Fantastic Cooking in the Cosmere

Recently, in a nerdy kick, I decided I would try some fantasy cooking. Now I'm not saying I cooked with dragon eggs and added a pinch of dwarven mead for flavor, no, I used very real world ingredients to cook some very out there recipes. Welcome to my first adventure in cooking with weird recipes from fantastic places!

A real shout out to Deanna Whitney who put together the inspiration for these recipes on Tor.com and who has done quite a lot of work to make these things right. I took inspiration, if not the whole recipe, from Whitney in compiling my own two meals. Mostly to a rousing success! Let's unpack how this went!

Now as a disclaimer, I'm not really a cooking writer, so I'll be giving what I worked on, some of the recipes, and linking to the articles with preparation instruction. This is just my unpacking of how this experience went.

The two recipes I tried were from the world of Roshar in Brandon Sanderson's cosmere. If you've read my reviews of the Stormlight Archive books so far, you'll see this is a world very unlike our own. It's one which, very much, requires a bit of experimentation to get things cooking just right. Roshar has a distinct lack of anything like cows, so all the dairy is either goat or pig, and chickens come in varying shapes and sizes. That makes for some interesting cuisine, and since many meat bearing creatures are more akin to shellfish than our own meat bearing animals, you have some fun designs.

For my first recipe I decided to cook a variant of Alethi "men's food" which is different from "women's food" for cultural reasons. Men's food is spicy, while women's food is sweet. I prepared myself a dish of shellfish chickpea curry, which went quite well in concept and execution!

The basic recipe as laid out by Whitney can be found here for both the curry I used and cooking the shrimp. For the curry, I did a few changes and I used coconut milk.

Whitney's recipe is laid out with these ingredients:

• 2 cups basic curry
• ½ cup milk (I used goat)
• 2 teaspoons of garam masala (to taste)
• 1 teaspoon of chilli powder (to taste)
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon+ of kosher salt (to taste)
• 15 oz can of chickpeas: pre-cooked, drained, and rinsed
• 4 oz of spinach 
• 1 teaspoon of cooking oil

Chickpea curry slow simmering

I managed to get these all together in the pan quite nicely while I marinated the shrimp according to the stated recipe. Her ingredients for a marinade were as such:

• 1 pound jumbo shrimp, cleaned and deveined
• 1 cup water
• 6 cloves of garlic OR 2 tablespoon of ginger-garlic paste
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• ¼ cup lime juice
• 1 tablespoon oil
• ¼ teaspoon pepper
• 1 cup of coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons of stock (I used chicken)
• ¼ cup of toasted coconut

Then for the shrimp I roughly followed Whitney's guide to the recipe and it turned out quite well. I think I had more food waste than intended with the marinade, but overall, it was an excellent recipe! For this recipe I had to forgo using the toasted coconut, and I used pre-minced garlic for my own which saved quite a bit of time and allowed me to set the marinade up very quickly.

Both of these went off, relatively, without a hitch otherwise. I managed to make myself a tasty snack with many leftovers for work the next day! The recipe came together as a very satisfying pair.

A light snack for reading!

Next I decided to try chouta. I will admit, that of all the foods that have fascinated me in the cosmere, chouta is the one I have most wanted to try and was what I had originally set out to cook. It was the recipe though which did not turn out quite as intended.

The recipe can be found here and it is well worth checking out. The way Whitney prepared her recipe involved making your wrap and meatballs from scratch. I got tortillas from the mall personally, and simply used chopped onion, rice, hummus and feta cheese for the base of the wrap to keep everything nice and stuck together.

My difficulties began when I decided to use store bought chicken meatballs (no beef on Roshar!) and pan fried them. It was a, less than satisfactory outcome. Doing that I moved on to cooking the sauce. Since I have not cooked my own sauce before rather than making something from a can, this from scratch sauce was way too thin, more of a liquid really, rather than very thick. Despite my very amateurish efforts to thicken, it never did reach the consistency I sought so I remedied this by adding the meatballs and cooking them together.

The sauce ingredients are laid out as such:

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons flour (I used cassava)
• 2 cups broth (I used chicken)
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• ¼ to 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper (to taste)
• ¼ teaspoon curry powder
• ¼ teaspoon turmeric
• ¼ teaspoon coriander
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• ⅛ teaspoon black pepper

The sauce was way too liquid like

I also forwent directions on cooking the bread, using my store bought tortillas to save the time. I wanted to try a thicker wrap, so I put two together. It was a bit of a stretch, but it took. To fill the wrap I used hummus, rice and chopped onions and feta cheese. It was a very tasty filling. So filling I could only eat two in one sitting! In the end, I ended up savoring them alongside a glass of yellow (white) wine with my dinner!

When I make this again I feel like I will be well served by practicing with making a sauce. I would also want to try making my own meatballs were I to do it again, and I would definitely stick to only using one tortilla. Even were I to fry the bread, one tortilla maximum. What would also be interesting is to work on my wrap style, making make it more "one handed" to work with. 

My first foray into chouta, mildly successful!

On the plus side, I had plenty of sauce, meatballs and rice leftover for a tasty meal at work the next day!

Meatballs, sauce, and rice.

This has been my first foray into fantasy cooking, but rest assured, you can't stop me from trying again!