. Romance has, in general, been the lowest parts of my life every time I’ve experienced it so far, but I am trying to counterweigh that as much as possible with good stuff like activities, friends, writing, books, games, and more.

Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile? Not all of it has been good, not all of it has been worthwhile. There are days still when I absolutely want to say ‘no’ to both questions. But I think I can say, on balance in general, ‘yes’.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

Recipe 36 from The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook is for the Othard region Nagxian specialty, Bahn Xeo. With a difficulty rating of medium, my first thought was that it seems to be fairly similar to how to make an omelet, but with a wildly different batter and other ingredients. I also have never worked with fresh shrimp before, and so this would be a completely new experience for me.

Here is what the Bahn Xeo dish is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea featured ingredient is…Thai chilis!

Thai chili peppers are grown across Southeast Asia and are frequently used in many different types of dishes. They are small, but range between 50,000 and 1000 Scoville units. I found myself being slightly paranoid about touching them, since I was worried about the oils getting into my eyes and making them burn. When I was cooking with them, in fact, I washed my hands several times afterwards and I refused to touch them directly after I cut them so that I could minimize the risk to myself with them.

My Cooking Attempt

My first week back to Cooking Eorzea, and I picked something of a doozy of a recipe to make with a lot of ingredients that I have never used before:

First, I had to make the Nước Chấm out of water, sugar, fish sauce, lime juice, a Thai chili, and garlic cloves. I started off making the Nước Chấm by mincing up the garlic cloves.

I then sliced up the Thai chili. Even though it is small, it was DEFINITELY quite strong and shouldn’t be underestimated! It reminded me quite a bit of Lord Lolorito.

I then added the water, sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice together.

I added in the Thai chili and garlic cloves, and then whisked all the ingredients together until it was smoothly blended.

Once the sugar was fully dissolved, I put the Nước Chấm in the refrigerator in an air-tight container while I turned my attention to the rest of the ingredients.

While the Nước Chấm chilled, I decided to peel and devein the fresh shrimp I picked up. There was shrimp that was already peeled and deveined available for purchase, but they were frozen, smaller, and more expensive than the shrimp I could buy fresh. Plus, I had never done it before and so this was a new cooking skill for me! First, I slit the shell and wiggled it off of the shrimp.

I then used my deveining tool to slice along both sides of the shrimp and remove the veins. As I went along, I actually got quicker and quicker at doing this!

In a large bowl, I added in the rice flour, cornstarch, turmeric, ground fennel, cumin seeds and salt together.

I then finely chopped up three scallions (aka green onions!) and added them in.

I then added in the coconut milk and the water.

I then whisked all the batter ingredients together and set it aside for an hour.

I then turned my attention to the filling. First, I julienned carrots before setting them aside.

I then sliced up the onion.

I then cut and tore up the fresh cilantro and mint.

I then tore up the fresh Thai basil and the fresh cabbage and set them both aside.

I measured out the bean sprouts (plus an extra handful!) next.

I then sliced up the bacon and cut the shrimp in half. Cutting the shrimp in half was HARD to do.

I then assembled eight portions of the Bahn Xeo filling. I portioned out the shrimp, bacon, onion slices, julienned carrots, and bean sprouts as evenly as I could.

I then added a tablespoon of canola oil to a frying pan and I swirled it around in the pan after it heated up.

I then added in one portion of bacon and shrimp and let it cook for a minute. I then flipped it over and cooked the other side for a minute. For very obvious reasons, it was important that the shrimp be cooked through before I would end up eating it!

Once the bacon and shrimp were done, I added in the carrots and onions, and then poured in a quarter-cup of the batter into the pan. Once I poured it in, I quickly swirled it around the inside of the pan to ensure that it was fully coated.

I covered the pan up and let it cook for three minutes.

Once the timer was up, I topped the dish with the mint, cilantro, basil, and bean sprouts before folding it in half.

Looking at the dish, I realized that the Bahn Xeo was a bit too big…and looking at the recipe, I realized that I used a pan that was WAY too big. I took another portion and redid the final steps of the dish with a smaller pan.

Once I pulled the Bahn Xeo out of the pan, I placed it on top of a sheet of rice paper, topped it with a helping of the Nước chấm, and set it with some Thai basil, a few fresh leaves of lettuce, and some more bean sprouts. And here is the final Bahn Xeo dish! I added some FINAL FANTASY XVI decorations for this week’s Cooking Eorzea final dish photo, as it is the first column that I’ve written since the game came out.

I am going to be up front: the Nước chấm smelled AWFUL, and I know it was completely due to the fish sauce. However, the dish was AMAZING. The batter, mixed with the Nước chấm and the fresh ingredients, had a distinct savory flavor that the bacon and the shrimp only enhanced. This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish had probably the most unique flavor profile that I have experienced yet, and it just needs to be experienced to be believed!

Afterword

If I was to do this dish again, I would absolutely use the correct pan size from the start. What tipped me off that I was using the wrong pan was that the ingredients seem too far spread out and the Bahn Xeo was way too big for what seemed to be a regular portion. I still don’t love the smell of fish sauce – and I haven’t from any dish that I’ve used the fish sauce in so far – but it is something that I was told that I will get used to as time goes on. Overall, I would absolutely make this dish again!

