You've encountered a lvl. 1 Chef!

Happy Belated New Year everybody! As you may already know, the EarthBound inspired cookbook I’m working on is in its final 3 days 24 hours on Kickstarter! We’ve been really successful so far and have unlocked a ton of stretch goals (including MOTHER 3 recipes!) One more to go and I think it’s within reach so let’s make that final push and SMAAaaash!! past 45k!

Check out the link below and share it with your EarthBound fandom friends!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/motherscookbook/mothers-cookbook-an-earthbound-inspired-cookbook/updates

Battle Chef Brigade - Iceberg Turnip Pastry

Battle. Chef. Brigade! One of my most eagerly awaited games from 2017 is finally out and it’s just as awesome as I hoped it would be! You’ll be seeing a lot more recipes from this game next month but I couldn’t help putting these Iceberg Turnip Pastries together after finally finishing the game last week. Vive la Brigade!

Battle Chef Brigade is not a game that can be described in few words. I’ll do my best, but the amount of cool stuff they crammed into this game is seriously unbelievable. It’s not even a mash-up I would have considered possible at first, but the team over at Trinket Studios made it work and truly surpassed all expectations!

In the game you play as a fledgling chef named Mina who is determined to leave her stifling home town to join the illustrious ranks of the titular Battle Chef Brigade. The Brigade is a force of good in this world, made up of top ranked culinarians charged with the safe preparation and practiced cookery of monsters for the hungry people of Victusia. This is no easy task mind you, and annual tournaments are held to determine which up and coming hopefuls have what it takes to be counted among these wonder chefs.

definitely not your average match 3 game

That’s the gist of the story, but where this game really shines is in it’s gameplay, and specifically in its fusion of gameplay styles. Each ingredient added to a dish will be accompanied by a number of connected colored circles known as “taste gems” that stack into a 4×4 puzzle grid. It’s up to the player to rotate these gem arrangements in order to connect three of the same color (green for earth, red for fire, and blue for water,) fusing them together into a single “level 2” gem. These level 2 gems can be similarly upgraded once again meaning that the player must constantly be add more ingredients to a dish to fill in the space left behind by these fusions. The more high level taste gems in your dish before the time is up, the more points your dish will earn!

If you were ever a fan of Iron Chef, you’ll feel right at home in these cooking duels. Similar to famed cooking show, it’s not just about making good food, but the right kind of good food. Before each match, Chairman Kamin will assign the match a main ingredient that must be present in every dish you make. In addition to this, your food will be judged by a panel of one to three separate judges each with their own taste affinities (related to one or more of the three colors/elements listed above.) That’s right, often times you’ll be juggling more than one recipe at a time so you really need to stay on your toes in this kitchen!

why is everyone so dang picky!?

But what about outside the kitchen? I mean the ingredients have to come from somewhere right? This is where the game breaks from its Iron Chef underpinnings and introduces an entirely separate but wholly complimentary element of gameplay: hunting. That’s right, there’s no neatly arranged basket of ingredients in this kitchen colosseum! The chefs must find their recipe components in the monster infested forests, caves, and mountains that surround them. This moves the game from match-3 puzzle game to platform beat-em-up in a fraction of a second and I gotta say, it feels so good to beat up some enemies after struggling with a particularly difficult puzzle.

dragon hearts! Just what I needed!

Now all that might sound like a lot already, but I haven’t even mentioned the compelling plot, super fun art style, incredibly diverse cast of characters, daily jobs, cooking equipment, or special game modes yet! Suffice it to say you really need to play the game to get the full experience. However, there is one experience I can help deliver to you, the taste!

The dishes in Battle Chef Brigade are dependent on two factors, the starting ingredient, and the chef who’s preparing it. In fact, each different chef in the game (there are about 18!) has their own unique style based on real world regional cuisine! How cool is that? A game after my own heart!

The dish I chose this time around is one that can be created by our main character Mina if she begins the recipe using an ingredient called an Iceberg Turnip. Originally, I didn’t know where to start attempting to recreate this Iceberg Turnip Pastry because I’d never heard of such a thing. I mean, I could stuff a pastry with turnips for you and call it a day, but knowing the research and care that the Trinket Studios put into this game, I had a hunch that it was based on something real.

