You can find details on the Mycena Cave Cuisine Competition - Homey Edition, both player and staff edition, in this Discussion Topic post. Please post all chit-chat in the Discussion Topic and restrict posts in this topic to staff recipe nominations only.

All recipes that were posted in the Staff Recipe Submission Topic are eligible to be nominated by you until December 27th, 23:59 ST. When you have finished a dish, please post in this topic with either a picture and/or a description of the process of cooking (and eating!) the dish, and optionally, how you felt about its taste.

All staff dishes will then go up for voting in two rubrics, being a) Appeal and b) Creativity. Additionally, players who have cooked a dish will also be able to grade the dish based on c) Taste. These individual player-given grades will be averaged, and together your votes will decide the winning entry from the staff recipes!

• You may nominate and cook multiple staff recipes.
• Multiple players may nominate and cook the same staff recipe.

• Discussion Topic
• Recipe Submission Topic
• Recipe Nomination Topic

• Staff Recipe Submission Topic
• Staff Recipe Nomination Topic

• Mycena Cave Cuisine Competition - Budget Edition Submissions
• Mycena Cave Cuisine Competition - Budget Edition Nominations

So I love rice and eggs and nori and omg all the things!! Meaning, naturally I had to try this out. I wasn’t able to make the pota, but it was super good nonetheless! I had onigiri sandwiches(basically just this, since I love nori, though they turned out rather big), tamagoyaki, which turned out not nearly as beautiful as Ru’s, chicken nuggets, some tomatoes and lots of corn!

It was very lovely, and, though I made too much for my lunch box, it looked super cute in it and was very tasty! Especially my onigiri! I filled them with various things, but my favourite was probably one with tunamayo!

I have to admit I was kind of excited when I saw this recipe. Growing up my parents used to take me and my brothers on long family vacations every summer down to Maryland, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay. We also spent several vacations camping on Assateague, which is a barrier island just off Ocean City, MD with beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, and a large saltwater marsh/bay on the side facing inland. It was a seafood lovers dream, wading out into the bay barefoot looking for clams, oysters and scallops, crabbing under the bridge, and all the fish you could catch. I have so many memories of crab boils at our campsites, shucking clams and watching the wild ponies grazing in the marshes and roaming the beaches. So clam chowder definitely gives me a homey feeling with memories of time with my family.

Today turned out to be a good day for it. Rainy, overcast and dreary outside. Perfect soup making weather! I’ve never made clam chowder before so I was a little surprised at the lack of any kind of real stock. And lets face it, even as much as I love seafood the idea of “clam juice” would kinda make anyone question the sanity of the recipe (How exactly do you juice a clam? I’m not sure I really want to know). But to be honest I was really surprised at how light the flavor was in the end. I even managed to get Kismet to come over and have a bowl, and she doesn’t eat seafood. If you have been thinking of trying this one out but worried about it being too clammy, don’t be. I’m definitely going to be adding this recipe to my collection for future meals, though I might tweak it a little by adding garlic or perhaps a couple of bay leaves just to make it a little more savory.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t have as many prep pictures as I wanted to get, because as soon as I started cracking open those cans of clams my cats went ba-nay-nay. I don’t know if it was the sound of the can opener or the smell of the clams but the entire time I was cooking they were ALL OVER ME. I even had to start squirting them with the sink nozzle because when I’d turn my back to check the soup they’d start trying to jump up on the counter to see if they could steal something.

I did manage to get a good 1 1/4 cups of additional juice when I drained the clams, though I was kind of surprised how white and cloudy it was compared to the bottle I had purchased. It had me wondering if I should use it or just toss it, but it didn’t have any strange fishy odor to it so I decided what the heck.

Their were two big changes I made to they way I followed the recipe, but I don’t think they made any real difference compared to the original

• switch which pot I did what in - I like my chowder chunky, with lots of potatoes. So it didn’t make sense to me to do the majority of the soup in the saucepan and the creme base in the big pot. Not to mention all my potatoes wouldn’t fit in the little one xD
• sweating the onions before adding the other veg + the juice/water - Again, a preferential thing. I always, always, always sweat or caramelize my onions before starting any soup. And as much as I tried I just couldn’t skip that step. Hence the olive oil added to the ingredient pic even though it wasn’t called for.