Rolling right into this week’s ‘thank yous’! I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how the various dishes look like. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series, and you should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I am one mission away from being completely caught up on MSQ, and I am finding myself falling deeper and deeper in love with Eorzea with the more time that passes.

Next Week

Next week’s dish is going to be Battered Fish from La Noscea! I actually am going to be using grill to deep fry the fish and potato fries with, since I am not doing that in my home. So it will also be my first truly remote Cooking Eorzea column since I used the grill to make Tuna Miq’abob back in Week 16!

So please come back for it then

Have you made Bahn Xeo before? What are some video games that mean a lot to you?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 35: Bahn Xeo appeared first on oprainfall.

It’s weird eating healthier and exercising more. I feel like I am losing weight, and that I am feeling overall a bit better.  I’m even thinking about picking up Ring Fit Adventure again to try to get in a bit more cardio at home in the mornings.

Pop culture psychology says that it takes 21 days to build a new habit, but I am not so sure that it is true. Sometimes, I feel like I am constantly making a hard choice to eat more chicken and drink more water instead of picking up that Cherry Pepsi or to eat a quick burger from McDonalds that I can get cheaply through the McDonalds app. I thought it would be easier as time went on, but it kind of isn’t for me. Even these healthier soups and stews that I’ve been making and eating for Cooking Eorzea seem to get a bit tough to enjoy from time to time simply because of how much chicken is a regular part of my diet now.

I’m also trying to actively be more social and see people here. It is a lot harder to make friends as you get older, but I will do my best to defy those odds if I can.

As a side note, I’ve started to level the Dancer class in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, and it is a bit exciting to finally see my character’s back tattoo. I regularly forget that it is even there, since there aren’t a whole lot of decent glamor options for male Elezen that show off the upper back.

I genuinely want my life to improve, and I want to be healthy and happy and enjoy life with Love, Eorzean Style.  It just is a lot harder than it looks to make happen.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

The final entry in the Soups and Stews section of The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook is the Skybuilder’s Stew! This recipe from the Firmament and the Ishgardian Restoration project in the Coerthas Region. With a difficulty level of ‘Easy’, and it being the 35th recipe, I was excited to see how this dish turned out!

Here is what the professional photograph of the stew looks like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Cream cheese is made from milk and cream, and it is usually not matured and has a high fat content. It is commonly used on top of bagels for breakfast, and it is fairly mild tasting.

I have used all sorts of cheese and other dairy-based ingredients in this column so far, but I had no idea that cream cheese could be melted down to be used as part of a cream base or anything else. All of this made cream cheese an easy, but simple, choice for Skybuilder’s Stew’s Featured Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

For this week’s Skybuilder’s Stew, I pulled together ALMOST all of the ingredients for a group shot. It was only while I was making the dish that I realized that I had left out the All-Purpose Flour.

First, I measured out a pound of chicken thighs, sliced it into bite-sized pieces, and then seasoned the pieces with salt and pepper.

I sliced the onion in half and then diced it into bite-sized pieces. I ultimately had to measure out the onion to make sure that I had enough for the recipe.

I then minced a few garlic cloves and then cut up a potato until I had enough for what the recipe called for.

I then sliced up the carrot and the daikon radish, and weighed both to make sure that I had the proper proportions for the Skybuilder’s Stew.

I then weighed out the broccoli florets and sliced off as much of the stem as possible for each one.

I added olive oil, the onion, and the minced garlic together in a pot and I let it cook for about five minutes while stirring occasionally.

I then added in the chicken, and I let it cook while stirring occasionally. After seven minutes, I saw that it was still pink and so I cooked it a couple more minutes until it was fully done.

I then added in the carrots, potatoes, and daikon radish pieces.

I then added in the chicken stock until it barely covered up all of the pot ingredients, and then brought the entire dish to a boil.

I then added in a bay leaf into the pot.

After lowering the temperature to let the pot simmer for 20 minutes, I started to make the cream base. First, I added the butter and cream cheese into the pot and let them melt together.

I slowly added in the flour to the saucepan and blended it in with the melted butter and cream cheese. After a few minutes, it started to smell a bit like bread.

I added in the milk, and then mixed it all together until the cream base started to thicken up.

After pulling the cream base off of the heat and setting it aside, I added the broccoli into the pot and brought the dish back up to a boil.

I then added in the cream base to the pot and stirred it in.

I then added in more salt and pepper to season the stew.

After whisking the seasoning in, I removed the bay leaf before ladling out the dish.

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

The Skybuilder’s Stew wasn’t anything special, unfortunately. I loved the cream base, but I felt like the chicken and vegetables really weren’t anything different than normal. It was definitely hot, but I definitely wasn’t in love with the end result. I think it was because there wasn’t too much seasoning in the overall dish to enhance the overall flavor. But I would absolutely make the cream base again for another dish!

Afterword

Ultimately, if I was to make the Skybuilder’s Stew again, I would go beyond the recipe and add in some other spices and seasonings. I think it would have really enhanced the stew. However, there are other stew recipes, especially the Orobon Stew I made last week, that I enjoyed more!

Thank you, thank you’s…

I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice, and you can check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. This column simply wouldn’t be possible without both of their input into creating Eorzea.

Next Week

There will be no Cooking Eorzea for at least one, maybe two weeks due to me covering the FINAL FANTASY XVI launch event and other activities. However, Cooking Eorzea will then make a triumpant return with the start of the Main Dishes section of The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, Banh Xeo from the Othard Region!