I’m in love with this spiral pastry design

And what do you know!? Turnip pastries (or more accurately daikon radish pastries) are fairly common in China which fits perfectly in line with Mina’s Chinese style of cuisine. The coolest thing about this recipe if you ask me (apart from it being blue if you want it to be) is the pastry dough. As you know, I’m a pastry guy by trade, but making puff pastry in the french style was really all I knew before this. That being said, I absolutely love this method and can’t wait to try it out in more recipes. Also, because it doesn’t contain butter like the French style does, this puff pastry dough is less expensive to make, but more importantly, it requires no resting!

So here’s my first course from Battle Chef Brigade. I don’t know if I’m good enough to be in The Brigade (my monster fighting skills are a little rusty) but I think Mina would be impressed with the recipe all the same. I want to give a big shout out thank you to the members of Trinket Studios for their insight into the game development process they have shared with me! So seriously, go check out Battle Chef Brigade on Steam and Nintendo Switch, you won’t be disappointed!

Want to try some monstrous cooking for yourself? Check out the full recipe on my blog right HERE: Iceberg Turnip Pastry recipe

Lvl.1 Chef Social Media Links:

Mother’s Cookbook, a fanmade EarthBound inspired cookbook project, just launched on Kickstarter! Please consider supporting this dream of mine 5 years in the making!

Spread the word! Thank you so much!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/motherscookbook/mothers-cookbook-an-earthbound-inspired-cookbook

Super Mario Odyssey - Stupendous Stew

The pride of the Luncheon Kingdom and straight from Mount Volbano itself, you know I couldn’t stay away from this one for long! Although it may look like a normal chowder there’s definitely more to this volcano cooked stew than meats the eye!

When Super Mario Odyssey was announced it felt like a return to the Mario 64 style 3D-platformers that enthralled me as a kid. But in addition to the excitement of getting to play another amazing looking Mario game, the teaser trailer hinted at something I could have never predicted: an entire kingdom full of giant technicolor food!

all of the townspeople are pieces of cutlery wearing chef hats AND I LOVE IT!

Without getting too much into the story of Super Mario Odyssey, the game has a unique focus on travel and exploration. In this game, our globetrotting hero travels far beyond the Mushroom Kingdom into several new kingdoms each sporting their own themes and fun gameplay mechanics. You’ll explore a dense forest sanctuary full of robotic botanists in the Wooded Kingdom and walk the streets dodging taxis in a bustling facsimile of New York City in the Metro Kingdom. But, like I said before, it was the Luncheon Kingdom and it’s enormous pot of stupendous stew set atop an active volcano that truly caught my attention, and I’m sure you can understand why.

It goes without saying, that as soon as I finally landed at the foot of Mount Volbano I immediately set about searching the kingdom for clues as to the stew’s ingredients. I was actually surprised by what I found! In addition to the several vegetables that you can find floating in the stew (carrots, corn, potatoes, etc.) but what was really fascinating is the addition of a HUGE salt encrusted hunk of meat that’s been left out on a high plateau to age.

please excuse the amateur screenshots. I was still getting used to the photo controls .__.;

Now there was no way I could just overlook this ‘secret ingredient’ but it’s inclusion did give me some pause. I’ve cooked things in salt before, but never a whole roast! What i came up with was to create a salt crust with salt sugar and water to achieve a ‘wet sand’ consistency (you can also use egg white instead of water as I found out later) and pack it up all around the meat in order to seal it up. I suppose I should also mention that to me, the meat in the game most closely resembles a big hunk of prime rib. Needless to say that would be WAY too expensive to replicate (not to mention use so much salt,) so I went with a more manageable 2 pound top sirloin roast.

After salting up my roast and leaving it to rest for weeks 3 days, I transferred the whole thing to the oven and hoped for the best! Thankfully, it baked really nicely and wasn’t even overly salted! Nice! I know In the game they just toss the whole cut of raw meat into the stew uncooked, but there is a limit to how far I’ll go for recipe authenticity haha. Yeah, uncooked meat into a finished stew did not seem like the right choice.

it’s as if you could dive right in! ::spoilers::

Another interesting thing I discovered while researching this recipe is that ‘white stews’ such as this one have a history in Japan. Apparently they were introduced in school lunches as a way to get kids to eat more protein and boost their health after the end of WWII. Being somewhat of a comfort food, white stews saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1960’s and remain popular today. Who knew!?

