Chowder

You might be wondering why I would procrastinate for so long on the Chowder entry, considering it is my favorite combination of tastes good/easy to make. It's potatoes and cream! One bite and you can practically feel yourself battening down the hatches (?) in advance of a nor'easter (?). Pleasantly foreign to this Texan, is what I'm saying.

When I was looking at the list of remaining Stardew dishes, I wondered that same thing myself, until the voice of Freddy Quimby screaming "IT'S CHOW-DAH!" interrupted my rumination and I realized "ah, maybe...maybe that's why." Turns out my very conception of chowder is haunted, not by the ghost of an old salty dog (?), but by a 26-year-old cartoon.

My children, blessedly unburdened by decades of reflexive Simpsons soundbites, approved.

You have no reason to believe me when I say this, but this child absolutely was wearing actual daytime clothes until she uncharacteristically insisted on taking a shower right before dinner

ASSESSMENT: Creamy, salty, eternally curséd by Dan Castellaneta 

PROJECT STATUS: Anna's default demeanor before I asked her to rate the dish 

Strange Bun

There are only a few recipes left rattling around at the bottom of the Stardew bucket at this point, some of which include fictional ingredients. I note this only so that you will be aware of how much heavy lifting the “Well I tried” tag is going to be doing here in the home stretch. This week, truly a foodstuff for our current times: Strange Bun.

Not only does it involve bread-baking, very hot right now, it’s also confusing, slightly unsettling and can potentially serve as any meal/snack/dessert. What’s inside these buns? Let’s just say I also could have written King Lear in quarantine with the amount of time I spent trying to figure out what to do with “periwinkle” and “void mayonnaise” as ingredients until I realized that the point of Strange Buns is that they owe you no explanation. They are strange, they are buns, they have fulfilled their destiny.

Mysterious wink

Mysterious time of day to be wearing pajamas

ASSESSMENT:  The void mayonnaise I ended up using was from a pressurized can and comprised of cream and sugar and also mixed with chocolate syrup, so...it was good.

PROJECT STATUS: Enigmatic

Plum Pudding

Many, many years ago--decades, eons--when I still attempting to apply rhyme/reason to this Stardew Valley cooking project, I planned on making Plum Pudding in December in accordance with its "traditional holiday treat" designation. As it turned out, steaming something on the stovetop for half a day was too big of an ask in the midst of my busiest month, so I kicked it down the road. And what a road it was! Took some real hairpin turns, that road! Bit of a "careening over Dead Man's Curve" situation! Anyway, steaming something on the stovetop for half a day seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do at this point.

Babysitting the food: a fun quarantine activity

I followed the general method of this recipe, but as I looked around I started to realize that people just kind of put whatever they feel like putting into these things, so I threw in my own combination of prunes, heels from an old loaf of bread, a couple of shredded carrots, some frozen pineapple, molasses, cinnamon, and so on. It's a real garbage cake, y'all. It's perfect.

Were these ratings pictures taken at different times on different days? Does one feature whipped cream on top because it is functioning as "dessert" and one feature yogurt because it is functioning as "breakfast"? Do we only wear robes...ever? Yes. It is always Christmas morning now. Join us.

ASSESSMENT: Cakes that you can dump random refrigerator bits into are good. Perpetual Christmas morning is good, in part because it allows us to entirely skip things that would maybe be considered milestones in normal times, she says in an extremely youthful and vibrant 39-year-and-362-day-old voice.

PROJECT STATUS: The proof of the pudding is in the blogging, as they say.

Baked Fish

No one in our house spent any time in a hospital this week! So right there, already, things are going pretty well. Our broken furniture is still broken, but nothing *else* has broken in the interim. Overall a solid B+ of a week once you factor in global situations and whatnot.

I'm very close to running out of Stardew recipes, although I noticed that I have made Eggplant Parmesan twice and no one mentioned it, so most likely I could just repeat recipes ad infinitum and be like "boy this Stardew Valley project is going great, I am very productive." Ad infinitum is kind of...the current vibe anyhow.

I think this is the first time I've made Baked Fish.

For a minute I though that quarantine had broken down our agreeable system of giving everything a thumbs up and was strangely thrilled by the dissent:

Until I clarified that only the fish part was under review, and the Brussels sprouts could be ignored:

Anna gave it a thumbs mostly-up but eyes firmly closed. These ratings systems are complex, and I admit I haven't not fully cracked the codes. All I can say with certainty is that this resulted in the fish being eaten.

ASSESSMENT: Fine. It will be fine again when I make it in a couple months and then a couple months after that.

PROJECT STATUS: We have always lived in the castle.