Seafood stew on a cold, rainy day

Today was cold, rainy, and the best sort of weather for staying indoors with a good book or video game, and it just so happens to be the day slated to try out Seafood Stew. When I first decided to cook through the list of Tales of Symphonia recipes, I just looked up the names of the recipes on Google. Most of the recipes came from allrecipes.com, as is the case for Seafood Stew, which is a thick, American-style stew. Here is the recipe, courtesy of allrecipes.com:

Seafood Stew

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups chicken broth 1/2 cup uncooked long grain rice 2 teaspoons chili powder 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained 3/4 cup julienned green pepper

3/4 cup julienned sweet red or yellow pepper 1/2 cup thinly sliced onion 8 ounces orange roughy or red snapper fillets, cut into 1-inch pieces 4 ounces uncooked medium shrimp, peeled and deveined 3/4 cup orange juice concentrate

Directions:

1.

In a saucepan, bring broth to a boil. Add the rice, chili powder and garlic; return to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until rice is tender. Add the tomatoes, peppers and onion. Cover and cook over medium heat until vegetables are tender. Add fish, shrimp and orange juice concentrate. Cover and simmer for 2-4 minutes or until the fish flakes easily with a fork and the shrimp turn pink. I also included dried seaweed (like the stuff that goes around sushi) to replace the kelp that the game requires, some lemon juice (no scurvy for us!) and some black pepper because, as I think I've mentioned, I put black pepper on almost everything. We're having this flavorful stew with a side of cornbread, courtesy of a Jiffy cornbread mix. :-)  And the verdict is.... It's... different. Not quite what I was expecting. If you like citrus and fish, you'll probably like this stew. And that's all I have to say about that.

Hamburger steak, twice-baked potatoes, and green beans -- a meal fit for a queen! Or maybe an empress. Or maybe just us.

One of the recipes in Tales of Symphonia is steak with onions. I had a pound of hamburger meat thawed, and time to work on a Tales recipe, so I decided on that Southern classic: hamburger steak. At least, I think of it as Southern because my grandmother makes it pretty often, and I tend to see it in home-cooking restaurants in my home state of Mississippi. So, what did I do first on that Sunday that I decided to make hamburger steak for the first time? I called my grandmother, of course. In any case, here’s Granny’s recipe for hamburger steak:

Ingredients:

1 lb. hamburger meat

Some oatmeal (the real stuff, not the instant)

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 Tbsp steak sauce

1 egg

Salt & pepper to taste

3 Tbsp chopped onion

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients together. Make into patties.

2. Cook slowly in a frying pan until they are done.

3. Pour off some of the grease, chop onion, and add a little flour to remaining grease to make gravy, or simply slice onion and bell pepper and sautee in remaining grease instead. In either case, cook until the onions are translucent.

And here’s how I actually did it (and then wondered why hers tastes so much better!)

Ingredients:

1 lb. hamburger meat

1 Tbsp of extra thick Worcestershire sauce

Salt & pepper & garlic powder to taste

3 Tbsp chopped onion

the rest of half of an onion, chopped

1/2 red bell pepper, sliced

1 Tbsp flour

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients together. Make into patties.

2. Cook slowly in a frying pan until they are done.

3. There wasn't much grease left, so I just added a tablespoon of flour and the rest of the chopped onion I had... yeah, turns out I don't really know how to make gravy ... so I added about a tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and kept using my wooden spatula to scrape up the thin roux (I think that's what it's called) that tried to stick to the bottom of the pan, and proceeded to cook chopped onions and bell pepper slices. 

 

Next time, I think I'll make brown gravy from a mix and sautee some sliced mushrooms and pour that over the top. My favorite hamburger steak (from a restaurant) is at the White Star Cafe in Water Valley, MS. Yum... brown gravy, mushrooms, and lots of black pepper. That's the trouble with moving to a new state. You have to find new favorite restaurants that don't break your budget. :-) 

On the side with the hamburger steak, we had twice baked potatoes and green beans. Here are the recipes: 

Twice-Baked Potatoes for Two 

2 medium russet potatoes 

1 tablespoon light ranch salad dressing 

shredded cheese (We like the "Mexican" blend that we get at the Hy Vee, which is similar to Wal-Mart's "fiesta" blend.)

