**As a disclaimer my brother is a cis straight dude who only dates the most basic white girls you can find. He's very emotionally aware but doesn't linger on his emotions, just processes them and moves on (this is wild to me)**
He calls me on my break just to say hi, that he’s driving back to Denver from visiting his girlfriend, to which I respond “didn’t you break up with your girlfriend (of like a month) last month” and to which he says “yeah I have a new girlfriend, we’ve been together four weeks but I went up to spend the weekend and meet her friends” and I’m like ok great this is already ridiculous
So we’re chatting and I’m teasing him about how he doesn’t sleep with people on first dates and he says that he’s changed his policy, it’s just that he won’t have sex with them if he’d rather be doing something else, so I joke that I’ve had that where I’d rather be watching the show Chernobyl (true) and he says “yeah or watching a movie with my housemate” and I say hey bud that’s kind of gay and he says yeah I actually had a weird gay moment last night
And I go oh???? And he goes yeah, I was at the bar with the girlfriend and some of her friends and one of them was a guy and we were hitting it off, doing a little flirting as you do with your bros at the bar~
And then my cis straight brother goes on to explain that sometimes when you’re out with the homies and you’re having a good time and the vibes are right you just give em a little kiss, like just a kiss on the mouth between bros, “no tongue or anything like that but just to express that you’re close and having a good time”
I’m like “My dude that’s not a thing” and he’s like “between confident straight men it is” and I’m like “NO IT’S NOT"
So there we’ve got my brother having casual queerplatonic relationships with his homies at the bar, and he’s telling me this and I’m obviously speechless, so he goes on and he’s like “so because this guy and I were hitting it off I go in for a little kiss and he fucking swerves me” and I’m like yes my guy but because my brother is actually very good with respecting boundaries he was like “ok man great communication, won’t do it again"
BUT
Apparently my brother and the dude and my brother's GIRLFRIEND who has been there the WHOLE TIME go outside (I assume to have a cigarette but he didn’t tell me that part) and the guy turns to my brother and is like “man I should have kissed you when you offered it” and my brother is like “cool good shit man” like in the most bro way possible and then the guy grabs his face between his hands and just PLANTS a big one on his mouth
And THEN the guy panics and shoves him down on the ground!! And my brother has the normal reaction to being shoved on the ground unexpectedly which is to say “what the FUCK” and the girlfriend says “what the FUCK” and the guy goes “what the FUCK” and leaves
And my brother ended the story there and was musing on it like "this guy obviously has some complexes to work through about his sexuality, no confident straight man kisses another confident straight man and then panics and runs away”
I told my coworker this and they were like I’m actually shipping him and his roommate and I was like HUH because I hadn't considered that and then later my brother sent me a photo of his housemate wearing sexy handcuffs
Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight
I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever
But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”
This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it
And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit
So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too
Coming back to say that while a lot of the responses to this post have been mainly positive, some folks have an attitude that it should be something that my friend— or any cis, straight man —should just be able to get over, because fuck ‘em, that’s why, because they’re in a queer space and they should shut up and accept it, because you suffer as a queer person and they should have to suffer too— regardless of whether or not this specific person has done anything to wrong you
I’m gonna say this point blank— you’re a tar pit if you think this way
Your suffering does not make you special, you are not granted brand new permissions to be belligerent and cruel because you have been treated poorly, straight people aren’t an oppressed class, no, but they’re people who are entitled to the same amount of basic decency that you, yourself, are entitled to
It feels good when you’ve been treated like shit to then go forward and treat other people like shit. That’s what you’re admitting. Does it make you feel good to do harm? Are you proud of that? Are you comfortable with being that kind of person? Because I dunno about the rest of you— but I realized I wasn’t, and it turns out it’s pretty fucking easy to change
Did you know that JRR Tolkien wrote an unpublished epilogue to Lord of the Rings? It's achingly, beautifully wistful in the way that only Lord of the Rings is. I revisited it recently because I'm guesting on my friends' LOTR podcast, and THAT reminded me that I drew a comic of the epilogue back in 2021 (all text is entirely canon). Anyway I thought folks on this website might enjoy it!
"We drink milk from Prim's goat, Lady, and eat the rough bread made from the tessera grain."
Okay, this one was interesting.
I'm going to say straight up that I gave up on the goat's milk. Like the blackberries, this was mostly an ingredient access problem; I could find goat's milk, but it was a) a large quantity, b) quite expensive, and c) in a location that was a pain in the butt to get back to after I initially walked away without the milk because of a) and b). I would've gone through with it if it had been integral to the meal, but I didn't think it was, or at least not to the extent that subbing in cow's milk would ruin the experience. The milk really isn't the point.
No, the point of this meal is the bread - and, specifically, the contrast between this bread, which defines the taste of Katniss's everyday life, and the finer bread (and, later, other finer foods) that she could never afford.
