Reeder - The Geeky Chef cookbook : unofficial recipes from Doctor Who, game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and more, real-life recipes for your favorite fantasy foods

Unofficial Recipes from Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and more Real-Life Recipes for Your Favorite Fantasy Foods

Cassandra Reeder, the Geeky Chef

So youre a geek, a nerd, a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie. Or, you know, maybe you dont like labels and youre just really into sci-fi. Thats cool. Im just guessing here, but you probably also like to eat. Great! Then this book is for you.

Generally, the kind of people who acquire the labels listed above, in addition to being wicked smart and perhaps experiencing a certain amount of social discomfort, tend to have a passion for a piece of work that consumes them. My blog, The Geeky Chef, was the love child of that intense nerd passion and my fondness for cooking.

Really, I have always had a fascination with food in fiction. When I was six years old, I enlisted my big brother to help me make Tree Star cookies after watching Don Bluths The Land Before Time. I also made Unicorn Hair Soup after reading the wonderful YA novel Ella Enchanted when I was slightly older. I could really go on and on with these examples, but the tipping point that inspired The Geeky Chef actually started with a Zelda game.

It was a dark and stormy winter night in San Francisco. No, really! Im not making that up for atmosphere. The year was 2008. My then-boyfriend (now fianc, and soon-to-be husband) and I were playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. In case you were wondering, we are able to play single-player games together because we have developed a system where I do the puzzles and he fights the bosses, which is not unlike how we handle most obstacles in real life.

The level we were on was called the Snowpeak Ruins, which is basically this giant abandoned mansion occupied by two yetis. To complete this part of the game, Link must collect ingredients to make a soup to heal the female yeti. The ingredients are a fish, a pumpkin, and goat cheese. When you successfully locate all of these items and add them to the soup, you get a consumable called Superb Soup. At that point in time, my fianc and I had been living almost exclusively on ramen and cereal, so maybe it was malnourishment speaking, but that soup sounded so good to me. I decided as a special treat that I was going to make Yetos Superb Soup for Thanksgiving.

So I hit up the old search engines looking for a recipe, fully expecting someone to have thought of this already. The game was a couple of years old at that point, but, alas, to my surprise and disappointment, there was nothing. At that time, the Internet wasnt quite what it is now, and though there were some sites with fiction-inspired recipes, they were mostly dedicated to something specific: primarily Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. So I decided that a) I was going to scratch my own itch and make the website I was looking for, and b) I was totally going to make my own recipe for Yetos Superb Soup. In the end, this worked out pretty well for me.

Now my humble little blog has its own cookbook. This still sorta blows my mind, and I have you guys to thank for it. Thank you to everyone who buys this book, and thank you to every nerd who stumbled on my blog while searching for a Lembas Bread recipe, and thank you for every suggestion that helped me discover new geeky things to love. All of you made one of my biggest dreams come true.

As a little girl I always expected that one day adventure would happen to mesomeday a tornado would whisk me away to Oz, or Id fall down a rabbit hole, or David Bowie would kidnap me and take me to his labyrinth where hed sing me songs and feed me magic peaches. (I still sorta wish David Bowie would kidnap me, but thats beside the point.) As I get older, I realize you have to make adventure happen for yourself. I hope this cookbook helps you, dear reader, to make some tasty adventures for yourselfand maybe throw some really awesome LARP parties.

And if you happen to be the architect behind any of the works that inspired these recipes: Hi, I love you, please dont sue me! I am a fan, and my goal here is to help other fans enjoy your work even more by giving them a taste of your imagination. I rather hope that this book will help people to discover new geeky things to love, as writing this book has done for me. If youre David Bowie, call the publisher for my address

A NOTE ON COOKING AND INGREDIENTS

Cooking is like an adventure: theres an end goal in mind but it is the journey that makes the end meaningful. Youll notice that I leave a lot of room for choices and that some of the ingredients have ranged amounts. This is because I want to encourage you to follow your own instincts when cooking. If you think you need fewer people in your Soylent Green or just a bit more pain and regret in your Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, try it! Make substitutions, add the ingredients you wish were there, include more of this and less of that. Cooking is rarely a precise science, and its adding your individual touch that makes the food good.

I guess what Im saying is play with your food! Experimentation is how you learn and grow. When in doubt, Google it!

Due to the nature of this book, some of the ingredients are a little out there, as were dealing in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Ive tried to limit rare ingredients and supplies needed as much as possible. With a few exceptions, most of the ingredients and supplies can be found at any generic grocery store or liquor store. Those that cant, can be found through online vendors.

BEVERAGES:

Non-Alcoholic

INSPIRED BY STAR WARS

BLUE MILK