Lots and lots and lots of traveling.
If you keep up with everything I write for oprainfall, then you’ll notice that I’ve recently been to Las Vegas two weekends in a row for 1) FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024 where the Dawntrail expansion was announced, seeing amazing cosplay, participating in a panel interview with Naoki Yoshida, and attending Eorzean Symphony- FINAL FANTASY XIV Orchestra Concert 2023, and for 2) EVO 2023 when I watched the best of the fighting game world compete in an environment that is for anyone who likes video games.
The last two weekends have been crazy and fun and amazing to report from while surrounded by people who love what they are fans of. It therefore was a bit of a shock to me when I got back home and got back to my day-to-day life…which includes Cooking Eorzea and learning to cook. After EVO 2023 though, I definitely found myself looking forward to trying to source the ingredients I needed and trying to pull this dish together so that I could make this week’s Friday publication deadline.
Learning to cook through this FINAL FANTASY XIV Online cookbook is a part of who I am as a person now and this is something I want to make time for even though it takes around 10-15 hours of my week every week. And it is something that I will keep pursuing with Love, Eorzean Style. I guess, in addition to being a fan of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and EVO, I am also now a cooking fan, and I want to surround myself with more people who feel like I do. Maybe a cooking convention will be in my future someday too…
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 Cooking Eorzea recipe is for Boscaiola, which is a dish that features a ton of different mushrooms and hails from The Black Shroud region of Eorzea. With an ‘Easy’ difficulty rating and it being the 38th recipe in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, I was excited to try out my first pasta dish!
The only thing is that I have never crushed tomatoes by hand before, and so this was going to be quite the adventure to do.
Anyway, here is what Boscaiola is supposed to look like in the hands of a professional:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
The King Oyster Mushroom is, let’s face it, BIG. I was shocked when I saw it in the store just because of how big it is. It has little taste or smell in its natural state, but that definitely changed when I cooked with it. I was so used to working with cremini or shittake mushrooms that I was absolutely surprised at how big the King Oyster Mushroom was, and how easy it was to slice and work with for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. As a result, it easily became the Ingredient of the Week!
My Cooking Attempt
Boscaiola is a mushroom-heavy dish, and you can tell because there are FOUR different types of mushrooms that I ended up using:
I have never crashed tomatoes before by hand, and so it was a completely new experience for me. First, I cut a cross-shape into the bottom of each tomato, and then I placed them into a boiling pot of water. This was to help loosen up the skin and make it easy to pull off.
I let the tomatoes sit for a minute in the boiling water, and then I placed it into a cold bowl of water to cool down.
I then peeled each of the tomatoes and then crushed them by hand. It turned out to be quite easy to do, and I was able to make the fresh tomato sauce.
And here is the final result of the tomatoes crushed by hand:
I added hot water to the dried porcini mushrooms, and I set them aside for around 10 minutes to hydrate back up.
While the porcini mushrooms were hydrating, I sliced the shallots and then I minced the fresh garlic.
After the mushrooms were hydrated, I strained the water out of them and then pressed out any extra liquid.
I then roughly cut up the porcini mushrooms and set them aside.
I then sliced up the king oyster mushroom before setting that aside as well.
I removed the stems from the shiitake and cremini mushrooms and then sliced both of them up.
I chopped up fresh thyme and fresh rosemary after stripping it off of the stems.
I sliced up the fresh bacon and finally set it aside too.
I set aside all of the sliced and minced ingredients and I started to make the al dente pasta. First, I added salt to a tall pot of boiling water.
I then emptied the box of spaghetti pasta into a pot, and I let it cook for seven minutes while stirring occasionally.
Once the timer was up, I strained the pasta out from the water. I made sure to pull a cup of the pasta water out of the pot, and I set it aside to use later on in the dish.
I then got another pot out, heated it up, and I fried the bacon in it for around five minutes until it was cooked through.
I removed the bacon, set it aside on a plate, and then I cooked the sliced shallots and minced garlic in the pot and bacon grease for two minutes until they were softened up.
I added the porcini mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, and king oyster mushrooms to the pot. I let them cook for around 10 minutes until they were all browned.
While the mushrooms were browning, I saw that the pot was starting to dry out and so I added in a bit of olive oil and stirred it in.
I added in the rosemary, thyme, and bacon into the pot.
I then stirred it all together before adding in the crushed tomatoes and one-fourth a cup of the reserved pasta water.
I blended it all together and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Once that was done, I added in the grated Parmesan cheese and the heavy cream.
I blended it all together, and then started to add in the remaining pasta water in small increments so that it could help thin out the sauce.
Finally, I added the pasta back in and I blended it all together to finish off the Boscaiola.
And here is this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish!
This was an amazing dish. It felt genuinely very ‘earthy’ from all the different mushrooms in it, coupled with the occasional pop of bacon. If there was one thing that I had an issue with, it is probably that there is too much spaghetti in the dish. That is a personal issue more than anything, as I know spaghetti dishes are supposed to be mostly pasta. I also could not really taste the heavy cream or the parmesan cheese, even though it was added late and it clearly lighted up the color of the sauce.
In other words, this is a Cooking Eorzea success!
Afterword
If I was to make this dish again, I would absolutely make the pasta al dente towards the very end while everything is simmering for 10 minutes. The pasta was a bit chilled from having sat out so long, though it didn’t affect the al dente aspect, and it warmed right back up when put it with, and blended with, the other ingredients. I would definitely make this dish again, but I would probably use a lot less pasta so I can enjoy the sauce more.
Let’s thank people that helped lay the groundwork for Cooking Eorzea! I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. 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 (especially this week’s recipe!) are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, 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.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. If you didn’t or couldn’t attend FINAL FANTASY XIV FAN FESTIVAL 2023-2024, then you missed out on seeing how absolutely wonderful the community as a whole is, and how much we owe these two men for sheparding FINAL FANTASY XIV Online to where it is now.
Two Weeks From Now
There will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, unfortunately.
That said, in two weeks, there will be Creamy Salmon Pasta! It is another pasta dish, and one that has (you guessed it!) salmon in it.
So please return back on September 1st for another installment of Cooking Eorzea!
Have you crushed tomatoes by hand before? What is your favorite type of mushroom?
And what are you hoping to see in Dawntrail?
Let us know in the comments below!