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 34: Skybuilder’s Stew appeared first on oprainfall.

This week has definitely had its ups and downs. Between still trying to figure out lifestyle changes and fitting in walks everywhere with life and work, it has been a lot to deal with. To try to sort all of that out, I’ve been cleaning my place, throwing things away, and trying to get my life in order. If I cannot control the world around me, at the very least I can control the environment that I find myself in.

It’s definitely not been easy. I have friends who love me, and who are there for me when I do struggle with everything. California is still very hard on me to deal with in a lot of ways, and I still am trying to adjust even two years on. This week feels like, in many ways, a real transition week in my life as I try to slow down some and take better care of myself and show myself a little bit of Love, Eorzean Style.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s recipe is the 34th recipe in the cookbook, and it is for the Thanalan region’s Little Ala Mhigo specialty: Orobon Stew. It has a ‘Medium’ difficulty rating, and it is made inside of a Dutch oven with quite a few simple ingredients in what ultimately amounts to a two-step process.

Here is what Orobon Stew is supposed to look like!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s featured ingredient of the week is…Chives! They are an herb closely related to spring onions, garlic, leeks, and other such plants. They are fairly small and I found them quite easy to cut and definitely have a milder flavor than spring onions do. I was surprised that there was this much variety in that particular family genus! They were chopped up and used to help flavor the dumplings, and I think it was rather successful in adding a bit of flavor to them.

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s ingredients for Orobon Stew are fairly simple and clean:

First, I sliced the carrots and the celery and set them aside.

I then smashed, shook, and minced the garlic before I also sliced up an onion.

Finally, I sliced up the ingredient of the week, measured out a couple tablespoons of it, and then set it aside in a small bowl.

Last time I melted butter in the microwave, I burned myself pretty badly. Because of that, I took a couple of tablespoons of butter and melted them in the microwave and then left it there to cool for a bit so I could use it for the dumplings.

As the butter melted in the microwave, I placed my Dutch oven on the stove and then melted some additional butter inside of it.

Once the butter melted, I added in the chopped onions, and I let them soften for about five minutes while stirring them occasionally.

After the onions were slightly translucent, I added in the minced garlic, the sliced celery, and the sliced carrots. I then stirred them occasionally for about five more minutes.

While the additional vegetables were softening up, I coated the chicken breasts in salt and pepper.

When the vegetables were ready, I added the sage, thyme, and basil in and then mixed it until the vegetables were well coated.

Once the vegetables were coated, I added in the chicken breasts, the chicken stock, and a single bay leaf.

I then brought the Dutch oven to a boil, lowered the temperature, and let the whole Dutch oven simmer for around 25 minutes.

In my glass bowl, I added the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, sliced chives, salt, pepper, buttermilk, and butter.

I then worked the ingredients together with my hands until it turned into a slightly thicker dough.

I then pulled small portions of the dough off and rolled them into tablespoon-sized dumpling balls before setting them down on parchment paper.

At that point, I removed the Dutch oven lid and removed the cooked chicken so it could cool down.

I added the dumplings in one by one, and covered the Dutch oven back up for 10 minutes to let the dumplings cook through.

While the dumplings cooked, I broke the chicken breasts open to make sure that they were cooked through before I started to shred the chicken. The chicken was really hot, and so I had to stop and let it cool down quite a bit before I could totally break the breasts down.

When the chicken was shredded, I lifted up the Dutch oven lid and saw that the dumplings weren’t fully cooked through. So I rotated them around with the spatula and then covered them for another five minutes.

When I uncovered them again, I saw that they STILL were not done. I rotated them again with a spatula, and covered the Dutch oven up again for another five minutes.

When I moved the lid again, I saw that the dumplings were done! I added in the shredded chicken and then blended it together to let the chicken heat back up.

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!

…It was after I took this photo that I realized that I had forgotten to pull the bay leaf out of the Orobon Stew. I ended up having to hunt for it before I could eat, and I found it still inside the Dutch oven.

The Orobon Stew. Was. FANTASTIC.

No joke, this is probably my new favorite dish that I’ve made so far for Cooking Eorzea. The chicken and the dumplings and the seasoning and the vegetables worked so well together, and you could taste the different seasonings working in harmony together. I ate the entire dish, and then had to put the rest away in the refrigerator so that I would not also eat all of it too in one sitting. It was also incredibly filling.

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again (WHEN I make this dish again), I would definitely make the dumplings smaller so that way they could just cook through on the first pass instead of having to cook them for an extra 15 minutes. Otherwise, this dish went exactly perfectly and I couldn’t have been happier.

This is where I start with the ‘thank yous’ every week! First: I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. Second: I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Third: I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Fourth: I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I keep discovering new things about Eorzea everyday when I log in, and I could not be happier.

Next Week

Unfortunately, there will be no Cooking Eorzea next week. I am traveling for quite a few days, and so I will not be able to make the next recipe in a timely manner. That said: Skybuilder’s Stew will be on deck!

Please look forward to it!

Have you tried making your own dumplings before? What about the Orobon Stew?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 33: Orobon Stew appeared first on oprainfall.