I’m very happy with this recipe and it tastes just as stupendous as the name implies! This was a dish I made live on twitch during my weekly Lvl.1 Test Kitchen stream so if you’re in to video game food recipes make sure to come by Thursday nights at 8 pm EST! Also, if you try out this stew for yourself, I’d love to see/hear how it turned out! Let me know!

P.S. I used baby corn and baby zucchini because the stew is originally so massive! I thought it’d be cool in this normal sized recipe if the veggies looked as if they had been shrunken down.

Feel like making some stew of your own? Check out the full recipe on my blog right HERE: Stupendous Stew recipe

Lvl.1 Chef Social Media Links:

Hi Tumblr friends! Maybe you can help me with some hype?

If you didn’t already know, I’ve been brought on as the head chef and lead recipe designer for an upcoming video game cookbook called Mother’s Cookbook, a fanmade project featuring over 50 recipes inspired by EarthBound! 

Mammoth Burger anyone?

We just started up our own Instagram to track the progress of the book and we have an account on Twitter going strong as well. So if you could do me a favor, please find us over at @motherscookbookeb and give us a follow. Our Kickstarter is slated to launch December 4th and we have a lot of food photos, layout spreads, and art that we can’t wait to show you! Thank you so much. I’ll see you over there! Let your fellow EarthBound/Mother series fans know!

What would a Skip Sandwich from Happy happy Village taste like? Blue blue..

Featuring “inspired by” recipes like Lier X. Agerate’s Roasted Garlic Bread

Recipe pages will be a mix between a scrapbook and I SPY!

If you can believe it, I’ve been creating video game food recipes going on almost three years now. That means I finally have enough to start making round-up posts like these!

Since I’ll be away with family this week, I won’t have a chance to make anything new. I thought about it for a bit and realized that I’ve already put out quite a few Thanksgiving appropriate recipes to date, so why not revisit a few of those!? That said, here’s my collection of 7 (actually 9) recipes that would be perfect additions to your table this holiday. Hope you like ’em! And be sure to let me know what you think :].

Now without further ado, let’s see what we got!

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim – Sweet Rolls

Get the recipe here! -> Sweet Rolls

These little treats (a hybrid of a bundt cake and popovers) are fun to make and fun to eat. The sweet icing on top is optional, but it elevates these rolls into the irresistible. Try them out if you’re looking to deviate from the usual thanksgiving pie scene, and don’t worry, they still leave your kitchen smelling divine!

Stardew Valley – Autumn’s Bounty

Get the recipe here! -> Autumn’s Bounty

There’s no better time of year for a dish like this! A mix of roasted pumpkin, sweet potato, and other Fall veggies, married with savory bacon and a touch of honey makes this an impressive tasting (and looking!) side dish that would be at home on any Thanksgiving table.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – Good Soup

Get the recipe here! -> Good Soup

One of the three soups from Yeto’s mansion gives us our second pumpkin based recipe in this list. This is definitely one of the recipes I’ve come back to the most over the years because it’s just so warm and comforting. Make yourself a tasty stock to start with and this soup goes from good to great!

UNDERTALE – Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie

Get the recipe here! -> Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie

The butts pie has been a fan favorite for years now and I always love seeing pictures of people including it in their holiday spreads. If you want to fill your house with the best smell ever, this is the recipe to try. Goat Mom would be proud ]: )

Stardew Valley – Cranberry Sauce, Cranberry Candy, & Stuffing

Get the recipe here! -> Cranberry Recipes

Woah! Three recipes for the price of one! (it’s easy when they’re all free!) Stuffing and cranberry sauce are always familiar faces at the Thanksgiving table so try out these recipes and I bet no one will even know they were inspired by a video game! Making all three is a great way to get the most out of that bag of frozen cranberries. Fresh work too!

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – Deku Nut Cake

Get the recipe here! -> Deku Nut Cake

This was a really fun recipe to work on and it’s not really like anything I’d ever eaten before. Chestnuts are the titular Deku Nuts in the cake but there’s pear, coconut, and caramel in there as well. Check out the recipe if you’re looking to try something new. Goes great with coffee for a satisfying morning snack to enjoy before the festivities or the day after!

