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!