Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 11: District 4 Bread
"One day, Peeta empties our bread basket and points out how they have ben careful to include types from the districts along with the refined bread of the Capitol. The fish-shaped loaf tinted green with seaweed from District 4... Somehow, although it's made of the same stuff, it looks a lot more appetising than the ugly drop biscuits that are the standard fare at home."
I've been looking forward to this one!
I really enjoyed coming up with the base recipe for Tessera Bread (see Meal 2!) and I was really excited to add some variations - this was both incredibly low-effort (I already had the recipe) and creative (interpreting the seaweed aspect, shaping the loaves into fishes). After all the palaver with the beef stew, it was nice to have something I knew I'd just have in the bag.
First things first: the seaweed! There are a lot of things that could make up the seaweed component here - there's the thick kelp stuff that flavours Japanese soup, there's bright green seaweed salad, there's nori for sushi wrapping, and then there's this - laver, thin sheets of seaweed cooked with a little oil and salt, crispy and savoury and delicious. It's a common Korean snack and often served as a side dish, eaten with hot fresh white rice.
I live in Asia and am privileged to have easy access to any and all of the seaweed things I mentioned, but we keep packs of laver at home because it's so tasty and useful (and shelf-stable!), so that's what I decided to use. In hindsight, this was maybe not the best choice - more on that later - but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had fun snacking on it too; a little chef's treat.
After that, it was simply a matter of making the tessera bread recipe I'd already researched and typed up, and shredding the laver into the dough. I halved the recipe as written in my earlier post, because I remember that it had made way more bread than I'd been willing to eat. It was at this point that I realised that I had maybe made a typo with my earlier recipe - I said "1/2 cup oil", but putting 1/4 oil into my dry ingredients left me with a batter that was really, really wet. And also quite oily.
I also began to see the flaw in my seaweed plan - while the laver does taste like seaweed, and has the sort of salty brightness that Katniss talks about when she talks about District 4 bread (including in Catching Fire, where it features more prominently), it didn't exactly spread its seaweed-ness throughout the dough. It certainly didn't tint it green. I don't know why I thought it would! Presumably some of the wetter types of seaweed might have had more of an effect. Oh well.
I was able to make the loaves fish-shaped, however. You can see, once again, how excessively oily the dough turned out to be - it made the whole thing very loose, and somewhat difficult to shape, but I think I did a decent job.
I left the loaves in the oven a tad too long, partly to try and cook off the excess moisture. This worked a treat, and most of the oil just ran out of the dough and onto the baking sheet anyway (good news for my loaves, bad news for washing up), though it did mean the bread was pretty overbaked. Shape held up great, though.
So how did it taste?
Well - almost identical to the tessera bread I'd made last year. Bit disappointing, and a bit of a fail - the bread is meant to be rather distinct from district to district, and I doubt that Katniss would have been overly impressed by the fact that this thing is shaped like a fish. Also, due to the overbaking, it came out a lot more like a cracker than a loaf. I would be hard-pressed to call this bread.
All the same, I actually really enjoyed it! The toasty, nutty flavour was back, and the pleasing crispy crunch as well. Would go great, as I'd said before, with a soft cheese; I had some with a bit of salmon tartare that I made for dinner for myself that night, and they paired very well. Perfectly on-theme. Perhaps not book accurate, but I can imagine some intrepid fisherman finding these in his lunchbox and going "well, okay!".
"As I gorge myself, I watch the sun rise over the Capitol. I have a second plate of hot grain smothered in beef stew."
And here it is: the dish that nearly ended this blog.
It sounds ridiculous when I put it like that. It's just beef stew, for goodness' sake - I am actively cooking up plans to buy rabbit meat for a later post, how hard could this be? Unfortunately I have the kind of ADHD where if you hit even one snag in a long project, you can't help but put it off for a bit, and then for a longer bit, and then it's been nearly six months and you're like Oh Shit. And the snag I hit here was: I didn't want to make beef stew.
Listen, I like a beef stew well enough. I like beef. I like stew. But the sorts of beef stews I'd made at home or had made for me in a home kitchen had always been sort of sad, heavy, claggy affairs, and for months I just didn't want to eat one. Adding on to that the fact that my parents have suddenly become quite budget-conscious and flinch whenever I buy beef (we can afford it, my God), and that means I'd have to just make the stew when they weren't around but a big pot of beef stew for one feels so intimidating, I just could never find the right time.
Also, I have beef stew related trauma. I made some as a teen in university, put it in leaky tupperware containers, and then stowed the whole thing in a friend's fridge, where it proceeded to coat the entire inside of the refrigerator, a thing my poor friend (and the rest of my friend group) didn't let me live down for three entire years. So guys, if you're reading this: this is on you.
I finally got over my Stew Fear by deciding that, if the stew was good enough for Katniss Everdeen, I'd probably find one that was good enough for me. This logic sucks - the girl eats pine bark - but nevertheless, deciding I was going to find the best tasting beef stew recipe on the internet was way more motivating than deciding I was just going to stew some beef and like it, goddamn it. And at that I did the thing I should've just done in the first place: I consulted my goddess, Nigella Lawson.
Hell yeah, Beef Stew With Anchovies and Thyme. I fucking love anchovies, and I like thyme. This proved an auspicious start.
The stew starts with the prepped vegetables: onions, garlic, and carrots. I had all of these at home already, though I vastly overestimated the quantity of carrots I had left, so it was a little light on those. Oh well.
Next, beef. I bought the frozen stuff; I'm not made of money. It came pre-chunked for stew but these chunks were sort of... weird cube shapes, and not quite the right size for biting, plus they had a bunch of uncut tendons and untrimmed fat. I've dealt with this before, usually with lamb when making my lamb stew recipe (see Meal 0!) so I hacked away at it with confidence, and rather enjoyed it - but oh, the mess. I hate it when blood gets on my counter.
After that it was almost laughably simple. Fry off the veg, brown the meat, add various fluids and the anchovies (the secret, it turns out, was red wine - no idea why I never thought of this, it's obvious!), and put the lid on and cook in the oven for three hours. This was just great for me, a person with no time sense who habitually starts making dinner at 7:30pm, but I managed.
The stew looked amazing after three hours - totally transformed, the meat cooked all the way down yet still recognisably Meat, the sauce rich and dark with a layer of tasty-looking fat. I was a little stressed by how wet it looked, but that was all - maybe it could've been improved texturally by adding some potatoes, but honestly, the stuff was good enough to drink as soup, so maybe it doesn't need to be gravy. The whole thing smelled incredible; when I took the lid off the pot, I almost passed out.