I tend to never slow down, and I certainly don’t ever take care of myself. It is a common theme with me that I try to do too much in too little time, and things have to give. I am trying to fit sports, Cooking Eorzea, Endwalker, my pet, my friends, my work, movies, and everything else in at once, and there simply isn’t enough time in the day for it all. I sacrifice sleep and I sacrifice cooking healthy meals for myself in order to do everything else that I want to do.

This week, I went to my doctor for my annual physical and I found that I have high cholesterol. It is high enough that I am at a serious risk for heart problems.

It’s hard to accept my mortality. I want to do everything, be everywhere, see everything and everyone, and not slow down. And tonight, right before I wrote this column, I panicked. I can’t die quite yet, I have too much I want to do. And so, it is 9 p.m., just a few hours before my writing deadline if I am to make my publication time as I write this, and I have been spending my time researching how to prepare ground turkey and what kind of fish is fine to eat and what I should not be eating anymore.

I’m trying to figure out how to eat healthier and exercise more and prioritize my own health because I know that my bad decisions will catch up to me quickly if I don’t do better. I have to find the time to eat better and to cook better outside of Cooking Eorzea.

I have to take care of myself and figure out how to care for myself with Love, Eorzean Style. No one else will do that for me.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe attempt is taken from the 33rd recipe from The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. Hailing from the Orthard region, the Namazu make this recipe and it has a ‘Medium’ difficulty rating. My main concern in making this dish was both the timing of it (I actually wouldn’t finish making this dish until 3:30-ish a.m.), and the fact that this seemed to be a lot of ingredients to put in a single pot.

Anyway, here is what Oden is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Konnyaku is made from the konjac plant, which is grown in east and southeast Asia. It is fairly bland and firmer than gelatin. The reason that this ingredient is my featured ingredient of the week is because it was nearly impossible for me to find. I ended up having to visit a grocery store over a half-hour away from my home in order to find a single piece of it to use for this week’s recipe. This and tobiko (Week 10: Futo-Maki Roll) are the two ingredients that I’ve had the hardest time finding so far for Cooking Eorzea.

My Cooking Attempt

Ingredients! Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Without them, Cooking Eorzea wouldn’t be possible. This week, more than any other, showed me that. Here is a full photograph of all that I used:

If having to clean and fillet frozen, raw, red snapper for Week 26’s Bouillabaisse recipe was the worst ingredient prep so far, then beheading and gutting each tiny niboshi for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish was definitely the most tedious. I easily spent over an hour just preparing each niboshi to make sure that I had enough for my cooking attempt. It was awful.

I then poured nine cups of water a large pot, added in two pieces of kombu, a bunch of dried shiitake mushrooms, and the prepared niboshi. I then let it all soak together for three hours to help flavor the stock water.

When there was roughly a half hour left, I prepared the hardboiled eggs in my replacement egg cooker. I then dunked them in cold water in an airtight container, and left them there for a good while to cool down. The sudden cold water shock also helps to make the shell easier to remove.

While the hardboiled eggs were cooking, I also chopped in half, peeled, and then sliced the daikon radish into semi-large chunks.

After preparing the daikon radish, I peeled the hardboiled eggs and then I put them back into the refrigerator to chill until I was ready to use them.

I placed three strips of nishime kombu into a bowl filled with water to let them rehydrate.

I then took two cups of water and washed rice with it repeatedly until the water was cloudy. I set the cleaned rice aside to use later on.

After the three hours were up, I brought the pot to a boil. Right before the pot did boil, I removed the kombu and then added in the bonito flakes.

I then let it all simmer for 10 minutes.

While the pot was simmering, I sliced the konnyaku into triangle pieces.

After 10 minutes, I pulled the pot off of the heat and I let it rest for five minutes. I then strained the stock through a mesh strainer into a second smaller pot before pouring it back into the large pot again after I wiped it down.

I added in soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar, and a pinch of salt and stirred until they were all blended into the stock.

I got out my smaller pot, added in the daikon radish chunks and the cloudy rice water, and then brought the pot to a boil.

While the second pot was then simmering for about 15 minutes, I knotted up the nishime kombu and placed it back into the bowl of water.

Once the smaller pot was ready, I pulled out the individual daikon radish pieces and then patted each piece dry before setting them aside.

I then added the daikon radish chunks, the konnyaku, and the nishime kombu to the seasoned broth. I then brought the entire pot to a boil, reduced the heat, and then let it simmer for an hour.

While the pot was simmering, I quartered two pieces of kirimochi.

I then sliced open each of the aburaage squares and inserted a piece of kirimochi into each one. I then slid a toothpick through the open end to help secure the kirimochi into the aburaage.

Finally, I took the rice that I previously cleaned and placed it into the rice cooker and turned it on.

As the hour was nearing an end, I heated up another pot of water, and added the fish cakes and fish balls to it after the water began to boil. I let them cook for roughly 30 seconds each and then pulled them out before drying each one of them off.

I then added the hardboiled eggs, fish balls, and fish cake to the pot. I then let it all cook for 15 minutes.

After the 15 minutes, I added in the prepared aburaage to the pot and I let it simmer for another 15 minutes.

At the end of the 15 minutes, the rice was ready!

Finally, I removed the toothpicks from the aburaage.

And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea column!

