You all know that my choice of reading matter can sometimes be a little… eclectic. But I bet most of you would still be surprised to see Heroes’ Feast Dungeon & Dragons Cookbook sitting my kitchen. I know I am. I don’t even remember when I first saw this title, but clearly on a whim I added it to my waitlist at the library. It’s a new title, so it sat with “On Order” status for about five months and then suddenly with no warning last week, it was waiting for me!
It’s unbelievably well-done. High quality construction, beautiful photos and very well written. For those of us who know NOTHING about D&D, it has nice introductions to each section (Human Food, Elven Food, Halfling Food, etc.) that describe the different kinds of beings and their foodie bent.
The food itself has fun D&D names; the fare itself is nothing extremely exotic, so the names are really key to making this cookbook a lot of fun.
I was having a friend stop by on Saturday morning and had my regular biscuit cookbook sitting out. The night before I was flipping through Heroes’ Feast and I came across the Yawning Portal Buttermilk Biscuit recipe. If you are a D&D fan, then you know that The Yawning Portal is a very popular tavern located on Rainrun Street in Castle Ward, one of the wards in the city of Waterkeep. If you aren’t a D&D fan, now you know.
I’m not going to put the recipe here – it’s a fairly straight forward biscuit recipe. The one difference is that instead of cutting individual biscuits, you pat all the dough into a pan, score it and then bake it. I also brushed melted butter on the top as it suggested. If I do say so myself, when I pulled them from the oven, they looked just like the photo in the cookbook. And they were excellent with homemade jam.
If I were a D&D player, I would HAVE to have this cookbook. As a non D&D’er, I’ll appreciate it for a couple more weeks and then back to the library it will go. But I will copy out just a couple of recipes so that I have them on hand whenever I want to make something with a really fun name!
Do you have any “exotic”/theme cookbooks? Or exotic recipes?
Trail Baboon 
Morning. I don’t think we have anything too exotic, but then I’m not known for perusing the cookbook collection.
We got several on gluten free, we’ve got some on cooking in different parts of the US. I think Kelly’s favorite is the ‘American Test kitchen’ one. And I have looked through the one from Lynn Rossetto Casper about the science behind cooking…
Don’t know anything about D&D.
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Rise and Shine, Baboons,
Somewhere in my basement books is a cookbook from Alaska where my brother-in-law grew up. I may have even discarded it. That book has all kinds of strange Alaska pioneer recipes, some which were native dishes. The most memorable and exotic was “Jellied Moose Nose.”
I don’t know a whole lot about D&D, but my son was a gamer for many years, so I heard about it some. However, I never forgot about a story I heard about a group who played together, then they noticed one person would go to the bathroom and never wash his hands, then handle all the little pieces. They all got a cold.
Shudder.
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Son is a D and D player. He loves to cook. He would get a kick out of that book.
For their visit to us this next weekend, we are cooking from several books for our son and his family: A Mediterranean Feast, 1000 Indian Recipes, The Way to Cook, by Julia, Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni, and good old Red Betty (Crocker) for pies.
Husband says he would not be without The Border Cookbook.
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Renee, I love the monitor, “Red Betty.” That is a new one. Have you been to the Mill City Museum here to get the history of Red Betty? Very fun and interesting.
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Ahh, Spell check. M-O-N-I-K-E-R.
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We are making Punjabi black lentils, so that is pretty exotic. Husband is making sourdough bread from the Greens Cookbook tomorrow. He has been fussing with the starter all weekend.
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I love the Greens cookbook. One of my favorites.
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I have this one and enjoy it as well.
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I should check that one out…
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I like the apricot-cherry crumble. I made it on Friday.
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Fun topic, VS. I have a few cookbooks that I would consider exotic.
– The Northern Exposure Cookbook – recipes with intros by the characters. The book’s Forward is by Maurice Minifield, and the Intro by Ruth-Ann, who compiles all the recipes; there are sidebars by various residents… If I ever get to a BBC again, I’ll bring it.
– Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook (from 1969) – a great beginner’s ckbk with advice like “Wine and liquor are great cor cooking, and also for the cook. In fact, more important for the cook than for the cooking.”
– Celtic Folklore Cooking by Joanne Asala – sprinkled with history/mythology, legends, poetry…
I’d be curious to know how many cookbooks all you baboons have… I have about 22 – the # keeps changing because I tried to weed some out, but they’re in a box in the basement (till the next book sale), and I keep retrieving one or another.
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Rats, I thought I’d turned off the italics…
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101. I’d have more but I instituted a policy about 10 years ago that if I buy a cookbook and bring it into the house than one has to go. An Asian cookbook that doesn’t have one useful recipe in it is now sitting on the side table waiting to go to a Little Library because I bought a new cookbook a couple of weeks ago.
I’d love to see the Celtic cookbook. I also have the Northern Exposure cookbook. I’ve only made a couple of recipes out of it but again it’s one of those things like this D&D cookbook that are just fun to have.
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Unlike Ben, I love to peruse cookbooks and I own 238 of them. Clearly that’s too many, and I have to cull them. Some of them I can part with without difficulty, but others hold such fond memories and recipes that I just can’t let them go. Not yet.