I served it with bread because at this point I could not be fucked to cook "hot grain" - which would probably have been barley again - and I figured that if I put one more obstacle in my way, I'd just die. But I can see this going great over barley, too.
So how was it?
Oh my God, I'm an idiot. I can't believe I waited months to make this because I thought it would be bad. I want to be making this constantly. It tastes amazing. More specifically: the beef was rich and meaty, tender without losing its bite; honestly, I could do with a little less bite. The carrots were deliciously sweet. The broth, which is the main thing, was fatty and rich, with a deep, layered saltiness that must've been from the anchovies, and a light dark acidity that I assume came from the wine. It did taste of wine, a little, but not so much that I think Katniss would object. I'm glad I had it with a baguette; it soaked up the broth so well, and the crunch of the crust was an excellent counterpoint.
10/10 breakfast. Unlike the meal in the last post, I think this actually wouldn't be insulting to feed to kids who were about to die. I mean, the death games are still unconscionable, but the stew? The stew is good.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 9: Training Day Breakfast (Part 1)
"I load my plate with eggs, sausages, batter cakes smothered in thick orange preserves, slices of pale purple melon."
This one's going to be a short one, I'm afraid, as I cooked this meal back in late August and then somehow didn't type anything up till December, so my memory of this dish is a little hazy.
I do remember really enjoying it - my sleep schedule is Totally Fucked Or Possibly Normal (Nocturnal) so I very seldom eat breakfast foods, seeing as how my first meal of the day is typically lunch. I also had this meal for lunch, but never mind about that. It's the most Breakfasty Breakfast yet, and I can only imagine eating it at the crack of dawn would make it all the more satisfying.
Katniss doesn't describe her eggs in any detail, so I picked whatever I thought I might like to eat - in this case a nice soft scramble, done at the absolute lowest heat over a fairly extended period of time. I learned how to scramble eggs from Jamie Oliver, of all people, and while I would usually take cooking advice from nearly any other celebrity chef, his scrambled egg method has never failed me yet: crack the eggs directly into a cold pan, lob in a shit ton of butter, add some herbs and pepper (and salt, if the butter isn't salty enough), and stir as little as possible while the eggs slowly set. This leaves you with a really rich, buttery, and loose scramble - not to everyone's taste, but to mine.
I used Martha Stewart's pancake batter recipe, though scaled way down - I never really know how to scale pancake recipes, since it's never clear to me what "serves four" means in a pancake context. As an aside, it's really interesting to me that Katniss describes what are clearly pancakes as "batter cakes" - is that what they call them in District 12, or has she never actually seen a pancake before, and is describing from first principles?
I did, I'll admit, cheat with the "thick orange preserves". I thought about making my own marmalade (fun! but a faff, and I hadn't planned for it), or about buying marmalade (expensive where I live, and I won't eat more than a few spoonfuls of it) before giving up and having some lemon curd instead. This was graciously brought to me by my parents, who had just returned from a trip to the UK with Some Jars, and it's great stuff that I'm always looking for a reason to put on things.
As for the sausage - I had a lovely fresh sausage in the freezer reserved for this occasion - nothing too fancy, but delicious and somewhat a pain to get. I'd wanted to squeeze the meat out and make little sausage patties, which would go along well, shape-wise, with the pancakes. I also figured a fresh sausage would be most on-theme for The Hunger Games, since you get the sense that ultra-processed food isn't really a thing in District 12, and as a hunter, Katniss might be more familiar than most with fresh ground sausage straight from the butcher (or her mother).
Unfortunately, my mother had already eaten this sausage without telling me, so I was stuck pulling a Johnsonville Hot & Spicy out of the freezer. Not an awful thing to eat under most circumstances, but I was pretty upset about it, which is why I'm still pettily recounting this slight four months later. In fairness to me, this sausage is not very inspiring. I mean, look at it.
Imagine eating that thing in the last week of your life.
Sorry to say that I did not manage to get my hands on any pale purple melon either. I couldn't figure out what this was meant to be - watermelon? Some kind of strange honeydew situation? - likely a new thing, like nightlock and groosling. I probably could have tried to swing for any sort of melon approximation, but I have ADHD, and I did not. I'm a fraud. I should probably rename this series "sort of cooking The Hunger Games."
Anyway, how did it taste?
Well, not bad! For all my moaning, the sausage was alright - salty, meaty, spicy. The eggs were really lovely and runny, which made them great to scoop onto the pancakes. The pancakes had the appropriate texture and a pleasing mild sweetness, though I wouldn't say they were terribly inspiring. The lemon curd was great.
Not a ton to complain about, as breakfasts go, but if I were in the Hunger Games, I'd probably hope for something just a little nicer than this. Sorry, kids.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 8: Post-Parade Dinner Part 2
"While they make small talk, I concentrate on the meal. Mushroom soup, bitter greens with tomatoes the size of peas, rare roast beef sliced as thin as paper, noodles in a green sauce, cheese that melts on your tongue served with sweet blue grapes... a girl sets a gorgeous-looking cake on the table and deftly lights it. It blazes up and then the flames flicker around the edges a while until it finally goes out."
Whew.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I did the mushroom soup separately, and a big part of the reason was that I worried that this meal would kill me. SIX courses! One of them a roast! And a fucking flambe dessert??
I know I've talked a big game about how Capitol food is really not so different from the stuff I make myself at home, but this was on, like, another level. Oh, the nights I spent, obsessively googling things like "desserts to flambe" and "desserts to flambe NOT christmas pudding" and "how to flambe without burning your kitchen down". Oh, the stress and worry. Oh how I suffered for this totally optional hobby.
So did I do it?? Did I succeed? You'll just have to stick around for the end of the post, because right now, I want to talk about beef.
Roast beef! How I love it. Back when I was regularly cooking dinner with the parents, we used to do roast dinners every couple of weeks on my insistence. Then the prices of everything rose and my mother started balking, and then last year I lived in a house with no working oven, and then I realised that cooking a whole joint of beef for one person was a little insane, so I haven't had a proper roast in a While.
One of the best things about this project is the impetus - or maybe the excuse! - to try new food things that I always wanted to but felt were too impractical or expensive or whatever. I purchased this hunk of meat with great joy.