The Oden dish is another one of those meals that I can both recognize as being delicious while absolutely not caring for it at all. It tasted great, the broth was amazing, and the fish balls and fish cake were great. However, the fish flavor permeated through everything and I found myself not caring for it too much. The shirimiso turned into almost a gelatin inside of the aburaage, but I honestly didn’t care for the texture of how it felt in my mouth. Finally, the konnyaku tasted a lot like the broth that it was soaked in – and hence, too much fish flavor to it.

Undoubtedly, there are people who will love this dish, but it just wasn’t for me.

Afterword

If I was to make Oden again, I would definitely use a lot less fish balls and fish cakes to try to lessen the fishy flavor as much as possible. It was not hard to make, thankfully. I just didn’t care for the dish as it was.

As always, let’s talk about the weekly ‘thank yous’. Victoria Rosenthal was the author behind The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and I’ve been cooking from her recipes each week. I want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. I additionally owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the Cooking Eorzea logo on short notice, and you should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both the Legacy 1.0 and A Realm Reborn 2.0 versions of this game.

Next Week

Next week’s dish for Cooking Eorzea is Orobon Stew. I am working with the dutch oven again to make this dish, so please do tune in next time to see how it turns out!

Have you ever made Oden before? What do you think of fishy-flavored stew?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 32: Oden appeared first on oprainfall.

One of the biggest surprises for me, though, is Cooking Eorzea. I am making new dishes every week that I would never have had the courage to make beforehand. This column is helping to make me more confident in the kitchen and to help make me into a better person since I have to have patience and take care in order to make delicious things. And everything is made with Love, Eorzean Style.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is the eighth recipe, Oriental Breakfast, that comes with a ‘Medium’ difficulty and hails from the Othard region. It consists of several miniature dishes inside of it: rice, tamagoyaki, green tea, salmon, miso soup, and pickled vegetables. I decided that, to make this week’s dish, I would try to have everything come up within a few minutes of each other. And honestly? I succeeded! Everything came up within four minutes of each other.

Anyway, here is how the professionals make the Oriental Breakfast dish look!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Sake is made by fermenting rice that has had the bran removed, and for once, I didn’t pick the cheapest version of an alcoholic beverage to work with. Cooking with alcohol, and using alcohol to impart flavors to the food, is still a very surprising concept to me. The fact that I was going to be rubbing sake into the salmon fillets was something that I had honestly not considered before, and I was blown away by how it ultimately worked out. This uniqueness, at least to me, was why I chose sake to be the Ingredient of the Week.

My Cooking Attempt

As always, we start off with a picture of all the ingredients used. Yes, there are quite a few that I utilized for this week:

SUNDAY

Sunday was all about preparing the pickled vegetables. First, I heated up the water until it was fairly warm.

While the water was heating up, I removed the end from the daikon radish, peeled it, chopped it in half, and then sliced it. I then also sliced the cucumbers.

I then measured out the sugar, salt, rice vinegar, and added it all together in an airtight container with the sliced vegetables.

I ended up not having enough liquid to completely submerge the vegetable slices, and so I added (per the recipe!) more rice vinegar and warm water until it was completely filled. I then closed the lid on and shook the container to ensure that all the ingredients were blended together.

I then placed the soon-to-be pickled vegetables into the refrigerator to…well…pickle.

MONDAY

On Monday, I first chopped a salmon fillet into four pieces.

I added some sake to a bowl and then rubbed it into the salmon fillet pieces.

After the sake-rubbed salmon rested for five minutes, I patted the salmon dry with paper towels.

I added salt into a bowl, and I then coated both sides of the salmon fillets with salt.

I folded over a paper towel, placed it into the bottom of a second airtight container, and then added the salted salmon fillets on top. I then added another paper towel on top and closed the lid on.

I then placed the salted salmon fillets in the refrigerator next to the pickling vegetables.

TUESDAY

First, I added water to a pot and then added a piece of kombu to it to let it soak for four hours. I realized that in order to make all the dishes come up at roughly the same time, I had to base everything about the miso soup with tofu.

While reviewing the recipe, I realized that I needed some nonstick spray, and so I picked up a bottle from the store while the kombu soaked.

About a half hour before the kombu was ready, I washed a cup of white rice in the sink.

The rice wasn’t totally clean the first time I washed it, and so I had to wash it a second time.

I sliced the bottom and leaves off of a leek and then split it in half.

Once the four hours were up, I placed the kombu and water into a smaller pot and then turned on the heat. Once the pot was ready, I placed it over medium heat. Once the water was just about to boil, I removed the kombu.

I then placed the two leeks to simmer for a half-hour. Once the leeks went in, I started the rice cooker.

Once I started the rice cooker, I cracked four eggs into a cup and then got the other ingredients ready to make the tamagoyaki. Once the other ingredients were added to the cup, I whisked them all together.

After I prepped the tamagoyaki mixture, I heated up another cup of water for the wakame to soak in.

At this point, I added in the bonito flakes to the pot and let the whole thing simmer for another 15 minutes.

While the bonito flakes simmered in the pot, I sliced the scallions, and added the hot water to the wakame to rehydrate it.

I got out the firm tofu and sliced it into small squares.

At this point, the rice was ready, and it went to standby mode to keep the rice warm.

I got out my tamagoyaki pan, and I sprayed it with nonstick spray. I then added a small amount of tamagoyaki mixture to the pan and I waited it to solidify.