1 chopped fresh Roma tomato 

cooked and chopped bacon would be good, but I thought of that one too late to add.

1. Scrub potatoes and then poke holes in them with a fork. Cook in microwave until they've softened a bit. It took about 5 minutes total in my microwave. 

2. Cut open potatoes and scrape out most of the insides. Mix the inside of the potato with salad dressing and a little shredded cheese. Here's where you would also add chopped cooked bacon if you thought ahead.

3. Spoon filling back into potatoes and top with shredded cheese. 

4. Place potatoes on a cookie sheet and bake until the cheese is melted at 350 degrees F. 

5. Put potatoes on plates, and sprinkle chopped tomato on top.

6. Enjoy!

I'll be honest, I'm about the pickiest person on the planet when it comes to how canned green beans are prepared. I like the way my grandmother makes them (complete with bacon fat), and I like the way I make them. 

Green Beans

1 can French-style green beans

black pepper

garlic powder 

1. Open the can, drain the green beans, and then rinse them at least three times to get rid of the taste of the can. Double Luck brand green beans are the best, but I don't even know where to begin finding that brand now that I no longer live in the South. 

2. Pour in half a can of water with the green beans and cook over medium heat until the water has evaporated. Sprinkle garlic powder and black pepper to taste. Personally, I love black pepper and garlic powder, so you may see a trend in this blog. :-) 

Enjoy the Southern classic, blogged far from home.

Quiche-y

I give up on using the Dwarven Vows for titles. It was one of those ideas that sounds great until you actually implement it, and then, it looks cheesy. Or maybe kitschy. Like quiche-y? 

Anyway, so I'm behind in my blogging (not that it really makes any difference in the long run, whatsoever), which means that I have several recipes to report. First, the quiche: It was one of those "make it up as you go along" kind of Saturday mornings, and it was begun with the greatest of intentions without realizing that three eggs are really not enough for a deep-dish pie crust. Oops.

Fortunately, there's a grocery store around the corner, and my quiche turned out to be what my husband referred to as something along the lines of "best I'd made." Quiche is one of those easy-ish delicacies that everyone can put their own spin on, but there are some basic ingredients it must have, IMHO, including eggs, cheese, and crust (unless you're going low-carb, in which case the crust is unnecessary). In any case, here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 deep-dish pie crust 
3 eggs
about 1/4 cup milk
handful of shredded cheese
about 1/2 cup frozen spinach (preferably thawed)
4 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled up
3 more eggs
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pat of butter
4 button mushrooms
more cheese (I probably used about a cup to a cup and a half of cheese in the entire thing.)

Directions:
1. Poke holes in the crust using a fork and bake in the oven until the crust is a light golden brown. (For my oven, it was about as long as it took to preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.)
2. Beat three eggs in a bowl. Add milk to mixture. (You can skip this, I think, but it does make the eggy mixture go further.) Dump in spinach and cooked bacon. Mix together. Pour into pie shell and realize that the shell is only half-full.....
3. Turn off the oven, and run to the store to pick up a new carton of eggs. :-/ Come back, turn the oven back on, cut up mushrooms, and cook them a la Julia Child -- fry a pat of butter in olive oil, and then cook the mushrooms over medium-low heat until they brown. Don't crowd the mushrooms if you want them to brown. Yummy -- real butter AND olive oil!
4. Mix together three beaten eggs, cooked mushrooms, and a small handful of cheese and pour in a second layer over the spinach-bacon-egg mixture. Of course, you don't have to layer your quiche, as I'm sure that you, dear reader, were better prepared than I! :-)
5. Sprinkle cheese on top.
6. Bake the quiche in the oven at 400 degrees F until the egg mixture sets. I think it was roughly half an hour, but if you're unfamiliar with quiche recipes, you probably want to check after twenty minutes and then every ten minutes after that. About the time that your kitchen starts to smell delicious with cheesy goodness is about the time you'll probably need to watch it more closely.
7. The most important step: ENJOY YOUR QUICHE.

Cutting the quiche

The first piece!

If only I could mess up more recipes and have them still turn out with quiche-y goodness! In any case, I guess "being prepared" is the lesson to be learned here. Also, after you've cooked a dish a couple times and looked at several recipes, ranging from your grandmother to Paula Deen to allrecipes.com, you can kind of wing it and come up with something that's pretty good. :-) So....necessity is the mother of invention, and practice makes perfect, and, um.... a penny saved is a penny earned and all you need is love. And stuff.