The joy faded a little when I saw the price tag (sixty bucks!!!!! for the smallest beef they had!!!!!) and then turned to trepidation when I realised I'd have to cook this thing myself and, hopefully, not totally ruin it. The stakes felt high and honestly quite terrifying. Luckily, I had Ella Risbridger's fabulous book Midnight Chicken on hand - and, side note, this book fucking slaps and you should all go read it - and she had a pretty simple recipe for roast beef. I dressed it in mustard and salt and peppercorns - crushed fresh in a mortar and pestle! - and then set my oven to 200c, stuck the beef in a pan, and went forth.
Since the beef took a while to cook, I had the bright idea of doing the noodles and the salad while waiting and chilling them in the fridge. This wasn't just for expediency's sake - I'd had a fantastic pasta appetiser a few years back in a casual French restaurant that has since sadly closed, and they did it by dressing angel hair in all variety of ingredients (kombu, truffle oil, tiny shrimp, it was weird) and then serving it very cold. The coldness dampened the flavours but really made the texture pop, and I was excited to try this myself at home - I figured it'd be nice to have something refreshing to go along with all that meat.
"Noodles in green sauce" has always read as "pesto pasta" to me, and I stand by this. The pesto in question this time was homemade, and I'd actually made it way back in the days of Meal 2, Reaping Day Breakfast - I bought the basil in a massive punnet and then turned the leftovers into pesto when it started to turn.
In terms of the pasta, I figured it could be anything long and stringy - angel hair probably would have been best for this, and I'd always imagined the pasta as a sort of spaghetti thing, but I like linguine best in my daily life and that's what I had in the house, so I used that.
I usually overcook my pasta but al dente seemed to be the way to go here, and to keep the texture and speed the chilling process, I put the pasta in an ice bath for the first time in my life.
Look at this! Isn't it funny?
As for the salad, I read "bitter greens with tomatoes the size of peas" as "rocket with cherry tomatoes". Rocket's pretty bitter, and as a bonus, I also like it! Thank you, Ms Collins, for being so kind to little me.
I also kind of love how rocket looks a bit like dandelion greens, and dandelions represent hope in dire times to Katniss, and Katniss is eating this salad while preparing for the Hunger Games but also specifically right after the parade, in which she looked amazing and has started to feel like a real contender, and I think that's really subtle and cool and probably too much analysis for a pile of leaves I bought in a plastic bag.
I did look for the smallest cherry tomatoes I could find, but none of them were pea-small. I decided to write this off as Capitol science trickery and just bought the regular ones and cut them up small.
The book doesn't specify a dressing, so I went with the classic olive oil and balsamic vinegar. This exact salad was the salad I used to make all the time a few years back when I was just learning how to make a salad I didn't hate, and that was pleasingly nostalgic.
The beef came out of the oven shortly after I'd finished making all this and cleaning up, which is the kind of perfect timing I'm not often blessed with in the kitchen. It came out very slightly too rare, but otherwise beautiful - and better undercooked than overcooked! - though as you can see, I did have some trouble slicing it at all, let alone "as thin as paper".
Hecking alas.
So, how was it?
Yeah, pretty amazing tbh. The beef was very meaty and rich, if a little tough; the mustard and pepper rub I put on it permeated the whole joint, and all of it felt delightfully well seasoned. Often when I do a big cut of meat or a steak I feel like I have to add salt after cooking to get it to taste like anything, but that wasn't the case here.
The pasta was great cold, though the flavours were a little dampened by the temperature. It had a great bite and the pesto was really fragrant. I was right about it being really refreshing - after all that hot salty beef, it went down like a cold drink of water.
The salad was a little disappointing. Rocket is bitter, with a nice papery non-crunchy texture, and the cherry tomatoes always go well with it, and the dressing was Fine. Sadly I learned the hard way here that this is the sort of salad you want to eat at room temperature. Straight out of the fridge the whole thing felt weirdly hard and offputtingly cold and the flavours didn't meld like they normally do. So now I know: no fridge for the rocket salad. Hot tip for you! You're welcome.
I'm sorry to say that I forwent the cheese and grapes. I was so caught up in the other massive piles of food I was going to be making that I plum forgot and then I was exhausted and stuffed and not really interested in going back to the store. I did eat some straight parmesan the last time I did a big Capitol feast, so go back and read about that again if you like.
And then... the cake.
So I do think the cake Katniss was talking about here was in fact Christmas pudding. It is gorgeous looking and rich and solid enough to stand up to burning alcohol, and it's just like the Capitol to whip out a Christmas pudding in the middle of July, for fun. But all the Christmas pudding recipes I could find online involved insane quantities of expensive dried fruits and also boiling and/or steaming for eight hours, and like, nope.
Instead I went with Nigella Lawson's vegan gingerbread recipe, which I'd already made twice before and loved both times. I am not vegan, obviously, so I used cow milk because I didn't want to go buy non-dairy milk just for this recipe, and scaled the batter back to 3/4 based on the size of my tin. This turned out to be a minor mistake since I didn't adjust the cooking time accordingly, and mildly overbaked it, but that was no big calamity.
Like a Christmas pudding, this gingerbread turned out thick, moist, and heavily spiced. It had a rich density to it that I love, and was not too sweet despite being primarily composed of assorted sugars. I'd highly recommend this recipe to anyone, though not necessarily as a base for flambe.
Because - man.
I set up a little camera rig (my phone on an appropriate stand) to capture the moment I set a piece of this gingerbread on fire, and then I went and heated a small quantity of good whiskey in the microwave, poured it on, lit a match, and -
Lmao.
Okay, I said to myself. This needs more whiskey, and I should probably set it on fire first. So I got a nice metal ladle, poured some whiskey in, heated it, and - yeah, no.
Okay, not hot enough! I put some more whiskey in a little saucepan on the stove and tried lighting that - no. Tried pouring it over the cake and lighting it again - no. Tried two different lighters and then the match again - no. Tried with bitters instead of whiskey because it had a higher proof - also, no!
At this point the poor gingerbread was sodden and smelled of smoke, but it was very much not on fire.
Depressing.
I'm not going to give my review of what the little cake tasted like after all that, because it would be unfair. It was still edible, which I think is a credit to Nigella. I will admit that I was very disappointed, because I thought this would be a cool as fuck way to end a big, difficult meal, but I was also sort of relieved, because as least I didn't burn anything that didn't want to be burned, like my kitchen, or my hand.
So as not to end on such a downer note, I will add that I made this meal a few weeks ago (but hadn't, to this point, gotten around to typing it up) and therefore can show you something of the afterlife of that beef.
Here it is with some fresh bread I made.
Here it is with some roasted potatoes.
All in all I got like five meals out of this thing, and if that isn't a happy ending, I don't know what is.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 7: Post-Parade Dinner Part 1
"You need only whisper a type of food from a gigantic menu into a mouthpiece and it appears, hot and steamy, before you in less than a minute. I walk around the room eating goose liver and puffy bread until there's a knock on the door."
So, confession: I already had a bag of foie gras in the freezer.
Look, we keep it for Christmases, which is when we do a big blowout of rich food, and it's cheaper to buy in bulk and freeze it, and this bag has been in my family's freezer since Christmas of 2023, so everybody just put the guillotine down and let's talk about this -
But also, like, yeah. I can't deny it. I love the stuff. It's one of the bougier things about me: all the weird expensive food I think is totally actually worth the hype, I'm sorry. So it was actually pretty gratifying to note that Katniss Everdeen, given the opportunity to eat seemingly any delicacy in the world about two weeks before she expects to be dead, does exactly what I would do - she orders the fucking foie gras.
Okay, technically goose liver, which is actually kind of interesting once you think about it - Katniss is a hunter, and we know she's shot geese, and obviously she's not going to be throwing out the offal, so goose liver is going to be not-uncommon meal for her in her regular life. Does she order it expecting it to taste the same way it did in District Twelve? Is she looking for a taste of home? All really fascinating questions that are moot in my case because somehow getting ahold of an actual goose's actual normal liver is basically impossible to me, and miles harder than digging through the depths of my freezer.
I seasoned the foie gras with some salt and slapped it in a screaming hot pan for a minute a side, which - if you didn't know - is the way to do it! Yes, while it was still frozen; if you let it get too warm, or cook too slowly, the whole thing melts into massively expensive grease. That's what the hot pan is for; you want it to develop a crust on the outside to hold the rest of it in, before said rest of it can turn into liquid.
As for the puffy white bread - why, it's our old friend the failed flower-shaped rolls!
Here they are again. See how puffy? I could hardly get a more perfect bread for this. Sometimes, guys, your Ls.... they can also be Ws.
I cut the bread up and toasted it - the book doesn't say to do this, but I like my foie gras on toast, and I'm the one who's going to be eating it!
I also decided to make the first course of the dinner proper - mushroom soup - partly because I wanted to eat something slightly more substantial than a single slice of foie gras and a couple bits of toast for dinner, and partly because the entire dinner is six courses long, and I wanted to give future me a little bit of help.
I went with this recipe from Serious Eats. My soup didn't blend as well as I'd have liked - it ended up kind of chunky and almost like a thin mushroom pate? But that was easily solved with a little extra water, and otherwise the recipe went easily enough.
I would like to note, for my own gratification, that I made the stock for the soup myself - I keep a bag full of vegetable scraps and the occasional meat bone in the freezer and make stock from it whenever it gets a little full. It's a fun thing to do and everyone should try it.
So how was it all?
The foie gras was amazing. I am getting hungry again just looking at that photo. When I ate it I made a noise that bordered on obscene. The bread went well with it, and I made a little apple thing by cooking diced apples in the grease - that's the little bowl at the end in the third picture, past the soup. It shouldn't count because it's not actually in The Hunger Games, but I thought I should note it - it was lovely as well.
I honestly don't know how Katniss even managed to get to dinner. If I had an unlimited supply of this stuff available to me, I'm not sure how much other stuff I'd be eating ever again in my life.
Anyway, the mushroom soup was also good. :)
No, okay, more seriously: it was nice, thick, creamy, rich. A little undersalted, which was my own fault. This recipe uses milk instead of cream and not very much of it, so the primary flavour very much is mushroom, and since I like mushrooms, I liked this. I would've liked it blended more finely, but that's between me and my blender.
All in all a good start to a big daunting meal. Tune in next time to see me tackle - scream - the rest of it.
"He presses a button on the side of the table. The top splits and from below rises a second tabletop that holds our lunch. Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for dessert, a pudding the colour of honey."
Yet another one of those Hunger Games meals that seared itself into my brain when I first read about it - not so much this time because of the food itself, though the description is striking, but because of the paragraph that comes after, where Katniss talks about the "days of hunting and gathering" it would take her to assemble a "poor substitute" for it.
I've always loved this bit of the book. It provides such simple but potent sensory pleasures - a two-for-one description of lots and lots of food - while also packing in absolute piles of worldbuilding in just two paragraphs. You learn something about the Capitol in it, and even more about District Twelve: not just the sheer fact of poverty and inequality, but also the plain logistics of everything - what ingredients grow there, what game Katniss can shoot, where she'd go to buy what she couldn't obtain herself, and what might not even be obtainable at all.
It also, secondarily, helps to break down what exactly the meal is made out of (twice!), which was very helpful to me specifically.
First things first: the chicken in cream sauce. There are lots of recipes online for chicken in cream sauce, and a fair few for chicken a l'orange or similar, but weirdly none (??) that I could find for chicken in an orange cream sauce. And yes, the sauce is not described as being orange-flavoured exactly, but I figured it must be, since a plain cream sauce with orange chunks just floating in it for no reason would be really weird.
I finally went with this recipe for chicken in a creamy lemon sauce from RecipeTin Eats, but swapped the lemon juice for orange juice. Plus chunks of orange, of course.
I also used a chicken thigh instead of a chicken breast, because that's what I had.
In terms of the grain: it was tempting to just go with rice again, but I didn't think it would taste that good. I do have short-grain rice in the house, but that cooks down quite soft, and after the situation with the lamb stew and rice, I wanted something with more bite. Besides, Katniss clearly does know what rice is, since she can identify wild rice, so it wouldn't make sense for her not to just say "rice" if that was what this was.
I decided to go with barley - it's white, it's pearly, it has separation between the grains even after cooking, and unlike couscous (which was my other choice), they actually had it in stock at the store.
I'd never cooked barley before, so I had to look up the method. Turns out it cooks very similarly to lentils: shitload of water, pinch of salt, cook till soft. Strain and rinse to get rid of any extra starch, which was pretty important because the barley turned out fairly slimy to start.
