It’s hard to believe that FINAL FANTASY XIV Online: A Realm Reborn has turned 10 years old. Ten years ago, I was just starting my life over again after having moved in northern Florida for a new job. My heart was broken from a woman, and I didn’t know anyone where I lived. I remember seeing the news about ARR launching, but I was too busy trying to piece my life back together into something resembling a decent shape. In 2023, my heart is still (a little bit) broken over a woman, and I am still trying to adjust to life in California. I would never have imagined I would be living here a decade ago, admittedly.
I am a completely different person internally and physically, though. I am (mostly) happy with where I am in life and who I am.
I also quite surprised with how much Eorzea has grown and changed in that time too – especially with Dawntrail coming next year. If you weren’t around for 1.0, and heading into 2.0, then you probably don’t realize just how dire of a situation the game was in. I honestly think that if it wasn’t a numbered FINAL FANTASY game, and if it was any other company besides SQUARE ENIX, then the game servers would have been shuttered for good. It certainly would have been impossible to imagine where the game is today with FAN FESTIVAL events being held around the world.
For this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, I picked two items to show off my final creamy pasta dish with: an acrylic block showing off the art from FINAL FANTASY XIV Online: A Realm Reborn, and a collaboration coaster with PARCO, a major Japanese department store, for FINAL FANTASY‘s 35th anniversary. In other words: the past and the present of the game. In an alternative timeline, this PARCO-collaboration coaster could have been the first new FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise that we got in a very long time to celebrate a long-shutdown MMORPG, instead of being one of the latest pieces to come out in celebration of a well-regarded title.
I wonder where I will be in 10 more years, where I will be living, and what variables and constants there will be then too. I also wonder where FINAL FANTASY XIV Online will be then. Either way, I will hopefully still be playing the game with 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 Cooking Eorzea dish is another pasta dish: Creamy Salmon Pasta. Hailing out of the Norvrandt Region with a difficulty rating of ‘Easy,’ this is the 39th recipe out of the cookbook. Much like last time’s Boscaiola recipe, this dish is pasta-focused, and that allowed me to focus my attention on trying to make the al dente pasta closer in time to when the overall dish would be completed.
Before making the Creamy Salmon Pasta, my thought was: “Wow, this has a lot of flavors going on!” and I was excited to see how it turns out.
Anyway, here is what a professional attempt looks like for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
Lemongrass can grow up to 6.5 feet high and they are used to make citronella oil – which is used in both insect repellant and soap! It has a very strong scent to it, and I was quite impressed with how easy it was to work with once I got the thick outer layers off.
This is a unique ingredient, and while I don’t have a ton to say about it…the fact is it was such a strong aromatic ingredient that I decided to make it the Ingredient of the Week!
My Cooking Attempt
This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish shared a few key ingredients with the prior Boscaiola dish:
The first thing I did was that I started to get the pasta water boiling, since it took such a long time to heat up last week.
While the water was heating up, I chopped up the garlic cloves after shaking them loose of their casings.
Setting them aside, I removed the gai lan leaves from the stems and then chopped up the leaves.
At this point, the water was ready and so I added in the salt, whisked it in, and then added in the pasta. During the next bit, I was stirring the pasta every few minutes while waiting for it to be al dente-ready.
As the pasta was cooking, I zested my lemons. Each lemon is roughly a teaspoon of zest. Thanks to prior Cooking Eorzea columns, I knew this already and so I didn’t buy extra lemons to waste.
When the pasta was ready, I strained out the pasta water and then saved a cup of it to thin the sauce out, if necessary, later on.
Turning my attention back to the other ingredients, I cut off the root end, peeled the outer layers of the lemongrass stalk off, and then smashed the bulb with the butt of my knife in order to break it up so the aromatics could blend in with the overall dish.
I heated up a frying pan with the butter and olive oil in it, before adding in the lemongrass stalk and garlic. I let it cook for around three minutes so the garlic could start to brown.
I then added in the flour, and I whisked it all together until the flour was blended in.
I then added in the lemon juice and the fish sauce and blended those ingredients together with the dish too.
I added in the heavy cream…
…And the lemon zest before whisking it all together.
At this point, I pulled out the smoked salmon and set it aside so I could easily grab it when it was time.
I then added the pepper, thyme, and oregano to the frying pan, and I blended all of those spices together. It was here that the scent of the sauce really took off and you could smell it through the kitchen!
I added in the grated parmesan cheese next, and it really started to thicken the sauce as it blended in – as you can see in the below picture.
I added in the gai lan leaves, and I had to actually be careful to not knock them out of the frying pan as they were blended in. I kept going until they were well-mixed and had started to wilt. Once they were at that point, I removed the lemongrass stalk pieces.
All of the prior steps took place over just a few minutes, and so I was able to add in the still warm and al dente pasta to the dish and start whisking it in with a pair of tongs. It was a lot harder to blend the pasta in than you would think.
I realized that the issue is that the sauce is probably too thick, and so I added in a bit of the reserved pasta water, and it definitely made the dish easier to work with afterwards.
Finally, I added in the smoked salmon pieces, and I blended the entire dish together to finish it off!
And here is the final Smoked Salmon Pasta dish!
This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish was honestly a complicated one to parse out the flavors in. It was very, very good – let me be clear, just a very complex flavor profile. The smoked salmon provided saltiness to the dish, but it was cleverly balanced out by the acid in the lemon juice and zest and the creaminess of the parmesan cheese. I loved how the spices and lemongrass/garlic aromatics clearly added a lot of flavors to the dish, while the slight bitterness of the gai lan leaves worked well. There is honestly a lot going on here, and it was super good!
Afterword
If I was to make this dish again, I am not sure what I would change. Everything went off pretty flawlessly. And I would make this dish again, though it is definitely not something that children or people who don’t like flavor complexity would enjoy. This was just a genuinely surprising, and easy to make, delicious meal. Maybe I would zest my lemons beforehand and crush my lemongrass while the pasta was cooking al dente?
So it’s time to thank the people who make Cooking Eorzea possible! I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and I 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. I would like to think that a lot of my dishes, despite my lack of culinary degree, comes fairly close to the professionals on occasion! 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. It’s been ten years since FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn launched, and I cannot help but wonder where my life will be in another ten years when the expansion turns twenty.
Next Time
I am attending DragonCon and PAX West this weekend, I have company coming the week after, and I unfortunately am getting my wisdom teeth out a few days after that. A very, very busy time in my life…and I obviously cannot make anything other than basic soup while my mouth is healing up from the oral surgery.
Cooking Eorzea will return before the end of September though, with Deep-Fried Okeanis!
Did you play FINAL FANTASY XIV Online ten years ago when it re-launched?
What is your favorite piece of FINAL FANTASY XIV Online merchandise?
Let us know in the comments below!