Once it was ready, I rolled it up and added another layer of tamagoyaki mixture to the pan. Once it was ready, I rolled it up as well.

At this point, the bonito flakes were done simmering, and so I lowered the heat on the tamagoyaki pan and strained the leeks and bonito flakes out of the dashi stock into a large pot. I then poured the dashi stock back into the small pot and let it cook on a low simmer.

Unfortunately, I didn’t turn the heat down enough on the tamagoyaki…because when I rolled it up, I discovered that it had burned really badly.

I turned the dashi stock down to a very low simmer, and I quickly made another tamagoyaki mixture and then started to make another tamagoyaki dish.

I kept rolling the tamagoyaki and adding more and more thin layers into the pan until I used up all the mixture. Once it was ready, I wrapped it up into a bamboo rolling mat and tightened it up to help give it a shape.

While I let the tamagoyaki rest in the bamboo rolling mat, I got the salmon fillet pieces out and placed them on a cooking sheet. I then turned on broil mode on my oven and slid the salmon fillet pieces underneath the heat for three minutes.

As soon as I popped the salmon fillets into the oven, the dashi stock was warm enough that I added in the tofu and wakame and I let all of that warm up for a few more minutes.

Once the wakame and the firm tofu were ready, I added in the shiro miso. I added in less than I did in the prior attempt, and I do think it improved the miso soup.

At this point, the timer went off for the salmon fillets, and so I pulled them out of the oven and then flipped them over. I also added loose leaf green tea to a tea pot.

As more water heated up in the microwave, I put the salmon filets back into the oven to broil.

While the fish broiled, I unrolled and sliced the tamagoyaki.

After slicing the tamagoyaki, I added the hot water to the tea pot and let the green tea steep. At this point, the salmon fillets were ready, and I pulled them out of the oven as well.

I then pulled the rice out of the rice cooker and added the sliced scallions to the miso soup with tofu.

At this point, green tea was ready and I pulled the pickled vegetables out of the refrigerator.

Finally, I sliced the lemon into wedges!

All of these dishes, with the exception of the rice, came up within four minutes of each other! And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea once I assembled them all together:

The pickled vegetables, despite smelling a bit…strong…were delicious. The rice was great, and the tamagoyaki was amazing, too. It had a strong, somewhat bold taste that clearly came from the mirin and the soy. The miso soup with tofu was, of course, delicious. And I think lessening the shiro miso was probably key to making it better than last week’s attempt. The green tea was green tea – nothing unique about that. The salmon was perfectly crispy, though I think I overdid it with the salt in the very beginning, because it was just a bit too salty for me to be happy about.

Overall, I loved this dish, and I would eat it even if I wasn’t writing Cooking Eorzea. That said, it took too long to make as a whole.

Afterword

I don’t think I would make this dish again. Even though everything except the rice came up within four minutes of each other, it still took time over three days to prepare. Otherwise, I would definitely have not salted the fish as much as I did. It really did take away from the delicious flavor of an otherwise great meal.

I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. This column wouldn’t be possible without her giving me the guidebook for making all of the dishes from Eorzea. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

I also want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both 1.0 and 2.0+. I am still playing through Endwalker, and I am absolutely adoring the story that started so, so long ago.

Next? Week?

The next dish for Cooking Eorzea will be the Doma specialty, Oden. Due to the…uniqueness…of the ingredients involved, it may not come out next week but the week after instead. To be blunt: I am not sure that I can find everything I need to make it in time. Either way, please keep an eye on this column for the next installment!

How great are you at multitasking? How have your attempts to make sure everything comes up fully cooked at roughly the same time?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 31: Oriental Breakfast appeared first on oprainfall.

I love video games. I really, truly do. But with all of the time I have invested in real life between this cooking column (that I write with Love, Eorzean Style!), my hobbies, work, seeing movies, and everything else in life…I have not really had time to invest in video games. When I became lucky enough to be able to attend the FINAL FANTASY XIV FANFEST 2023-2024 in Las Vegas, I realized that I needed to catch up in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and finally play through the Endwalker expansion. However, before I could start that, there was one last bit of major side story content that I had to finish: Eureka, from the Stormblood expansion.

Eureka is a grueling, sometimes punishing, level-up grind that ends up taking many, many hours to get from level one to the 60 level cap across four different areas. At first, you can grind out enemies through killing them and by completing the challenge log. Eventually, though, the EXP to next level starts to get into the millions and you will find yourself forced to party up with other players to complete FATEs in order to snag anywhere from 3-8 million EXP at a time.

It’s a very brutal slog, especially when you can easily lose a level and millions of EXP if you die and no one else in the instanced Eureka area is able to raise you.

I ended up getting up around 4:30 a.m. for the past three weeks to make time to do the Eureka content. Along the way, I met several amazing Eureka players who were working on their Relic weapon, were trying to level their way through the content just like me, or who were there because they honestly love the content. And along the way…I started to fall in love with Eureka, too. That grindfest became a lot more friendly to me, and it absolutely required a higher skill to play and survive in than a lot of other content in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online.

My time in Eureka finally culminated on Tuesday afternoon when I achieved level 60…and was able to earn this amazing image on my screen as I wrapped up the side story, save for a few closing cutscenes:

I didn’t have the ability to add time to my day on the backend, and so I had to ‘burn both ends of the candle’ slightly in order to fit in a dedicated timeslot every day to play through Eureka. And honestly? It was what I needed to be able to dive into Endwalker. I am excited to see how this story ends…and so I guess that means more early morning risings in order to see it all too!