Rinsing fixed that, though - as you can see, it's looking pretty good!
When reading about the peas and onions, I initially assumed the peas and onions were both "tiny". To be honest, I still think that's what was meant, but I had no earthly idea of where I could find "tiny onions" small enough to serve alongside peas, so I gave up - it's just the peas that are tiny! I went to the store for sugar snap peas, which really are that small, but I couldn't find any; frozen peas it was.
It turns out that peas-and-onions are actually, like, a Thing. The combination of the two always sounded a little arbitrary to me, but no: it's an actual side dish, with recipes! I used this one, but roughly quartered.
For the rolls: I tried to make the RecipeTin Eats dinner rolls recipe again, with the idea being that I'd score the tops of the buns prior to baking so they'd puff up into a flower shape. It turns out though that I lose all competence in the kitchen when I attempt that recipe, because after doing everything more or less flawlessly till the second proofing stage, I... just sort of forgot about it for two hours. Man.
Yeah, overproofed to hell again. It smelled pretty good, though! I tried scoring the tops of the buns anyway - aiming for a sort of star/petal shape with sharp kitchen shears. I made the cuts okay, but they didn't show up that well (as you can see, or maybe not see, above).
The scoring was a little more obvious after baking, though I still wouldn't say these were "rolls shaped like flowers". There is something flower-ish about them, though. I will maintain this.
For the pudding - I really did consider making a flan for this, but the idea of the sheer amount of work kind of flattened me. I'm sorry; I just couldn't do it. So I cheated and just bought something.
Hey, look, Katniss had no idea what was in it either, so it makes sense that it'd have to be store-bought, right? Right?
So how was it?
The chicken and barley was fantastic. The sauce was creamy but light, the oranges added a nice sweet-sour pop, and the chicken itself was tender - a little undercooked, actually, but nothing forty seconds in the microwave couldn't fix. The barley worked brilliantly with it all: it was tender and bouncy, with a light nutty flavour. It absolutely sucked up all the salt that I put in the water, so I'll have to be aware of that going forward, but luckily it wasn't actually too much salt - just enough to make the barley taste rich and savoury in its own right.
The peas were a little tough; I could've taken longer to simmer them, I think. They were nice all the same, though: salty from the broth, sweet from the onions, a little buttery. I like peas, and I liked this.
The bread was, obviously, not what I had expected or hoped for, but taking away the intention - as bread in itself, it was really pretty nice. A great bouncy crumb, a good crust that crisped up in the toaster beautifully. I have no idea what happened the last time I made this recipe, because while this bread was also extremely overproofed, there was no weird alcohol smell - this bread smelled of bread. A little yeasty, but I like that.
It actually turned out perfect for a different Hunger Games recipe, but that's a story for the next post.
The pudding was, well, pudding. I got the cheap stuff because that's what was there that matched the colour and overall vibe, so I kind of expected it to suck, but it didn't. It pleasantly surprised me! It was a milk pudding with caramel, and the milk bit did taste of milk in a light and pleasing way; the caramel was thick and gelatinous, and maybe a bit over-sweet, but not bad. Went well with the milk pudding. As puddings go, pretty decent; for a one-dollar pudding cup, really impressive. Certainly exciting enough to impress Katniss, and I don't blame her for being flummoxed by it; if they hadn't literally written it on the label, I might not know what was in this, either.
Once again, it was the labour that got me this time: it was hot as fuck the entire week before I made this, and I nearly fell over in my kitchen even before I turned the stove on. Again, hard to complain because I'm doing this myself on purpose - I could just go to a cafe and get a meal if I wanted to! - but I do agree: if I never had to cook again, I too would have no idea what to do with all my time.
Probably not spend four hours making a three-and-a-cheat-course meal, tbh. Oh well.
"The moment I slide ino my chair I'm served an enormous platter of food. Eggs, ham, piles of fried potatoes. A tureen of fruit sits in ice to keep it chilled. The basket of rolls they st before me would keep my family going for a week. There's an elegant glass of orange juice... [and] and cup of coffee."
Big breakfast!
I'm really not a morning person so my first meal of the day is often lunch, which is convenient, because this meal always sounded to me like it was way more lunch- or even dinner-sized. No shade on anyone who eats a large breakfast daily, I just usually find it difficult to manage more than a sweet bun and a piece of fruit before 10am. Then again, I find it difficult to manage being awake before 10am, so I guess this doesn't say anything about anything.
Timing aside, this meal is right up my alley - I love white-people breakfast foods, especially fried potatoes, and having this amazing breakfast on a train feels both dreamy and... surprisingly plausible?
I'd just have to find the right train.
Since this meal is comprised entirely of breakfast foods I've been eating for decades now (I'm old enough to use "decades" in the plural, how delightful), I didn't actually use any recipes. I love when I can cook without a recipe!
I used only one potato for the hash and was a bit worried that wouldn't be enough. This was silly, because: this was the potato in question.
Admittedly I have small hands, but come on.
I diced the thing after peeling it and forgot to take a photo, but trust me when I say that the potato bits covered the entire cutting board. In a mound. It was honestly kind of intimidating, but well in keeping with the spirit of Enormous Breakfast.
I put the potato bits to parboil in a little pot on the back burner and set about making my eggs. Katniss doesn't specify what type of eggs, but I like a scramble, so that's what I made. You may notice that my scrambled egg pan contains some not quite beaten eggs and a big plop of butter. Trust me: this is by design.
Of all people, I learned how to scramble an egg from Jamie Oliver - he says (somewhere on television once, I think?) that the trick to a tender egg is to beat it as little as possible and cook it as slow as possible. You break the eggs right into the pan and only beat them with a spatula enough to break the yolks and mix the thing a little; the stirring you do as the eggs cook will mix them the rest of the way. Then you put them on as low a heat as possible - you may see that my electric stove is set to 1 - and add too much butter. However much butter you think is too much, add a tiny bit more.
Eggs done, I went on to fry some ham.
I've never had fried ham! I have bacon, I've had spam, but I have only ever had sandwich ham in, well, sandwiches. I didn't like those sandwiches much as a child and so I've avoided ham ever since - cooked ham, that is, not cured ham, which I eat straight out of the packet with tears in my eyes.
I kind of had to guess how to do the ham, since I had never cooked it before, but like - ham is ham. Damned if I was going to look up a recipe for that.
The finished product. Ta-da!