One of the more esoteric cookbooks I own is Sephardic Cooking: 600 Recipes Created in Exotic Sephardic Kitchens from Morocco to India. I especially enjoy cookbooks that give some historical and cultural background of the foods. I find it interesting how foods travel the globe with immigrants, become integrated in their new locales, and how influences flow in both directions.
When I moved to the West Side in 1974, my exposure to foods, other than mainstream European and American, had been extremely limited. Sure I had been to Japanese and Indian restaurants, and had sampled the occasional taco, but had never really tried to tackle cooking any of it myself. Shopping at Morgan’s Mexican Lebanese store changed all of that. Their fresh produce section was a revelation to me. And, once the Hmong farmers started making inroads to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, there was just no going back to salt, pepper, parsley and chives being the default flavorings for food I cooked. A whole new universe opened itself to me, and look at what it did for the Twin Cities restaurant scene. I just love the diversity of food available here.
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PJ – sounds like you taught yourself a lot of ethnic cookery – so far I’ve only delved into some Greek and Scandinavian, but would like to try some others.
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WOOWWW!! 238!
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On the other hand, some of us have never counted our cookbooks.
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I didn’t until today, and frankly, I’m shocked. My guess would have been 100 or so. But it did motivate me to start culling them.
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I haven’t counted them lately but we have a lot of cookbooks and over the years have culled at least as many as we still own. Some of ours go back 50 years or more.
Who’s to say what’s exotic? Because of Robin’s background we have about a half dozen Japanese cookbooks, including one compiled by a women’s organization in Kyoto back in the 1950s. The recipes tend to be sketchy, like so many of those cookbooks comprised of contributed recipes put out primarily by church groups and women’s groups as fundraisers. The Kyoto one is particularly so because the lack of availability of many familiar (western) ingredients required approximate substitutions.
It’s been my experience that most cookbooks have no more than two or three recipes we especially like. The trick is to remember which recipes are in which books. Also, my go-to recipes in the winter are different from those in the summer, with heartier, heavier dishes in the winter. After a winter of stews and soups it’s often difficult to recall which recipes we were enjoying last summer. Some things get forgotten.
We have five ring binders of recipes we’ve collected from friends, from newspaper and magazine sources and from the internet. Those actually tend to be the ones we turn to most often. In fact the availability on the internet of just about any recipe you can imagine has diminished our cookbook acquisition. Not all the recipes online are worthy, of course, but that’s true of cookbooks as well.
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Yes, I’ve got three binders of stuff that I use quite frequently – one of them is a Chicken Cacciatore recipe I got from Robin… : )
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That’s funny. When Robin makes Chicken Cacciatore here she almost never uses a recipe.
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It’s not complicated – I’ll bet it’s in her nerve endings by now, plus there’s a lot of leeway for adapting…
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There are only a couple of Japanese dishes that I have tried to cook. While I enjoy Japanese food, and I sorely miss the now defunct Tanpopo, I have just never become adept at cooking it. Our friend Ken, who is now completely out of commission due to FTD, is Japanese. He would prepare such exquisite, healthy, and delicious meals for his family and friends. What a horrible irony that a man in such great physical shape should succumb to disease of the brain.
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We have that many ring binders, too.
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I have exactly zero cookbooks. I do read labels and occasionally will check the internet.
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Wow. I didn’t know D&D had a cookbook. That’s great. Thanks for sharing.
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Any recipes for cicadas? They’re here!
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/05/19/spicy-popcorn-cicadas-recipe/
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I will do it! I swear. I thought some dissecting was necessary.
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The robins and even starlings are feasting. I’m sure they will leave me some.
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Or this one: https://www.facebook.com/Unicornsbloodandglitter/photos/a.112165973632167/333579984824097/
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Our son does a lot of Thai cooking.
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I’ve been making a lot of Thai curries lately using the Instant Pot to precook the meat in coconut milk and curry paste, then sauteeing the veggies (I always add way more than the recipe calls for) and other ingredients. Ordinarily, Thai curry would be eaten over rice but we’ve been enjoying it over udon noodles.
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I was out running some errands and happened to be in the neighborhood of a Half Price bookstore so I stopped in. I was browsing the clearance section and there were a lot of cookbooks including one of Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s, a Nigella Lawson and some others that carried a respectable pedigree. I didn’t end up buying any, though they were only $1.00 to $3.00 each. I had my reasons. But let me ask, how do you judge a cookbook at first glance?
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I’d say there must be something about it that interests you
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P.S. Homemade biscuits are meant for homemade jam.
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And both are meant for yawning portals.
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I don’t think I own any exotic or unusual cookbooks, but I recall that at least a couple of people have published books of recipes for cooking roadkill.
Here’s a recipe:
A hippo sandwich is easy to make.
All you do is simply take
One slice of bread,
One slice of cake,
Some mayonnaise,
One onion ring,
One hippopotamus,
One piece of string,
A dash of pepper–
That ought to do it.
And now comes the problem…
Biting into it!
– Shel Silverstein
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