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Tough Meat Stuffed Pumpkin

Get the recipe here! -> Tough Meat Stuffed Pumpkin

Can’t get enough pumpkin? This final recipe is like the older, beefier cousin of the Good Soup up above. It definitely makes and impressive centerpiece and you can even cover it with the pumpkin ‘lid’ to keep it warm on the table. A filling stew that also increases your defense, what’s not to love!?

Lvl.1 Chef Social Media Links:

Splatoon 2 - Double-Fried Super Schwaffle

When you’re looking for a bite to eat in Inkopolis Square, you’ll want to make your way over to Crusty Sean’s food truck for some super fresh grub. (Crusty Sean… like crustacean, get it!?.) In Splatoon 2, players can receive tickets for completing various in game tasks which they can then use at Crusty Sean’s “Crust Bucket” in exchange for food and drink. The effects of these food items vary between increasing experience and money earned whereas the drinks have more ability enhancing qualities such as speed boosts and shorter respawn time.

Welcome to the Crust Bucket. I’ve got snacks and drinks that’ll increase your experience and cash flow when you battle! Just give me a ticket, and I’ll hook you up with an item. What’ll it be?

– Crusty Sean

One of the breakout hits for the Wii U, Splatoon returns to the Nintendo Switch to deliver more inkredible action than ever before! For newcomers to the series, the game is a third-person shooter that puts you in the super stylish shoes of a young Inkling armed with ink dispensing weaponry. The main focus is on the multi player battles in which teams of inklings battle head to head to cover the majority of the arena with their own team’s colored ink. It’s really kind of amazing how Nintendo could take something as brutal as the shooter genre and turn it into something cute.

This was definitely a fun recipe to make just because of how strange it is in both appearance and flavor. I mean, I can’t say that I’ve ever tried tempura shrimp with chocolate sauce before, can you? There wasn’t really any way around that flavor combo unfortunately, but in the end it certainly wasn’t the WORST thing I’ve ever eaten. Sure, It wouldn’t be my first choice at the Crust Bucket, but hey, chicken and waffles are pretty popular, so why not shrimp and waffles! Honestly, if you were to take a bite of this massive ice cream waffle sandwich (easier said than done!) the shrimp barely ekes out above the ice cream and other sugary ingredients so it’s more like a background flavor if anything.

Because most of the ingredients for this Shwaffle would be store bought, I wanted to concentrate mostly on the development of the tempura batter. I actually tested a few different recipes live on my twitch channel before deciding on one and it was really interesting to see how they all fried up a little differently.  In the end, my goal was to make a tempura shrimp recipe that could be enjoyed on its own in case people weren’t really feeling the chocolate and waffle combo, and in that I think I succeeded.

If you feel like making your own super fresh grub (and I mean, who wouldn’t) check out the full recipe on my blog right HERE: Double-Fried Super Schwaffle Recipe

Lvl.1 Chef Social Media Links:

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Monster Cake

To say I was excited about the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be an understatement. In fact, if you’ve been following the blog for a while, you might remember I threw a Breath of the Wild cookout last year to celebrate its announcement. I only had a few screenshots and videos to go on at the time and I still managed to churn out 8 recipes haha. Suffice it to say that when I actually got the game in my hands I had a recipe notebook ready to go in the other hand (three hands? eh whatever.)  Anyway, I wanted to start off my Breath of the Wild recipe series with a bang, so here’s the fan favorite and number one requested recipe from my Twitter followers: the Monster Cake.

Some of the most striking food items in the game are made with an ingredient called monster extract. This rare ingredient can only be obtained from a shady merchant named Kilton who runs The Fang & Bone, a shop specializing in all things monster. If you give some of the monster parts you’ve picked up to Kilton you can trade for a number of bizarre items not found anywhere else. From monster masks that let you blend in with your enemies, to utterly ineffective squeaky hammers, to just plain old ordinary mops, Kilton’s shop certainly has… things.

But it does have monster extract, and that’s something Link will need to succeed at this recipe.

It’s interesting to note that the Monster Cake is one of the few food items that has its recipe described in game. An excerpt from the Royal Family’s Secret Recipe Book reads as follows:

The Chancellor’s Favorite: Monster Cake

Stew Monster Extract, Tabantha Wheat, Cane Sugar, and Goat Butter for a spell. “It’s a dangerous dish that makes your head fuzzy and may even motivate you to plan evil schemes!”