Before I give my review, a word about the fruit: I'd always imagined it as some sort of cut fruits situation, maybe with some mangoes or something thrown in there for spice (I love a sliced mango), but I was kind of pooped after cooking hash browns AND scrambled eggs AND ham before I'd eaten any lunch, so I went with cherries and berries, since a) I had them in the house and b) I didn't have to cut them and c) I like them. I didn't have a tureen, but I did put them in a dish on ice!
I also didn't have any orange juice in. Whoops! We did have some peach juice in the house (from concentrate, nothing fancy), so I figured that would be an acceptable substitute. I did have coffee in the house, since I always have coffee in the house, so I had that too; and of course the rolls and chocolate had already been taken care of in the previous post, so I left it off. Which is a good thing, because the amount of food I had was already looking sort of terrifying.
Looks amazing, doesn't it?
The eggs were creamy and rich and soft - delicious. They were also cold, because I did them before the ham AND the hash, but I knew they would be going in, and honestly they were great even despite not being fresh-fresh - not claggy at all.
The ham was surprisingly nice, too: salty, obviously, but a little bit sweet. The cooking added a nice crispness and bite, not to mention the fine colour.
The potatoes were lovely: fluffy and crisp. Perhaps a tad over-salted. They were definitely the highlight of the dish, which is good, because they were also the biggest pain in the ass to make.
The fruits were fruits, but keeping them on ice really did make them very cold, and that made them a lot more delicious to a degree that I was genuinely not expecting.
The peach juice was a bit mid, though I expected that. The coffee was, as Katniss put it, "thin and bitter", but I expected that too - since I drink it like that constantly, tasteless adult that I am.
Overall a great meal, but it was a Lot and also a Lot of Effort. This is the thing that pinged to me hardest while I was cooking this: the ingredients were no problem to me (imperial centre, etc etc, we're not getting into that again) and were perhaps even a little cheap compared to other stuff I've done for this project (or on a daily basis!), but the labour was intense. There's a bit just a little later in this book where Katniss talks about all the work that she'd have to personally put in to procure inferior ingredients for a fancy meal, and I obviously didn't have to do any of that, but I was thinking about that passage a lot while I was peeling and chopping and boiling and frying. Food, like everything worth having in the world, is somebody's labour.
In this case, it was mine, and I can't really complain about that - I like cooking, I did it on purpose, and I got to eat the thing, which was nice. But it's another vector of privilege that allows people to have big and fancy meals like this - the ability to expend the time and energy yourself, or to outsource it - that's maybe less obvious than the cost of lamb or caviar.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 4: Hot Chocolate and Rolls
"I take a sip of the hot, sweet, creamy liquid and a shudder runs through me. Even though the rest of the meal beckons, I ignore it until I've drained my cup."
Hot chocolate! While a magical substance to Katniss, hot chocolate has never really represented luxury in my life - which, given any knowledge of food history, is patently insane, but nevertheless - and not just because I am basically a Capitolite, &c &c, but because most of the hot chocolate I encounter these days is... bad?
Like, in my experience, the drinking of hot chocolate is deeply situational. It's the thing you have in the wintertime when you come back to a dark cold home and need something comforting immediately; what you buy at the Christmas market when you're In The Mood to splash out; what your friends make you in their dorm rooms at three in the morning so they have something to put the Bailey's in. It's what you get at the coffee shop when you've given up coffee for lent, and the barista gives you a look like really? and pulls out a tin from under the counter that has actual dust on it. It's the thing you drink when it's what you need right then, which means it's usually made with an air of "will this do?" - because the answer is basically always going to be "yes".
So I figured that the trick here would be not only to make hot chocolate, but to make actually good hot chocolate - a much higher bar!
Also, since this is the scene in which Katniss is first introduced to the concept of dipping bits of bread in hot chocolate (thanks Peeta), I decided to make some rolls. Really they ought to call this Baking the Hunger Games.
I used this hot chocolate recipe from Allrecipes. I was hunting for hot chocolate recipes that used cocoa powder instead of, yknow, actual chocolate, because I (gasp) didn't have any in the house, and this recipe was recommended on Reddit. Score!
The process was so simple I didn't take any pictures. I did make the drink in a pot on the stove - you'll just have to take my word on that! - and it was such a delightful, satisfying process. I live in a tropical country now but I still love to make drinks in a pot on the stove - it used to be an autumn/winter tradition for me, because there's just something so warming about simmering [liquid] with [flavourings] until [temperature] and [fragrance wafting through the house]. It's less Chef and more Witch, which is a mode I don't slip into often but always kind of want to slip into more.
It was pretty good! I quartered the original recipe so maybe my calculations were off, but I think the recipe called for too much sugar - it nearly took my teeth off. I added more salt after the fact and that really made it work at last - the drink was indeed hot, sweet, and creamy, and it was also rich, dark, and savoury. Absolutely delightful, though if I made it again I'd dial back on the sugar a little even still - the salt did round it out, but it was still a bit Too Much Flavour overall, and would do well being just... a little Less.
The rolls were... harder.
I used this recipe from RecipeTin Eats - or tried to, at least. After the roaring success of the no-knead artisanal loaf (also a RecipeTin Eats recipe!) I was riding high, and fully expected these rolls to be a walk in the park. Not so!
The one proper baking tin I have in my house is approximately 2/3 the size of the one in the recipe, so I scaled the recipe down to 2/3. This was, to be frank, a fucking nightmare. I don't have a third-cup measure, so I was sort of... guessing? A lot? I think I did some pretty solid guesswork for all that, but when the dough came together, rather than being "the consistency of a thick muffin batter", it was the consistency of unrolled pasta. That was bad.
I should probably have called it right then, but I just dumped a bunch more water onto it till it looked right. Problem solved! Moving on.
I let it rise for the requisite two hours but I was otherwise occupied at that moment so, as the recipe suggested, I covered the dough in clingfilm and chucked it in the fridge. I came back to it later and did all the shaping. So far so good!
I didn't read the part of the recipe that said that if I put the dough in the fridge, I did not need to do the second proof after shaping. This was my second, and probably most catastrophic, mistake.
Oh dear.
As you can see, those buns are overproofed to shit. I kind of got the feeling something was up because they were meant to be, like... smooth? On top? And also they smelled like yeast (a lot of yeast) and... booze?
But there was nothing for it. Into the oven they went.
And out of the oven they came!