I didn’t need to add much water, and as it started to simmer I was surprised how good it smelled. It really doesn’t take that long once the liquid starts bubbling for the vegetables to get tender. So depending on how firm or soft you want them you might want to start the next step of making the base. Mine ended up a little softer then I wanted them. But still very tasty. Just missed the texture I was going for with the big chunky veg.

I did have one slight problem with my butter/flour mixture. I somehow didn’t seem to have enough butter. When I got to adding in the third 1/4 of a cup the mixture didn’t just thicken, but actually was starting to solidify into large clumps.  So I had to stop adding the flour and instead started adding the half and half a little at a time and whisking it to smooth it back up again. Despite that hic-up I got all the flour in and everything mixed up nice and smooth and thick

Once that’s done and I added it to the large pot everything thickened up very nicely. Then it was just adding the clams and the vinegar and seasonings and it was done!

This chowder definitely gets my omnomination!

Myla‘s Mrrlrr’s Vegetarian Chili of NOM!

I’ve been eyeing this recipe since it went up as I’ve adopted an herbivore lifestyle recently. I finally have a day off and most ingredients or similar ones to substitute on hand.

I added some carrots I had and the rest of my cauliflower for a “meaty” texture. Didn’t have any tomatoes so put in some tomato sauce and salsa. (Incidentally the lid was stuck on the salsa and when I got it open spilled half of it in a drawer and on the floor. Too bad I didn’t take a pic of that.) Subbed out the beans too.

It smells delicious and I will update on the taste when it’s done cooking.

I love cookies. I really wanted to try this one because it was the only dessert submission, and it looked like a variation on the “white chocolate macademia nut cookies” that are a guilty pleasure of mine at a certain fast food place <.<
It tastes almost identical!

I had most of the basic ingredients on hand and just needed to grab chocolate and nuts, which are two things that always get used up at my house!
I tried to follow the recipe exactly, but made a few small changes:
1. I subbed self-rising flour with regular flour + baking soda + salt
2. I chopped the nuts and chocolate in an electric choppy thing because I’m super lazy <.<
3. I let the dough rest in the fridge for a few hours before baking.

ingredients, plus Andrew playing Fallout 4

There were a few times during this recipe where I went “hmmmm.” The first was after mixing in the egg. The dough had a very strange texture, with lots of holes/bubbles in it, not like the “icing” consistency mentioned. Maybe I beat the egg too much and put too much air in it?
The second was during the penultimate step, before adding the chocolate and nuts. After mixing in the last bit of flour, the dough got really thick and crumbly, and seemed to crack more than most cookie doughs I’m used to making. However, after getting in there with my hands to incorporate the nuts/chocky it all seemed to turn out right.

Since it’s the middle of summer here, turning on the oven during the day is a really easy way to turn your house into the third circle of hell. So I formed the dough into a log, wrapped in cling film, and put it in the fridge until the sun went down and things cooled off.

Fridge dough log. Also pickles and beer.

These turned out great! I think chilling the dough really helped them in terms of “spread” (though maybe I measured the baking powder wrong). I managed to get 12 cookies on one sheet, with about half the dough (the rest is in the fridge until later). I just used a big kitchen knife and cut “cookie slices” which I balled up a bit with my hands and placed on the greased baking sheet, then let come to room temp (about 10mins) before putting them in the oven. (If I knew they weren’t going to spread much, I’d probably have pushed them down in the middle), After 12 mins in the oven, mine were a great colour on top but still uncooked in the middle, but they cooked the rest of the way as they sat on the sheet so it worked out. :)

COOKIES OM NOM NOM

These were really tasty. They were really sweet, but I think that was the point (and they are almost identical in taste to that fast food place’s cookies, except tastier). I would make these again but would cut down on the white chocolate, possibly sub it out for bittersweet or dark chips to give a little bit more balance to the sweetness of the cookie. Though I think the next time I make them I wouldn’t bother separating all the ingredients out first and would just use my normal routine of creaming sugar + butter, dumping in the rest of the ingredients at once, and then folding in the “extras” (nuts/chocolate), as it would be a lot less to clean.