I don’t know who this Chancellor was, but he seems like a pretty shifty dude to me if this was his favorite recipe.

While deciding how to put this cake together in real life I tried to pick components that matched the sprite. There’s not much in game information about how the Monster Cake tastes other than it’s “unforgettable sweetness.” The only other hint we get is from an enthusiastic NPC named Gotter who, after delivering a monster cake to him via a side quest, remarks that it tastes like biting into a Chuchu. For the uninitiated, Chuchus are gelatinous blob enemies that appear in several Legend of Zelda games and are known for the ‘jelly’ they produce. Looking at the sprite however, the filling seemed too opaque for a jelly so I opted for the best blobby filling: meringue. This actually worked out great because I had already planned on making the horns out of baked meringue; two birds with one recipe!

Now, let’s find a cooking pot and get to it!

Learn how to make these devilish desserts in your own kitchen, no monster extract required! Check out the rest of the recipe right HERE: Monster Cake Recipe

Lvl.1 Chef Social Media Links:

Hello, everyone! I haven’t posted here in a while, but all that is about to change!

Even though you may not have seen me around Tumblr in a while, I’ve been very active in other parts of the internet. Lately though I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic for this place so I’ve decided to resume updating here as well! I have a lot more going on than just recipes these days so I thought I’d take this chance to get you all up to speed on all the exciting goings on! Check it out :D!

1. Recipe Blog (www.level1chef.com)

This is where my full recipes live these days. I wanted to create a site that was easier to search for recipes as well as categorize them by game. It’s still the same tutorials you’ve come to love, but now with better formatting and higher res pictures! I have so many new recipes since I stopped posting here in January so please go check them out at www.level1chef.com (the old ones from this site are there as well!)

2. Twitch Channel (twitch.tv/lvl1_chef)

Yeah, I started streaming too! And not only video games, but a live cooking show as well :O. It’s been going really well and I have so much fun (I actually hit affiliate status a few weeks ago too!) I stream 4 times a week currently, here’s the schedule(EST):

Wed 8pm: Game stream - playthroughs, challenge runs (that pic above is me at the end of my Paula-only EarthBound run,) sometimes co-op, who knows!?

Thurs 8pm: Lvl.1 Test Kitchen - This is where I experiment with weird video game food things to see if they work.

Fri 10pm: Friday Night Farmin’ - Late night relaxing with farm sim games like Rune Factory, Harvest Moon, and Stardew Valley

Sat 12:30pm: Bento Box Brunch - Every week we make and pack a new bento box from the Just Bento Cookbook by Makiko Itoh

So yeah, join me at twitch.tv/lvl1_chef if you want to see what this is all about!

3. EarthBound Cookbook (kickstarter launching within a month)

Woooaaaahhhhhhh! This is the dream right here, friends. I’ve been working with a team for the past few months on putting together a kickstarter for my first cookbook! It’s called Mother’s Cookbook and every recipe is inspired by the food in EarthBound. I’ll be super busy puting this together over the next several months, but I am so excited to make this long time dream of mine a reality! It’s going to have a fun scrapbook-y layout and will be just dripping with EarthBound goodness. I hop you’ll consider backing it when it finally goes live next month! Follow the progress on twitter at https://twitter.com/MothersCookbook

4. Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/lvl1chef)

In order to offset the costs of recipe ingredients and other Lvl.1 Chef expenses, I’ve recently launched a patreon page. I have some cool patreon rewards like recipe cards and food sprite perlers so if you’re interested in that or just feel like supporting me and my content check out the page right here -> https://www.patreon.com/lvl1chef THANKS!

Whew, that was a lot! Like I said at the beginning, my plan is to start sharing my work here again so I hope you’ll look forward to a lot of delicious looking food coming to your feed :]. And, hey, I really appreciate you reading all the way through as well! If you feel like staying up to date in other ways I’ll post links to my social medias below. Until next time, may your souffles always rise to the occasion! 

Social Media Links:

It IS the perfect game for me! I had a lot of fun playing through the story last month as the Chef class (obviously ;).) I even made some of the food from it during my Lvl.1 Test Kitchen stream on Twitch. Check it out and thanks for thinking of me!

Hieroglyph Toast:

Slime Jellies:

Choc Rock: