Hi everyone!

It’s that time of year again and this year I drew the short straw at work, which means my vacation comes a bit earlier than usual. So, as of today, I’m sending out the invitations to all of my tulpas for the annual banquet that’s being held in our castle called [Odylfius]. So for the next few weeks, we’ll be partying, feasting, and generally catching up on everything that we’ve been doing this year.

However, I do have a surprise for a lot of them, as I will be introducing our newest addition to our collective. Long story short, her name is Llemiara, (Ara for short) and she comes from a world in conflict. I’ll do a full write-up of how she came to be later, but suffice it to say, it’s a story that definitely made my head spin as it dives straight into the heart of what tulpamancy is about. While some of my tulpas have already met her during her “emergence”, others have no idea who she is.

This of course necessitates a new seating arrangement, which means I had to expand the already looong

table in the dining room to be even longer.

And here’s also my customary invitation:

And of course, here’s the menu as well,

New entrants for this year on the menu are:

Forest Crêpes

Fairly easy to make, but a bit time-consuming. First, you’ll need to either make some pancakes, or do as I do and buy them pre-made at the store.

Now, for the mushroom mix, it comes in two parts, the sauce and the mushroom/garlic mixture:

In a frying pan, start frying half a head of solo garlic that’s been finely diced; use a generous amount of butter. (I wouldn’t recommend using cooking oils here as they tend to make the sauce consistency suffer)

Add in about 150g of your favorite mushrooms, finely diced, sizzle and mix for a bit until the mushrooms start showing some color. Then, strain off the fat into a small sauce pot for a few minutes until you have most of it.

Heat up the fat again in the pot, and when it starts sizzling, you add in finely ground flour and stir until you have what looks like a brownish paste. After that, add in half a stock cube of mushroom stock, white pepper, dried dill and decent pinch of sugar. Then in another cup, mix 1dl of milk with 2dl of water and add that mixture to the paste in small amounts, constantly stirring. You’ll slowly see it go from a paste to a sauce which is basically how you make a perfectly smooth sauce every time. But again, be SLOW when you add the liquid and let the paste slowly expand into a sauce, otherwise you might up with a saturated paste that’s just floating around in your milk/water mixture.

Add in the mushroom/garlic mix and let it reduce until it’s very thick, you want something that’s thicker than your typical gravy, but less thicker than a blob of gelatin.

Then let it cool down to room temp after which it should thicken up some more as well. Then you get your pancakes out and a tablespoon and simply spoon in as much as you want of the mixture onto the pancake. Then you can either be fancy and do some kind of neat looking parcel looking things (fold in half), or do what I do which is to simply roll them up and tuck in the sides and let the whole “roll” rest on the seam of the roll.

Grate some mozzarella cheese on top and then put them into the oven at 225c for about 10-15 minutes or until the cheese has that sexy golden brown color. Then take them out, and let them rest until you’re not longer burning your mouth when you’re trying to eat them too soon 😀

Atomic Carrots

Get some sea salt in flake form and put it into a bag and crush the flakes until they’re a fine powder. Then mix it with cayenne pepper to taste. It should be a spicy blend that burns on your tongue, if you’re a spice head, experiment with adding reaper powder to it in different ratios. When you have your powder, add in some MSG too for the flavor. (that’s optional though) Then mix in the plastic bag and pour it onto a small saucer and slice up a few carrots into sticks, then coat them in the spice mixture and put them on another plate.

And that’s it! This snack pairs amazingly well with a shot of high proof vodka, just saying!

Savory Veggie Bites

Get a quarter of a head of cauliflower and a head of broccoli and start separating them into small bite sized “trees” and rinse them thoroughly in a strainer. Let the strainer sit on a plate for a bit to ensure most of the water is gone. Also, don’t throw away your broccoli stem, get out your potato peeler and peel off all the thick skin and bumps from it. Then slice it into coin sized slices, and toss into a bag with salt and black pepper and some liquid cooking butter. Then mush it all together and let that sit in the fridge overnight. (We’ll circle back to this later)

With your small trees now properly rinsed off, place them into a ceramic bowl and drizzle some liquid butter over them along with some salt and black pepper. Then toss everything until it’s evenly coated in it. Then, put the bowl into your microwave and nuke on high for a few minutes until it gets a consistency where you can pick up pieces with a fork, but make sure not to go to long or they’ll get mushy. What you want here is a savory crisp! Then simply serve up on a plate or small bowl and eat with a fork!