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, which comes with an ‘Easy’ difficulty rating to make, is the 32nd recipe from the cookbook. Hailing from the Hingashi region, Miso Soup with Tofu is a dish that looked fairly easy to make, but the low difficulty level was made up for by the fact that I had to let the kombu soak for three hours at the very start of the dish.

Anyway, here is what the Miso Soup with Tofu is supposed to look like!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

Bonito flakes were an easy choice for this week’s Cooking Eorzea Featured Ingredient. Bonito flakes come from skipjack tuna fillets that has been boiled, smoked for up to a month over multiple cycles to draw out all the moisture, and then sun-dried with the assistance of mold that helps to ferment the fillet and dry it out as much as possible. The final rock-hard fillet are then shaved down into thin flakes for use in dishes.

All of these steps are a LOT of work to make one ingredient, and it reminded me a lot of my efforts in Eureka. Therefore, I had to pick bonito flakes as my featured ingredient of the week.

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish involved a lot of ingredients that I have never used before. It turned out the majority of the time making this week’s dish was to go into making the dashi stock.

First, I filled a pot with water.

I pulled out a sheet of kombu – an edible form of kelp – and I tried to put it inside the small pot. However, it would not fit inside. I then had to move the water into a larger pot and then put the kombu into that new pot. I then left it to soak in the water for the next four hours.

Right before my timer went off, I removed the ends of the leek, and split it in half.

After the kombu soaked for a few hours, I placed it onto the stovetop, turned up the heat, and I removed the softened kombu right before the water started to boil.

I then added the leek halves and let it simmer for a half hour.

I then added the bonito flakes, and I let the pot simmer for 15 minutes.

I removed the pot from the heat, let it sit for five more minutes, and then I strained the dashi stock through a fine-mesh strainer. After I strained the dashi stock into the larger pot, I wiped down the smaller pot and then added the dashi stock back into it.

This is what the dashi stock ended up looking like.

As soon as I finished draining out the dashi stock, I heated up a cup of water in the microwave. I poured some of the hot water into a small dish and added dried wakame – another type of kelp – to the small bowl to hydrate it up.

As I put the dashi stock back on the stovetop to warm up again at a low simmer, I sliced half of the firm tofu up into small cubes.

I then added the rehydrated wakame and the cubed tofu into the dashi stock. While I let it all warmup for another three minutes, I sliced up the scallions.

After the three minutes, I lowered the heat again.

I added a tablespoon of shiro miso to a ladle, and then added some dashi stock to it to try to dissolve the shiro miso into it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I ended up introducing three tablespoons of shiro miso directly into the pot and then swirling it around inside to blend it in.

The shiro miso started to cloud up the miso soup as I kept adding it to the mixture, but the miso soup started to smell absolutely amazing. I finally added in the sliced scallions, and it was ready to eat!

And here is the final photo of this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish!

If last week’s Chestnuts and Lentils dish was one of my least favorite dishes that I’ve made so far, this week’s dish was one of the high points. The miso soup smelled extremely fragrant, and I loved how I could taste the dashi stock, the tofu, and the scallions both separately and all together. I could also tell that the miso soup that I am used to getting in restaurants definitely is loaded up with umami to enhance the flavor, as this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish had a much more subtle – but no less delicious – flavor to it. I ended up unexpectedly eating two bowls of it, in fact!

Afterword

I am making this dish again for next week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, actually. When I make it again, I think the only thing that I would do differently might be to slice up the scallions sooner. Waiting until the last three minutes of the dish to slice up the scallions definitely put the pressure on me to make sure that I got it right, and I didn’t care for that feeling. Next week will be better though!

I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series and you should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I definitely fell a bit more in love with Eorzea over the past three weeks because of Eureka, and that wouldn’t be possible without the two of them.

Next Week

For next week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, I will be making Miso Soup with Tofu again…as part of the final breakfast dish in The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook: Oriental Breakfast!

I am extremely excited to finally knockout that dish, so please tune in next Friday to see how it all turns out!

Have you made Miso Soup before? How do you like to prepare it?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 30: Miso Soup with Tofu appeared first on oprainfall.

I am a huge proponent of being able to play older video games. There are simply so many amazing titles, ranging from SNATCHER and Panzer Dragoon Saga to Chulip and D that simply are not available to play on modern day consoles. I always think it is amazing to see how the video game industry has evolved in both gameplay, storytelling, visuals, and even the development and publication side of things since Pong was first installed in a bar back in 1972. As certain video games become harder and harder (and more and more expensive) to find to pick up and play, there is a real danger that these titles will become lost works of art that future generations will not be able to enjoy. After all, when was the last time you heard someone talk about how the themes that Hideo Kojima wrote about in SNATCHER are clearly also present in DEATH STRANDING several decades later?

And all of this is why I have been looking so forward to FINAL FANTASY PIXEL REMASTER to be released on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. Until these titles were re-released in the past week, you would have to dig out your Nintendo DS/3DS, your PSP or PlayStation Vita, your original NES/Super NES, your original PlayStation One or PlayStation 2, or import a WonderSwan console to play some of these games – with FINAL FANTASY III and FINAL FANTASY V being the hardest to find. Yes, SQUARE ENIX is undoubtedly re-releasing these titles to make money off of their older library. But: this is also a way to preserve these titles into the future.