Before I start, I want you to know something funny happened. I was very sure to follow glitch’s instructions and get the rice cooking before doing the rest, but there was no pot in the rice cooker!! This is because I had forgotten that I had co-opted the rice pot for another purpose… xD

SO, the newborn transplanted to a different pot to keep growing, I wshed the pot and set my rice on.

Since this picture comes before the others that is proof I turned it on first also I’m really just using this as an excuse to show off my rice cooker

I made the following substitutions, which is kind of a lot I’m sorry:
- I dislike onions, so I used an onion on the smaller side, soaked it in cold water for a few minutes and then blanched 5 seconds to cut down the sulphur and make it a lil more mild.
- To keep the spice up, I added about twice as much garlic (minced), a pinch of chinese five spice (whose primary flavour is aniseed), and some freshly grated ginger.
- I haven’t been able to find cayenne here, so I subbed it with a spice blend (that contains cayenne as well as some other stuff) from the import section.
- Finally, I cut the salt to 1tsp because the dr said so, but I’m pretty used to that and didn’t notice a change in flavour at all.

Ingredients, plus Andrew STILL playing Fallout 4

At the risk of annoying the almighty admin, I have to admit I struggled with a few things for this recipe. The first was that there’s no indication what temperature the stove burner is supposed to be for the first stage. I started with 4/medium, but turned it up to 6/medium-high after the tomatoes didn’t seem to be reducing (then back down to medium for the simmering stage). The second is that I wasn’t sure about how long to cook things in each stage. I thought the simmering would take about 10 minutes (based on other stuff I’ve cooked), but with the bean juice and wine it was probably closer to 30 minutes simmering.

Also omg do NOT look in the bean can after pouring out the bean juice. It’s like some slimy eldritch portal to the Great Ones. ew.

ALL THAT SAID… This was pretty good. The onions were mild enough that I could eat it and my partner (an onion-loving heathen) absolutely adored it!

OM NOM NOM also random tomato scrap i didn’t clean up oops <.<

I love the versatility of this recipe and will definitely be experimenting with it again. I think next time I’ll add some big fat mushroom slices and maybe sub out some/all of the beans for fried tofu or mince for a little change. I might scrap the cayenne/tex-mex spice and go a little heavier on the five spice, and maybe replace the salt with soy sauce or Bragg’s (ooohhhh and maybe add some MSG). I think this would also be really tasty paired with french fries instead of rice, like some bastard poutine <.<

I tried! They looked super delish in the photos and I wanted some nice wraps for the buffalo chicken strips I’m making this evening. But, I couldn’t figure out how to translate the ratios into Freedom units. After a few failed batches using gimpy conversions from different sites, I eyeballed it the best I could and this is what I went with. I think it was still a bit too thick but they do taste quite well! (I mean, who doesn’t like some fried dough??) These were also very easy to flip and I love how versatile the dough is. I can make a plain batch and use it for many dishes throughout the week. I’d love to be able to figure out how to make it for real one day.

Photos of my best attempt:

Bonus:

First of all, thank you so much for the beginner’s notes! We ended up making two batches because I only had enough of the proper ingredients for one batch. The second batch came out just as good! For the first batch the only substitution was chestnuts instead of the brazil nuts as we didn’t have any and regular chocolate chips for the white (after reading up on Jacq’s review). The second batch we added in some oatmeal and spiced it up with nutmeg!

Show spoiler

Gathering the ingredients together. We didn’t have self-raising flour so we used regular flour with a little bit of baking soda instead.

Chopped up the chestnuts and snapped a picture while Naz chopped up the chocolate.

The brown sugar, butter, egg, and flour mixture waiting for the fillings.

Second batch fresh out of the oven!

Proof of yummyness!

All in all they were both delicious. I have a weakness for nutmeg so I have to admit the second batch was my favorite. They reminded me a little of my friend’s everything cookies so I may attempt to make these a second time but with the ‘everything’ part included. (Everything cookies have a little but of peanut butter, which I usually forgo not liking peanuts, have walnuts, almond slices, white, caramel, and regular chocolate chips, and are usually made with an oatmeal base to stick everything together.) It was well written and we had no issues with the prep and baking so, for my first foray into baking things all by myself I consider it a roaring success!