My introduction to Akira Toriyama was not what you would expect. I did not watch his biggest anime-inspired work, Dragon Ball Z, until late in high school. DBZ was a show that my younger brother would watch, and I ended up actually time recording a lot of the episodes on VHS tape for him since neither of us would be home from school when it aired. Instead, the first time I ever saw his art was in a Super Nintendo game that opened with a pendulum swinging against a black background before that the opening notes of Presentiment, composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, echoed in.
Yes, my love for Akira Toriyama started with Chrono Trigger.
While Chrono Trigger is not the work of just one person, I would argue that it wouldn’t be the long-loved, insta-classic it was without Akira Toriyama’s artwork. Most crucially: when you see the character sprites, you can tell a lot about who you’re about to meet and go on an adventure with. Chrono, with his long spiked hair and muscles, is clearly the protagonist and can handle himself in a fight. Frog is presented as a knight that you cannot help but take seriously as a protector. And Magus? Magus just looked COOL, and he was someone with a mysterious air that I desperately wanted to have on my team.
All of Akira Toriyama’s Chrono Trigger character designs, be it for villains or heroes, are just like that. The cohesiveness of the art design, no matter who the character was, and the fact that you can understand so much about the characters and their personalities just by looking at them, is due to Akira Toriyama and his unique art style. Again, Chrono Trigger was the work of multiple people who all brought different aspects of this game together. But it would not have been the same experience without Akira Toriyama’s art to keep me company during my journey throughout time.
Ultimately, yes, I did start to watch Dragon Ball Z and play the Dragon Quest series. Even when I wasn’t aware that his artistic hand was involved in a project, it was impossible to miss out on- after all, his design for characters and his story concepts are very unique to him. But he will always be a large part of why I fell in love with Chrono Trigger a long time ago, and he will be missed after his unexpected death.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online column where I cook with Love, Eorzean Style, then you can check out all the prior recipe attempts here.
Recipe of the Week
For this week’s Cooking Eorzea column, I make Trapper’s Quiche. This dish comes from the Coerthas region of Eorzea, and it is very, very mushroom heavy. Like, three different types of mushrooms are used to make this dish! With a ‘Medium’ difficulty rating, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from this dish.
Here is what Trapper’s Quiche is supposed to look like when a professional chef has a go at it:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
I wasn’t expecting store-bought pie crust to be the featured ingredient of the week. That was before I pulled out the pie crust, tried to unwrap it…and it turned into a bunch of broken pie crust shards that I absolutely could not make Trapper’s Quiche with. However, because I’ve been making so many dishes from this column, I thought of a way to save the crust: I whipped out the dough mat, mushed all the shards together into a ball, and then used my rolling pin to flatted it back out to a 10-inch (more or less) size.
When I started Cooking Eorzea, I would have been paralyzed with not knowing what to do or how to fix this issue. But it is because I have had experiences with working with so much dough that I knew that I could just ball it up and flatted it out.
Store-bought pie crust isn’t a super flashy ingredient. Well, not usually. But instead, it shows how I have grown as a self-taught chef working my way through a FINAL FANTASY XIV Online-themed cookbook, and that earned the store-bought pie crust a spot as the featured ingredient of the week.
My Cooking Attempt
First off, let’s take a look at this week’s ingredients for Cooking Eorzea!
First, I sliced up the king oyster mushroom and the shiitake mushrooms.
I then sliced up the cluster of oyster mushrooms and put them all together in a bowl and set the mushrooms aside for a short bit.
I then peeled and sliced up the shallot.
Setting the shallot slices aside, I first sliced off 3.5 ounces of Gruyère cheese. And what is the biggest shock for me was that I managed to eyeball the correct ounce amount and slice it on the first try! I couldn’t believe it, honestly.
I then grated the Gruyère cheese. I honestly had a lot of trouble doing it, as I had to keep rotating the hard cheese around to grate it down and get a better purchase hold onto it every so often.
At this point, I unrolled the store-bought pie crust…and I found out that it was in shards. As I talked about in the Featured Ingredient of the Week section: I thought quickly, whipped out my dough mat, turned it all into a dough ball, and then rolled out a new pie crust to use.
Setting the pie crust aside, I cracked the eggs and added in the heavy cream, fish sauce, nut meg, and the room-temperature cream cheese. I then started to whisk it all together to try to blend it into a coherent, blended, mixture. At this point, I also started to preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Heating up a pan on the stove, I added in olive oil when it was ready.
I then added the shallots and the mushrooms in, and I worked to sauté it all together.
After roughly 10 minutes, this is what the shallots and mushroom slices look like.
I then spread the Gruyère cheese evenly across the bottom of the pie crust, and I spread the six Thai basil leaves across the top of them.
I then carefully- and evenly- spread out the mushroom and shallot mixture all over the pie crust.
I then gently poured the wet ingredient mixture into the pie crust. It was then that I realized that I had unfortunately not blended the wet ingredients as well as I should have. You can tell this by the small chunks of cream cheese that are still clumped together, unfortunately.
I then put the entire pie crust onto a baking sheet, and I put it into the oven to cook for an hour.
After letting it bake for an hour, I pulled the Trapper’s Quiche out of the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack.
And here is this week’s Cooking Eorzea final dish!
When I cut myself a slice of the Trapper’s Quiche and then ate it, I was surprised at how thoroughly cooked it was. The mushrooms were perfectly done, and there was definitely a bit of cheesy flavor at the bottom of the crust. I swear that I could even taste a bit of the pop from the fish sauce. The Thai basil leaves were more or less non-existent to me, and I don’t know what purpose they served other than to bring a bit of color to the dish.
This was, overall, a very, very good dish and it is one perfect for someone who does not eat meat. I ate half of it by myself, but that was mostly because I skipped dinner so I could have this instead! I normally eat before I start an installment of Cooking Eorzea, but I just did not have the time to today, unfortunately.
Afterword
If I was to make Trapper’s Quiche again, I would probably try to blend the cottage cheese in more thoroughly with an electric hand mixer. While the small lumps didn’t affect the overall dish, it would probably give the dish a more uniform appearance on top at the end of the day.
Let’s dive straight into this week’s ‘thank yous’! As always, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also need to thank Insight Editions‘ staff for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look- especially since my own attempts don’t always line up. 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 X. I also want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online over the past decade-plus, as this column wouldn’t be possible without them.
Finally, I want to thank Akira Toriyama for all the amazing art he has done for Chrono Trigger and well, really anything else. He was loved, and his art will live on forever.
Coming In April
This is not my lie: in April, Cooking Eorzea will return with the start of the side dishes section of The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook! Just because these are side dishes, however, does not mean they will be easy. In fact, I will be kicking off this new section of the cookbook with the Chawan-Mushi recipe! This ‘Hard’ dish from Hingashi promises to be something extremely unique and so you have to return then to see how it turns out!
What is your favorite piece of art by Akira Toriyama?
Did you ever play Chrono Trigger?
Let us know in the comments below!