They came out flat. Like, flat flat. This, I later learned, is what happens when you overproof bread - it collapses in the oven. It also continues to smell of yeast and booze after it bakes, which is unpleasant.
Decent crumb, though! Not quite a dinner roll crumb, a little coarser and denser - and the smell is offputting - but not, like, totally inedible.
At this point I realised that I had totally fucked this re: book accuracy, because I think if Katniss had been served this she wouldn't have said "the basket of rolls they put before me would've kept my family going for a week", she'd have said "it is really remarkable that, for all their resources, the bakers of the Capitol make worse bread than my twelve-year-old sister". Nevertheless: there was bread. There was hot chocolate. It was two o'clock in the morning, and I wanted my goddamn midnight snack.
So I had it.
How was it? Well - good! My thoughts on the chocolate have already been pretty comprehensively documented, but the bread was texturally actually quite nice, and the hot chocolate totally masked the weird alcohol flavour. It turned the bread from something tolerable to something - well, minimally, pleasant. I never eat bread like this but maybe I should start. With better bread this would be a doozy.
At this stage of the project, I come up against the knowledge of my own mortality limitations as a cook - namely that I'm not that great at cooking literally everything, I do often just fuck shit up, and I also have a kind of bad record of being able to find and/or willing to buy literally every listed ingredient. I cut corners! I have baking fails! I was kind of wrestling with the question of whether I should even post this, or whether I should go back and make the thing again but better, because surely in the book it would've been better, so this is not accurate, and not a valid entry into the project.
... then I thought about it and meh. I'm out here doing my best, and I'm doing it for fun, and for free, and most importantly, this project is supposed to be celebrating an explicitly anti-fascist, anti-exploitation text. So, like, whatever. I'll post my Ls. Fuck the police.
Cooking the Hunger Games Meal 3: Tribute Train Dinner
"The supper comes in courses. A thick carrot soup, green salad, lamb chops and mashed potatoes, cheese and fruit, a chocolate cake."
Is it weird that I found the first Capitol meal the easiest to make so far? It's weird, right. What a weird coincidence. It's totally not a commentary on my current socioeconomic/geopolitical position. Nope.
More seriously: I know it's a cliche to go "we are the Capitol, after all!!". and it's kind of cringe to be clutching my pearls about how I have enough to eat and access to the full range of modern conveniences afforded to me by being middle-class in a first world country - like, I started a "cooking every meal in The Hunger Games" project, self-funded, for fun. I already knew this about me.
But there was still something viscerally strange about going to make the first Capitol meal in the book - a meal so rich and alien to Katniss that it signifies her transition into a whole new world - and find out that it's, like, a slightly above-average-effort Sunday night dinner for me? I do cook more than most people - I have an undemanding job and a lot of leisure time, and I cook as a hobby, so it's not unusual for me to be making weirdly elaborate meals for any given dinner, and doubly so on the weekend. I don't usually make soup and salad and potatoes and lamb in a single meal, but even so - it was about two and a half hours of concerted effort in the kitchen, which is well within the range of work I'm normally willing to put in, like, two or three times a week.
I even had most of the ingredients in the house.
Let's take it course by course. I do make a carrot soup from time to time - it's something I can do without a recipe - but it's fairly basic and I wanted this to be special, so I went and searched for a recipe that might prove an upgrade to my usual.
I had in mind the carrot-cumin soup you can get at Muji - for those unfamiliar, it's a Japanese furniture/lifestyle brand, and their stores often have a cafe which sells fabulous deli-style lunches, including a carrot soup which is still one of the best soups I have ever eaten on a semi-regular basis. I could not find a copycat version - not for lack of trying! - but I did find this carrot and cumin soup recipe from BBC Good Food which looked both fancy and simple enough.
There was a bunch of chopping involved!
The soup turned out beautifully. It was sweet and rich and salty and savoury. The star anise added a gorgeous light almost medicinal sweetness, and the cumin added warmth. It's one of the better soups I've ever made at home. My dad complained because I hadn't made more.
My go-to salad, especially if there's only greens involved, is rocket with salt and oil and lemon, but there's a salad later on (spoilers!) that I'm certain is a rocket salad with cherry tomatoes, so I wanted to do something different. I've been on a Caesar salad kick lately, so I went with that, except with no croutons or other mix-ins - just lettuce and dressing.
This one's a personal by-feel recipe, but if I had to write it down, it'd be something like:
Two garlic cloves, grated/microplaned
One anchovy fillet, plus oil
Olive oil
Salt
Black pepper
Lemon juice - about a quarter of a lemon, to taste
Lettuce ripped into little bits - I used butterhead and romaine, and I think the romaine works better than the butterhead
Parmesan cheese or equivalent - I used grana padano - grated/microplaned
Mix all ingredients up to the lemon juice in a bowl till combined, making sure especially to chop the anchovy into bits as small as you can get it
Put the lettuce in. Toss.
Put a shit ton of cheese on it. Toss again.
Adjust seasoning and serve
It was good! I knew it would be. My taste in salads skews sort of sour, which I think cuts through the salt really nicely. I didn't do a great job of cutting the anchovy up, so I kept getting these little funky chunks - great for me, who eats anchovies out of the jar in the middle of the night, but perhaps not to everyone's taste.
I had an assist from my dad on the lamb chops. I used this tutorial from The Kitchn when figuring out cooking method and time, and seasoned the chops myself, but as I was running around the kitchen doing three other dishes, I got my father to actually do the cooking. I know! I'm a cheat.
He got a great crust on the chops - probably better than I could get! - but they were a little overdone. Possibly we let them rest too long. Oh well.
The lamb was really tender despite being medium-well, and had a lovely rich, gently gamey flavour. Honestly, I could do with more gaminess! The thyme worked really well on it.
I also made a pan sauce, as mentioned in the tutorial. It had wine and lemon in it and was lovely - it was a little weird putting something very obviously acidic on my lamb, but it really enhanced the flavour.
The mashed potato is another household staple - I didn't need a recipe for this one either. But you can have mine!
Some potatoes
Garlic - a couple cloves (optional)
Salt
Butter, lots
Black pepper
Water
Peel and chop the potatoes - big chunks will do
Peel the garlic if you're using it
Fill a pot with water, throw a bunch of salt in it, and set it to boil
Once the water is boiling, chuck in the potatoes and the garlic. Boil till the potatoes are fork-tender and a little crumbly
Drain the potatoes (and the garlic). Put them back in the still-warm pan
Put the pan on the stove on a very low heat
Put a bunch of butter in the potatoes
Mash with a masher. Be aggressive.