After all, FINAL FANTASY is a storied franchise that all other JRPGs are ultimately compared against. By making the first six FINAL FANTASY titles available to buy and play by anyone with an internet connection and a current generation console, SQUARE ENIX is ensuring that these titles will live on and that a new generation of gamers will be able to idolize and fall in love with Terra, Cecil, Bartz, and everyone else just like I did when I was a kid who was discovering video games.

I personally cannot wait to finally start up FINAL FANTASY V as soon as possible and I hope to enjoy it with all the Love, Eorzean Style, that I can muster.

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

Chestnuts and Lentils are the 31st recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. This recipe comes from Bentbranch Meadows part of The Black Shroud, and has a difficulty rating of ‘Easy.’ I am not too worried about cooking this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, as it seems to just be a lot of vegetable mincing. I am a bit worried and surprised that there are no spices or seasonings that I am adding, but we will see how it goes.

Here is what the Chestnuts and Lentils soup is supposed to look like:

Featured Ingredient of the Week

This week’s featured ingredient is fennel! When I first went looking for fennel, I was shocked at how big the fronds were. Apparently, fennel is part of the carrot family of plants, and the fronds can grow up to eight feet tall. When I was cutting it up for this week’s recipe, I was absolutely surprised at how aromatic the bulb smelled, and the scent absolutely flooded my kitchen. This is a simply gorgeous plant, and one that I had to make my Featured Ingredient of the Week!

My Cooking Attempt

This week’s ingredients photo is fairly unique, as there are zero spices or seasonings (besides garlic?) for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish:

First, I minced the leeks and the carrots. I cut off the ends of both the leeks and the carrots, chopped them up lengthwise, and then chopped them with my cleaver.

Keeping with last week’s Cooking Eorzea column, I did not use pre-minced garlic. Instead, I crushed a bulb with my hand and broke away the skin off of the cloves by shaking them really hard inside of a plastic container.

I shaved the resulting garlic cloves down into thin slices, and then I minced them by hand. It was very easy, and I was more than a little satisfied with how simple it was to do.

I then turned my attention to this week’s featured ingredient, the fennel bulb. I first cut off the top fronds, pulled off the outside layer, split the bulb in half after trimming off the ends, and then I used a paring knife to extract the root core out. The fennel smelled so fresh and so unique, and I was surprised at how simply fragrant it was.

I then minced the remaining fennel.

Finally, I minced a celery stalk.

Here are what all the vegetables looked like together.

I poured a couple tablespoons of olive oil into a pot, and I let the oil warm up first. Once the pot was ready, I added the vegetables in and let them simmer together for 20 minutes to help soften them up while stirring occasionally.

Once the vegetables were prepped, I added in the red lentils, stirred them into the vegetables, and let it cook for another couple of minutes.

Once the lentils were also softened up, I added in the bay leaf and the vegetable stock.

I mixed the stock and bay leaf in, and then brought the entire pot to a boil before I then lowered the stove top temperature to a simmer for 20 more minutes.

While the Lentil soup was cooking, I opened up the two bags of chestnuts and chopped them up. I discovered that I didn’t have enough that the recipe required, so I opened up a third bag (I had extra shipped to me in case I needed it) and chopped those up too.

I then added the chestnuts into the pot and let them all cook together for another 10 minutes to soften those chestnuts up as much as possible.

After the chestnuts were done in the soup, I removed the bay leaf. It took a while and I had to hunt for it inside the pot before I could find it.

I then ladled the soup into the blender. It was really quite hot, and I was surprised that the blender could handle it.

I finally blended the soup together until it was fully smooth.

After ladling the blended soup out into a small bowl, I topped it with croutons.

And here is what this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, Lentils and Chestnuts, final dish looks like!

After this photo was taken, I immediately sat down and dove into the soup. I…wasn’t thrilled to eat it, to be honest. It was warm and very creamy (which makes sense as it was blended in a blender), but that is about all that I have to say about it. I didn’t taste the chestnuts or any particular vegetable. And as I pointed out earlier in this column – there was no other seasoning added to the dish, and so it was fairly pleasant and somewhat bland in taste. It wasn’t bad, per se. It just wasn’t memorable either. The croutons did pair well with the soup, however.

Afterword

If you can’t tell, I was a bit disappointed by this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. I would maybe make this dish again if I was cooking for someone who can’t handle spice whatsoever (like one of my dear friends who actually cannot do so). The Lentils and Chestnuts recipe was very easy to make, and I had no issue cooking it this week.

Let’s talk ‘thank yous’! First off, Victoria Rosenthal is someone I am absolutely indebted to, because she wrote The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook that I have been cooking from. I also need to thank Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Additionally, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I am currently tackling the Eureka content, and the care and love that goes into crafting even this content is evident with every FATE that I clear in Pyros.

Next Week

Next week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is Miso Soup with Tofu, which comes from a Kogane Dori food stall in Kugane. I have never made miso soup before, but I have always liked it! So, I am pretty excited to see how this dish turns out. Please return next week to see how that dish turns out!

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Cooking Eorzea Week 29: Chestnuts and Lentils appeared first on oprainfall.