Good Eats for Gamers: Fancy Pants Sam with Beauty and the Beast

These past few weeks, I've been stretching my gaming thumbs getting ready for the Gamers Northwest Disney marathon coming March 22. I've committed to playing a couple of different games I've been having some non-ironic and some ironic fun practicing. I signed up for Beauty and the Beast and Kingdom Hearts, both pretty different from what I'm used to.

I'll start with this: I didn't even know that there was a Beauty and the Beast game for the Super Nintendo! Belle was always one of my favorite Disney Princesses when I was little. It was between her and Ariel, because Belle has brown hair like me, and she really likes books like me. But Ariel is a mermaid, and damn that's cool! In Beauty and the Beast, you play as Beast, trying to persuade Belle to fall in love with you, while everything is trying to kill you... that's everything from wolves in the forest and some of the more malevolent enchanted household items in Beast's castle (which makes no sense to me, actually). It's a tough game (more on that later), and practicing it can work up a good appetite. For this game, being set in France, I felt a certain pressure to make a fancy version of my usual gamer fare: no veggie bologna sandwiches here. I came up with the poshest sammy I could: roasted tomatoes and grapes over caramelized onions, sautéed spinach and brie over toasted grain bread. I call it the Fancy Pants Sam.

It's delicious.

Fun Foods: Dani's Cheese Rolls

String cheese - it's a texture thing

Right now, my food cravings are pretty much only for the foods of my childhood. Mmm, (vegetarian) baloney and american cheese sandwiches with mustard, Gushers, Capri Sun, and string cheese. Oh goodness, string cheese!

I remember when I first saw a string cheese commercial in the 90's and I thought that was an inspired idea and I had to have some. Twenty years later, I still put string cheese in my lunch (of course, it's the light version now). This is why I can't be a real vegan. Also fish sticks.

Anyway, now that I am 26 27, I need more grown up ways to eat my childhood favorites. Here, now, is the homemade cheese roll or pizza roll (which is an ironic twist for string cheese since that commercial is all like "pizza without the pizza!").

Gamer Good Eats: Kraid's Cashew Cookies

Video games make me hungry. Well, everything makes me hungry, but video games frequently make me hungry because pretty much everything I notice in them reminds me of food, even the non-food objects. I swear the orbs in Devil May Cry and the health beads and munny in Kingdom Hearts give me the craziest craving for fruit gummy snacks.

This is a Chute Leech

And then there's Metroid... pretty much every enemy and environment in that series makes me think of food, whether it's tomato soup lava levels, or floppy pizza-like chute leeches in Metroid II. I've already made yummy fangy raspberry metroid cupcakes for Caleb's birthday last year.

But then, there's nothing like Kraid. He's the human-sized chubby crocodile that shoots things at Samus in Metroid I. While he himself doesn't really remind me of food, it's the things he shoots that get my tummy grumbling. During the game, he paces back and forth hurling his spikes at Samus. The spikes that come from his front are shaped like little syringes, but it's the spikes from his back, the ones shape like little crescents that I love. It weird, I know, but whenever I see them, I get an instant craving for cashews (they seem cashew-shaped and -colored to me). I get a hankering for some kind of cashew treat, so I decided to try out a cookie recipe to nom the next time Caleb does a Metroid run.

Kraid in Metroid

Sleepy Sunday Cocktails for People with Colds

I love holiday weekends, not only because I get an extra day off of work (which with my normal Fridays off means I get a 4-day weekend!) but also because it means I get to spend an extra day with my all-time favorite guy, Caleb <3

Yeah, that's a little mushy, but it's cool. Because we live in different cities, we can really only see each other on the weekends, which is tough when it comes to the love of your life. I mean, come on! Anyway, even a little thing like infectious illnesses won't keep us a part; I've been sick and coughing for about three weeks now, and he's been toughing out the worst of it lately. But we've made the best of our long weekend, staying in pretty much ALL DAY, playing games, watching Star Trek, reading... and I guess not much else. All in the pursuit of rest and health, of course... er, at least we made our Sunday cocktails with a sense of healing, kind of.

For Caleb's rough cough, I made him a honey-lemon hot toddy, and for me, an amped up, Vitamin-C rich orange dreamsicle.

Caleb working on his Phantoon battle in Super Metroid... a surefire way to get over a nasty cold.
You can kind of see the mug of his yummy hot toddy in the far right.

Book Reveiw: Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

Ender's Shadow is Orson Scott Card's parallel novel to Ender's Game... the two stories take place during pretty much the same time period. They also seem in to generate the kind of relationship parallel universes would have: distinct existences uncomfortably close together, surged by similarities but ultimately rendered apart by their polarities.
Watch out: spoiler alert!