This bread is the taste of life in the Seam, and more than that, it's the taste of working-class life everywhere in the districts - because other district breads, despite their regional variations, are ultimately "made from the same stuff". Symbolically, it's also the taste of the Games, because it's made from the stuff of tessera rations: rough grain and oil.
I knew I had to get this bread right. Unfortunately, this turned out to be pretty difficult, because the bread's defining feature is that it sucks. And nobody is posting recipes for bread that sucks.
And thus began... my Research (TM).
First of all, I knew I couldn't make this bread Bad through ineptitude alone. This is meant to be the bread made and eaten by every home baker in the districts, and it would be ridiculous to assume that none of those guys can bake. Also, the entire point of this bread is that it sucks because of systematic inequality, rather than because of any individual failures. So it was going to have to be an ingredient issue.
I started my research by thinking about scarcity. I looked up some Depression-era recipes, but while those were pretty simple - just flour, water, salt, and yeast - they weren't really different from the recipe for the lovely artisanal bread I made the last time. So that was a bust. I decided to break down the problem:
The flour:
Tessera grain is described as coarse and rough, and based on the fact that Katniss is always saying "grain" instead of "flour", I figured I'd want some kind of wholemeal situation where I could see the individual Bits. This is especially so because at one point she talks about how tessera grain "cooks down into an unattractive mush", which suggests that she's tried making a porridge of it - not something one typically does with flour.
I'll admit that I was starting to worry at this point - I was imagining some sort of stone-ground hand-milled organic wheat situation, and I was not relishing the thought of trekking out to a health foods store to pay a shit ton of money for weird flour so I could make bad bread. I did some googling to see if maybe Katniss was accidentally talking about oats, but - come on. She probably knows what an oat is.
Finally I went to my local supermarket chain's website and they had wholegrain flour in stock, along with superfine wholegrain flour - intriguing. Presumably the not-superfine stuff was... not super fine? That listing also suggested using the regular wholegrain flour as a mix-in to bread made with normal, fine, white flour. Interesting.
So I got off my ass and actually went to the store and felt up the bag and it felt like literal sand. Okay, then. That's our tessera grain! Surprisingly simple once I stopped overcomplicating it.
The leavening:
Yeast or soda?
The type of leavening agent used to make this bread would determine what sort of bread it turned out to be. This was a bit of a puzzle for a while - both yeast and chemical leaveners are very cheap in the present day, and there's no real reason to believe either of them would become terribly expensive in Panem. Honestly, I'd expect people living in deep poverty to use sourdough starters - after all, the leavening is free! - but I was not about to make a wholeass starter just for this project.
While I was justifying this decision to myself, I thought about the fact that a coal miner might not have the time or energy to properly care for a starter, either. This helped me realise the real question here, which was not about ingredient price but rather about ingredient storage. In a world where replacing spoiled food is often a serious difficulty, you'd want your bread leavener to be the easiest thing to store.
This put me down on the side of baking soda/baking powder, because while both things - like yeast - require protection from moisture, they're not actually living organisms, and take a lot more effort to "kill".
Also, this meant that I could use this recipe -
The loaf:
Looking at breads in the Training Centre, Katniss describes the District 12 loaf as "drop biscuits". I always assumed this was referring to the shape: drop biscuits are small, round, and lumpy, like chunks of coal.
But then I thought: what if this bread actually is drop biscuits? Drop biscuits have a long history in the American South, giving them cultural ties to Appalachia, and - perhaps more importantly - they're a chemically leavened, low-effort bread that is quick to cook. Plus, they use fat, specifically butter - providing a way to incorporate the oil component of the tessera ration, and to realistically degrade the quality of the recipe based solely on ingredient availability rather than skill - since butter would be prohibitively expensive, and it would simply make sense to replace it with oil.
I used this drop biscuit recipe from Serious Eats, but swapped in wholegrain flour for regular flour, oil for butter, and water for milk. I also halved the recipe, because I expected to sort of hate the results, and I didn't want to be stuck with ten biscuits to hork down.
The final recipe came out as follows:
3/4 cup wholegrain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup plus 1/2 tablespoon oil
3/4 cup water
mix drys
add oil
add water
shape
put on baking tray at 200 celsius for ~12 minutes
And here are some process pictures:
The biscuits were kind of hard to shape since the flour didn't absorb much moisture - it felt like I was shaping wet sand. Honestly, it was kind of fun! I also had some trouble figuring out when the biscuits were done - they looked basically the same brown then entire time.
So how was it?
I mean... bad!
The texture really was quite challenging - I felt like I was chewing through fine unpopped popcorn. You really do taste every grain, and at some points I got a little worried for my teeth. Also, the heaviness of the flour probably worked against the baking powder - I didn't feel like these were meaningfully leavened at all. And because I used oil instead of butter, there was no flakiness; the bread really was flat and dense.