Put more butter in the potatoes. Continue mashing. Think of some guy you don't like if you need some motivation.
Taste. Add pepper. Add salt.
If the potatoes are dry/crumbly/claggy, and you're positive you couldn't possibly add more butter, put a little water in to moisten them up. Keep doing this whenever you need to.
Keep working the potatoes until they're silky, or at least as silky as you're going to get them (you'll get a better result with a floury potato instead of a waxy one)
Serve!
Good potatoes imo! I love the taste of a potato in itself, so that was a plus; the mash was nice and buttery and salty, though sadly the garlic didn't come through as much - maybe add more than the two cloves I put in if you like a garlicky mash. I tend to avoid putting milk in my mash because I think it adds too much sweetness - potatoes and butter are sweet enough on their own.
Katniss has her savoury courses one by one, but we ate ours together. Here's my final plate!
At this point I was, as they say, fucking stuffed. I was satisfied; I had had enough. Honestly I probably could've had a little less, but I was really enjoying myself.
I was committed to finishing all the courses, so I took a bit of a break and ploughed on, though I will admit to having half-assed the cheese and fruit.
I love cherries and they were on sale. The cheese is grana padano - yeah, the same stuff I put in the salad. I realised too late we were out of Snacking Cheese, and tbh I'm not too good to just cut a wodge of grana padano off the block. It's really great - crumbly, salty, with a strange but lovely tang.
The chocolate cake was sort of a cheat as well, in that I actually made it a week and a half ago from this recipe, though I did leave off the ganache (because I ran out of time to make it and never got around to it after). It's gorgeously rich and chocolatey without being very sweet, and was beautifully moist for like a week after baking, though it was a little dry today (understandably).
I would say that the original cake is more or less Capitol-worthy, if maybe not quite rich enough, especially without the frosting; they likely wouldn't serve it as it was today, stale as it is, though I doubt that Katniss or even Peeta would have turned their nose up at it. I didn't.
All in all a gorgeous meal, and definitely note-worthy. Guilt and weirdness aside, this has really made me think about how much more attention I could do with paying to the food I make and eat on a daily basis. I mean, I do pay attention to it - a bit hard not to if I spend two hours making it! But this meal was the stuff of legend to little teen me and remained so for years, and I make things like it in my kitchen on the daily. Yeah, that does say uncomfortable things about my position in the (horrifically unequal) world I live in, but it's also - I mean, it's nice, isn't it? It's worth honouring and being grateful for, and savouring. I mean, if I'm going to live in the imperial centre, I should at least 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.
I've been a fan of The Hunger Games since I was thirteen years old, which was fifteen years ago, which is terrifying. I've been a fan of food for even longer. These things are related: one of the things I have always loved most about The Hunger Games is how the book(s) describe food: with such lush, expressive detail, and with such attention to setting and character.
Katniss Everdeen loves food; it is survival and life itself to her, but more than that, it's something she clearly takes pleasure in - a fact that hints at a "weakness for beautiful things" that she vehemently (and falsely) denies having, and projects onto poor Peeta. I have always loved that about her: how open she is to pleasure despite her own intentions. I see that pleasure-loving nature in myself; I am also a girl who loves to eat.
This July (and possibly August, who knows how long it'll take!), I've decided to cook my way through the first Hunger Games book, creating and then eating the dishes described in the book in roughly chronological order. I'll be making some concessions for practical reasons - I fully intend to split the multi-course Capitol dinners into several meals, and I might have to skip the pine bark since I live in Southeast Asia, and where the fuck am I going to find a pine tree - but I do intend to eat as much of what Katniss eats as possible. This blog is where I'll share it with you.
We'll be kicking off properly on July 4th - Reaping Day - but first I wanted to cook what might be the book's most iconic meal: the lamb stew.
"Best of all, a tureen of that incredible lamb stew on wild rice. The very dish I told Caesar Flickerman was the most impressive thing the Capitol had to offer."
This lamb stew needs no introduction; if you're reading a Hunger Games cooking blog post, you already know what I'm talking about. Katniss eats it for breakfast the morning before her interview prep, then again in the Hunger Games proper, and, much later, from a can during the invasion of the Capitol.
I always imagined this stew to be vaguely Middle Eastern for two reasons: firstly, because cooking dried fruit with meat is A Thing in Middle Eastern cuisine, and secondly, because thirteen-year-old me got "tureen" and "tajine" mixed up. Whoops.
My go-to lamb stew recipe is the Slow-Cooked Lamb from the excellent cookbook Souk: Feasting at the Mezze Table, by Merijn Tol and Nadia Zerouali. I used this as the base for my lamb stew, and chopped a bunch of prunes into it.
My bastard recipe goes as follows:
Ingredients:
500g lamb cubes, cut into bite-sized pieces
3 large tomatoes, diced
4 onions, thinly sliced
10 cloves garlic, chopped to shit
About 80g prunes, cut up
Stick of cinnamon
A few drops of vanilla extract
Half-teaspoon rose extract
Method:
Put lamb, tomatoes, onions, and garlic in a pot with some oil.
Fry for ten minutes, stirring constantly.
Add cinnamon, salt, prunes, and enough water to cover the lamb.
Drop the heat to medium-low and simmer for 2-3 hours
Panic because the prunes have completely changed the flavour profile of the stew, and compensate by salting the fuck out of it a second time.
Finish with the vanilla and rose.
Serve over rice.
The stew was delicious. I was running late so I didn't cook it the full two hours, so it was a little tough, but the flavour of the meat was rich, and the gravy was sweet with the onions and tomato. The prunes added a really strong and interesting sweet-sour flavour to the dish, which really did need a lot of salt to counterbalance; it made the whole thing more complex than the base recipe, though I personally prefer the stew without.
I didn't have wild rice and couldn't find any, so I used normal white rice as the base - it was a little soft and added very little to the stew, which I think would be better served with some flatbreads and yoghurt. Wild rice is a lot firmer and distinctly-textured than the white rice I used, though, so I can see it pairing well with this stew - perhaps even "perfectly".
The rose extract was a relic from the original recipe, and it makes the lamb pop while taking the edge off its gaminess. I like that the first Hunger Games dish I made for this project has roses in it.