Dwarven Vow #2: Never abandon someone in need.

In spite of a brief hiatus in the world of blogging, my wonderful husband has been helping cook even further. It was a long work week and I hurt my back, but he definitely gets the whole "Never abandon someone in need." At least, where I'm concerned.  He took care of two recipes at once: omelet and fried rice.

Omelets are really quite simple, so long as you don't overload them with ingredients. At least, that's what he tells me. The Tales crew always puts rice in their omelets, so he tried to do the same. He took brown rice, cooked and cooled in the refrigerator overnight and stir fried it in a little olive oil and soy sauce with salt, pepper, chopped carrots, and bell pepper. That was the fried rice part. He beat 2-3 eggs in a separate cup with herbs and spices that he liked (he tends to cook by smell; he did mention that he used Greek seasoning), and then fluffed the eggs with chopsticks and poured it over the whole thing and let it cook until it was firm on the bottom before trying to turn or fold it. He added cheese before it was done to make sure it was melted.

 

 Hm, could have sworn that picture was turned sideways when I uploaded it.... Oh well. And we were supposed to add tomatoes to it... the game would probably say we failed to cook it, but we leveled up, anyway. :-) One nice thing about this dish is that it's pretty cheap to make. 

Dwarven Vow #1: Let's all work together for a peaceful world.

In the spirit of working together -- and producing a palatable product on a day where I worked two four-hour shifts at two different jobs in retail for the third day in a row-- my husband put his Polish (well, quarter-Polish) hands to work making stuffed cabbage. Yeah, so we definitely went with the default recipe without adding the Tales-inspired ingredient cheese. Sorry, Genis. Your cooking ideas were odd, and practice makes permanent. We did add the mushrooms, though.

Here's the family recipe we used:

1 head of cabbage (boiled whole)
1 lb. hamburger meat
1-2 cups rice
2-3 slices of bacon, fried and chopped up finely (oops, forgot this one)
a few mushrooms, cut up and sauteed (Tales-inspired ingredient not found in the original recipe) 
2 cans tomato soup

1. Boil the cabbage until it is boiled through. This will take a long time.
2. Cook rice according to package instructions. 
3. Sautee mushrooms in a little butter while rice is finishing up.
4. Cook bacon, then cut it up finely. (Traditionally, you're supposed to use salt pork, but bacon is what we have at my house.)
5. Mix together bacon (including fat that cooked out of it), hot rice, mushrooms, and beef. The heat from the rice, plus the time spent baking in the crockpot should cook it through. If you're squeamish, though, go ahead and cook the hamburger meat at least partway in the bacon fat and mushrooms.
6. Peel off cabbage leaves carefully. The first couple will probably fall to pieces, but you should have a relatively sturdy, pliable leaf soon enough. Spoon filling into a cabbage leaf, and then fold the leaf around the filling carefully. Place folded-side down in the crockpot or slow cooker.

7. Be sure to get a full layer on the bottom of the crockpot, and then pour one can of tomato soup over the stuffed cabbage. Then, you can use any weak or easily torn leaves as a layer before putting in the next layer of stuffed cabbage leaves. The better the cabbage and/or the better job you did boiling your cabbage, the fewer leaves you will have that fall apart.
8. Top the whole thing with the second can of tomato soup, and then cook in the crockpot. If you use the low setting, it'll take 6-8 hours. If you cook it on high, it'll take about 3 hours. Sure, it's labor-intensive, but it's good and relatively cheap meal.

9. If you want to top it a la Tales of Symphonia, sprinkle cheese on top, but when I mentioned this to my husband, he looked horrified. I think it would be good, but, then again, I forgot to add it to mine. Guess I'll have to try to remember the cheese with the leftovers sitting in my fridge. :-) They do reheat well!

The trick to good stuffed cabbage (AKA cabbage rolls) is a good cabbage. I apparently do not have a discerning enough eye to pick a good cabbage. Either that, or we over-boiled the leaves. In any case, the leaves weren't strong or sturdy enough to really wrap around the filling.