But it stayed remarkably moist on the inside, and the flavour was actually quite nice - mildly salty, malty, and roasty. It tasted like what it was, which was a pile of roasted grain; but roasted grain has quite a pleasing nutty taste, so it wasn't all bad.
I did try it with some milk and the milk helped me not choke on the bread on the way down, so maybe it was more integral than I thought.
I can see this being kind of enjoyable sliced or pressed flat, with some soft cheese spread on top. As an everyday bread, though - ugh. No.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 1: Reaping Day Breakfast
"Gale spreads the bread slices with the soft goat's cheese, carefully placing a basil leaf on each while I strip the bushes of their berries... the food's wonderful, with the cheese seeping into the warm bead and the berries bursting in our mouths."
So, full disclosure, I've been wanting to eat this meal for the last fifteen years.
I have eaten this meal! I've had bread and goat's cheese a bunch of times, both separately and together. But there's something different about this particular instance of cheese-and-bread. It's described so tenderly, as a meal both loved and loving: the "perfect little goat's cheese" a gift from Prim, the bread cradled in Katniss's hands so she can smell the crust. It's sensuous and precious and special, which is fitting for the first meal in the book and - in a way - the last real meal of Katniss's life.
I knew I had to bake the bread myself. I mean, I didn't have to, but getting really quality bread where I live is neither that easy nor that cheap, and also, I wanted it to be warm, for book accuracy.
I'm a middling baker but have a pretty bad record when it comes to breadmaking, so I went looking for a foolproof recipe. After some googling I went with this no-knead bread recipe from RecipeTin Eats, which was not only very simple but also allowed me to leave the bread in the fridge for up to three days (I left it in for about thirty hours), which guaranteed that I could actually have fresh bread for breakfast - or, since I got up around noon today, Technically Lunch.
I failed to get a photo of the dough after it had risen, but it filled the entire bowl by the end, and was pleasantly squishy. I would like to note here that I divided the recipe in half; I was looking to get a two-person loaf of bread, such as Gale and Katniss might have finished together.
It turned out absolutely gorgeously! I am in awe. 100% would bake again. Look at how round it is! Look at the crust on that thing! Look at the little sail!
I was not planning to make the goat's cheese myself, since I am not insane. I bought it from the store, already shaped into a perfect little round.
I did, however, plan to wrap the thing in basil myself. I actually have my own basil plant, but it's not doing so well, so I also got some store-bought stuff.
I had wondered over the years how it might be possible to wrap a cheese in basil so securely that you could slip it into a pocket without, you know, ending up with a pocket full of cheese. The store-bought basil finally solved that mystery.
Look at that leaf! It's a monster!
It took me about six of those massive leaves to wrap the cheese (with a bunch of overhang). I wrapped that sucker in clingfilm to help the leaves keep their shape and then put it back in the fridge overnight, till the Time of the Bread this morning.
I could not get blackberries for love or money - I tried three different stores! This was quite galling as aside from the book accuracy question, I fucking love blackberries, and seldom shell out for them because they cost a lot here. I was looking for an excuse to finally have one, but Oh Well. Not having access to food you crave is very Katniss Everdeen. I got blueberries instead.
So how was it?
Folks, it was the ambrosia of the gods.
The bread was amazing - crunchy crust, incredibly soft and springy crumb. I was actually kind of worried that I'd underbaked it somehow, so moist and tender was the crumb, but nope - it just is Like That. The book doesn't actually say what the bakery bread was like, other than Delicious, but if it had any sourdough characteristics (as opposed to being, like, a sandwich bread) it might have tasted something like this. And if so, congrats, Katniss and Gale! You have taste! This shit slaps!
The goat's cheese was also delicious - rich, creamy, and noticeably Goat but not aggressively so. I can't take much credit for this myself - they only had the one kind in the store - but I really enjoyed it. It went great with the bread, especially since the bread was - as in the book! - still warm. Also, wrapping it in basil overnight did impart a lovely basil flavour into the cheese, and those flavours do go together really beautifully.
The berries didn't add a lot to the meal, but it was nice to have a sweet/sour/fresh counterpoint to all that rich cheese, which I think was the point. If I'd had blackberries it probably would've been better, but eh!
The first chapter of The Hunger Games does the essential work of sketching out Katniss's life before the Games take her away from it; it shows us what her world looks like, the struggles she faces, all the ways her life is hard. But it also shows what sweetness there is in that life, and how much it hurts to lose it. This meal is a key part of that, and having tasted it myself - man, that is a life you'd want to fight to keep.
Lowkey we should create a giant manmade blood device to attract ticks away from humans and its a giant blood container that pumps like a heart and emits phermones that attract ticks and mosquitos and we should call it Mother
The soft eyes! The forward facing ears! The question mark tail! Not to mention the poise and control! This little dude is having a blast and is SO good at it!!
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