This week has definitely had its ups and downs. Between still trying to figure out lifestyle changes and fitting in walks everywhere with life and work, it has been a lot to deal with. To try to sort all of that out, I’ve been cleaning my place, throwing things away, and trying to get my life in order. If I cannot control the world around me, at the very least I can control the environment that I find myself in.
It’s definitely not been easy. I have friends who love me, and who are there for me when I do struggle with everything. California is still very hard on me to deal with in a lot of ways, and I still am trying to adjust even two years on. This week feels like, in many ways, a real transition week in my life as I try to slow down some and take better care of myself and show myself a little bit of Love, Eorzean Style.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
Recipe of the Week
This week’s recipe is the 34th recipe in the cookbook, and it is for the Thanalan region’s Little Ala Mhigo specialty: Orobon Stew. It has a ‘Medium’ difficulty rating, and it is made inside of a Dutch oven with quite a few simple ingredients in what ultimately amounts to a two-step process.
Here is what Orobon Stew is supposed to look like!
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s featured ingredient of the week is…Chives! They are an herb closely related to spring onions, garlic, leeks, and other such plants. They are fairly small and I found them quite easy to cut and definitely have a milder flavor than spring onions do. I was surprised that there was this much variety in that particular family genus! They were chopped up and used to help flavor the dumplings, and I think it was rather successful in adding a bit of flavor to them.
My Cooking Attempt
This week’s ingredients for Orobon Stew are fairly simple and clean:
First, I sliced the carrots and the celery and set them aside.
I then smashed, shook, and minced the garlic before I also sliced up an onion.
Finally, I sliced up the ingredient of the week, measured out a couple tablespoons of it, and then set it aside in a small bowl.
Last time I melted butter in the microwave, I burned myself pretty badly. Because of that, I took a couple of tablespoons of butter and melted them in the microwave and then left it there to cool for a bit so I could use it for the dumplings.
As the butter melted in the microwave, I placed my Dutch oven on the stove and then melted some additional butter inside of it.
Once the butter melted, I added in the chopped onions, and I let them soften for about five minutes while stirring them occasionally.
After the onions were slightly translucent, I added in the minced garlic, the sliced celery, and the sliced carrots. I then stirred them occasionally for about five more minutes.
While the additional vegetables were softening up, I coated the chicken breasts in salt and pepper.
When the vegetables were ready, I added the sage, thyme, and basil in and then mixed it until the vegetables were well coated.
Once the vegetables were coated, I added in the chicken breasts, the chicken stock, and a single bay leaf.
I then brought the Dutch oven to a boil, lowered the temperature, and let the whole Dutch oven simmer for around 25 minutes.
In my glass bowl, I added the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, sliced chives, salt, pepper, buttermilk, and butter.
I then worked the ingredients together with my hands until it turned into a slightly thicker dough.
I then pulled small portions of the dough off and rolled them into tablespoon-sized dumpling balls before setting them down on parchment paper.
At that point, I removed the Dutch oven lid and removed the cooked chicken so it could cool down.
I added the dumplings in one by one, and covered the Dutch oven back up for 10 minutes to let the dumplings cook through.
While the dumplings cooked, I broke the chicken breasts open to make sure that they were cooked through before I started to shred the chicken. The chicken was really hot, and so I had to stop and let it cool down quite a bit before I could totally break the breasts down.
When the chicken was shredded, I lifted up the Dutch oven lid and saw that the dumplings weren’t fully cooked through. So I rotated them around with the spatula and then covered them for another five minutes.
When I uncovered them again, I saw that they STILL were not done. I rotated them again with a spatula, and covered the Dutch oven up again for another five minutes.
When I moved the lid again, I saw that the dumplings were done! I added in the shredded chicken and then blended it together to let the chicken heat back up.
And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!
…It was after I took this photo that I realized that I had forgotten to pull the bay leaf out of the Orobon Stew. I ended up having to hunt for it before I could eat, and I found it still inside the Dutch oven.
The Orobon Stew. Was. FANTASTIC.
No joke, this is probably my new favorite dish that I’ve made so far for Cooking Eorzea. The chicken and the dumplings and the seasoning and the vegetables worked so well together, and you could taste the different seasonings working in harmony together. I ate the entire dish, and then had to put the rest away in the refrigerator so that I would not also eat all of it too in one sitting. It was also incredibly filling.
Afterword
If I was to make this dish again (WHEN I make this dish again), I would definitely make the dumplings smaller so that way they could just cook through on the first pass instead of having to cook them for an extra 15 minutes. Otherwise, this dish went exactly perfectly and I couldn’t have been happier.
This is where I start with the ‘thank yous’ every week! First: I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. Second: I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Third: I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.
Fourth: I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I keep discovering new things about Eorzea everyday when I log in, and I could not be happier.
Next Week
Unfortunately, there will be no Cooking Eorzea next week. I am traveling for quite a few days, and so I will not be able to make the next recipe in a timely manner. That said: Skybuilder’s Stew will be on deck!
Please look forward to it!
Have you tried making your own dumplings before? What about the Orobon Stew?
Let us know in the comments below!