Oh well, at least stuffed cabbage has the time-honored family tradition of being hard to mess up if you follow directions, it reheats well, and OH MY GOSH it makes a lot of food. For the two of us, at least. Two or three rolls are enough for a pretty substantial meal for me and my short, mid-twenties self. If only life were so simple, you know? Then again, if life could be lived by a formula beyond love God, love others, and take care of business, it'd be a lot less interesting. It probably wouldn't have very many good stories for the video games. :-) 

Dwarven Vow #4: Don't depend on others. Walk on your own two legs.

You know, it occurs to me that not everyone in the world is playing Tales of Symphonia at the moment, so here's a quick summary. In the GameCube game Tales of Symphonia, Lloyd Irving and his friends set out to save the world. Along the way, they make new friends and discover that the world is considerably bigger and more complex than they first imagined. For some reason, I'm reminded of those great lines from The Princess Bride:

    The Grandson: Has it got any sports in it?
    Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...
    The Grandson: Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.
    Grandpa: Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

The game sounds pretty generic, I know, but the it really is a lot of fun with many hours of gameplay value. There are a couple of things that will affect this blog:
    -- The main character Lloyd was raised by a dwarf, hence the titles of the posts. I'm trying to go in the order that the vows appear in the story, so yes, they are out of numerical order for a reason.
    -- The mysterious gourmet, the Wonder Chef, hides throughout the world to give you recipes to help heal after battle. These are the recipes I am preparing His picture is my profile picture. No, I did not make him up. He is the product of Namco-Bandai. Perhaps someday I will branch out to other video games, like Cooking Mama (that'd be a huge undertaking), Eternal Sonata, or Tales of the Abyss.... But for now, Tales of Symphonia will be my starting point.

The first two recipes on our agenda are: a sandwich and cabbage rolls. The character Genis (the main character's brilliant best buddy) is, generally speaking, the best cook in the game -- probably because when he adds extra ingredients, they are ingredients that make sense. For example, a sandwich Genis-style may consist of bread, meat, greens, cheese, and tomato. Lloyd is prone to adding lemons to his sandwiches, and Collette skips the meat altogether in favor of a couple of pieces of fruit. Lemon sandwich -- yum. :-/

So, here's my Genis-style sandwich before adding some mustard and mayo. And some more tomato slices and a brownie on the side... no wonder sandwiches don't restore that much health..... But at least I toasted it, so the chance for failing to make the sandwich was there. It could have burned or something. (Yes, you can  fail at making a sandwich in this game. Seriously.)

I'll most likely be attempting cabbage rolls on Friday. I have to hit up the grocery store for cabbage, among other things, and the local ads come out on Wednesday. I feel a bit like I'm cheating here at the beginning -- the first recipe is a sandwich, for cryin' out loud, and cabbage rolls aren't new to me since my husband's family makes them pretty often and calls them stuffed cabbage. (Yum, Polish food.) Oh well, there are plenty of recipes on the list that I've never made, such as paella, and I'll have to save my risk-taking and expensive groceries for another day. But at least I'll be doing it myself -- walking on my own two legs as much as possible. Of course, if my hubby decides to help and/or take over making stuffed cabbage, I certainly won't complain! :-) Anyway, enough rambling. Have a fabulous day!



Oh, and here's the address for the walkthrough that I'm using: http://www.gamefaqs.com/gamecube/561316-tales-of-symphonia/faqs/42708

The Beginning of a Journey

It's the same old story, different verse: underemployed woman who has just moved to a new area and needs a project. Her hobbies include cooking, playing JRPG's, and spending too much time on the Internet. She thinks for a long while about how to mark her days and have her days make their mark. Voila! Why not combine her three hobbies into one challenge?! (She might have seen Julie and Julia a few too many times, as well.) Thus, the idea for the Tales of Cooking blog was born: I will undertake every recipe in the game Tales of Symphonia in (gasp!) real life. Of course, I'm probably not going to make them enough times to "master" the recipe, so no special costumes for me, and if I start seeing the Wonder Chef, I will also start seeing a psychiatrist, but still, the challenge is there: make every recipe in Tales of Symphonia in real life, one or two per week since (alas!) I have a real life grocery budget, and I'm pretty sure that if I try to kill monsters around here, I won't be getting any money out of the deal. :-) I'm starting my umpteenth playthrough of Tales of Symphonia tonight, and I'll start cooking when I start getting recipes. Will I be using a walkthrough to make sure that I get all the recipes? You betcha!