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.