The day after your feast, open your fridge and get out the package of broccoli medallions. Start boiling some salted water in a pot and then toss them in and boil for about 5-10 minutes or until you can pick them up with a fork. As the stem is tougher than the “trees” on a broccoli, it needs some extra love. This is a perfect side dish for any dinner plate if you’re tired of the usual veggies and the taste is amazingly similar to both broccoli and cauliflower.

Also, while writing this, I realized that you can probably coat the medallions in fine breading and fry those suckers up in a frying pan as well. I bet that would be even better. My main point is though: DON’T WASTE IT.

Cozy Winter Soup

This recipe is very simple. Dice potatoes, shallots, cabbage, carrots and whatever low grade smoked ham you can get your hands on. Add water until it covers the ingredients and then add about a third more. Most of it will boil away when you’re making the soup. I’d recommend waiting about ten minutes before adding the potatoes as those tend to cook faster than the rest of the ingredients.

The seasonings I used were dill, black pepper, white pepper, half a tablespoon of soy sauce, pink peppercorns, thyme, basil, oregano, and about half a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of white wine vinegar and a tablespoon of any cooking oil you have.

Then just simply let it boil for 40-60 minutes on medium until you can put a fork easily through all the ingredients. Kind reminder, that higher heat does not always equal a better dish. You want this to have a boil, but a languid one that’s slightly more pronounced than a simmer, but not as violent as having your stove splattered in seconds if you forget the lid to the pot!

Now, you may have noticed that I didn’t add any milk nor butter which would normally add a lot of flavor to a soup and the simple explanation for that is that they don’t really age well in a soup. However, I highly encourage you to add those to the bowl just before serving if you want that juicy umami. If you want to go into overdrive mode, get some crème fraîche, it’ll be insane.

And with this, any kind of soft bread will do as a companion.

The Peppersteak and potatoes

Another easy dish, get a cut of meat or done steaks from any bovine, make sure it’s the rump part of the animal and not the front, because then you’ll have nasty dry steaks. Put it into a bag with salt and let it sit in your fridge for a whole day. The day after, start with the potatoes, those take the longest time.

You’ll need stout, firm russet potatoes and what you’re going to do is basically peel them and cut them up into any configuration you find beautiful. Then rub in some liquid butter into each part and pat on some salt flakes onto them along with black pepper. Set them in the oven for 200c for about 20 minutes on normal above/below heat and then check them, they should be still mostly under-cooked and have some color on them. Crank your oven over to grill and let them sit for another 20 minutes. Once they have that crispy golden brown color, take them out and let them sit and rest.

For the steaks, take them out from the fridge while you’re finishing up the potatoes and let them sit until they attain room temperature. This lessens the temperature shock and gives you a better consistency. Get out a big plate and pour lots of coarsely ground black pepper on there and dunk them in that and then start getting your veggies ready. Shallots, mushrooms and the solo garlic should be cut into strips and then you fry them with a generous amount of butter or whatever cooking fat you have on hand. Once they start getting a bit wobbly, add your steaks and cook them for about 5 minutes on each side. Of course the time varies depending on your meats, so be mindful of that.

Once your steaks are done, put them on a plate and let them rest for at least ten minutes. And this is the time when you make your brown gravy. Get all of the veggies and oil into a pot, then get it back to a sizzle. In this sizzle, you’ll add either stock or a sauce powder, if you’re going with the stock, then add fine flour to it and stir it in until you have a roux as explained above with the crêpes recipe. Simply repeat that for a great sauce.

Then you plate everything and you’re good to go!

As for the rest of the new menu items, they’re quite straightforward, so I won’t mention them here. However, if you’re interested in any of the older items, I recommend you check [last year’s] Xmas post for those.

With that, I wish you all some pleasant holidays!

As always, I’m your scribe.

– Wondrous Fairy