It’s only a cold mid-Wednesday in February, and I am already starting to plan out my summer activities. I want to travel, I want to attend conferences and industry events on behalf of oprainfall, and I want to find time in there somewhere to play video games and read more books.
As I get older, the spontaneity that defined so much of my life becomes harder and harder to do. I have to arrange kennel care for my dog, make sure I have enough finances set aside, set bills on auto pay, make sure I’m not getting any packages delivered while I’m gone, figure out things with and around other people’s schedules, and all of those little ticky-tacky things that come with people having fulfilled lives.
In 2015, I went to Colombia for five days with a woman whom I asked after only knowing her for less than a week with less than five weeks’ notice. Last year, I went to Germany for several days to attend the FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour in Munich, with almost seven months’ notice and time to prepare, and it felt like I was never fully ready to go with everything that needed to be done before I could leave the country by myself.
I miss the days without as much responsibility in my life so I could just pick up and go places, even though I wouldn’t give up the lifestyle I have now. And hence, why I am planning my summer out NOW instead of waiting.
By the time this goes live, hopefully there will also be news of another FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Fanfest too from the Live Producer Letter on Friday…I’m genuinely looking forward to the next event with Love, Eorzean Style, and I will definitely fit that into my schedule along with everything else.
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 Mushroom Sauté! This ‘Easy’ ranked dish is the 53rd receipt in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and it comes out of the Norvrandt Region of Eorzea.
This is a very, very mushroom-heavy dish. Like, almost all of the ingredients are mushrooms of one type or another. It also looks incredibly easy to make, and I am excited to see how it goes. I don’t know quite WHAT it says about my cooking confidence that I looked at it and went ‘Oh, I can do this’, as I definitely wouldn’t have done that when I was first starting out with writing Cooking Eorzea!
Also, here is what Mushroom Sauté looks like in the hands of a true professional:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s Featured Ingredient of the Week is a cluster of beech mushrooms! Beech mushrooms are native to East Asia and are named after the trees they are often found on: beech trees. They are tough to work with when they are raw (and in fact it was slightly annoying chopping through them for this week’s dish), but they become delicious when cooked.
They are my featured ingredient mostly because of the difficulty I had finding them. I actually had them ordered to be shipped to me, as I could not find them in my local stores, until I stopped by a random, super-small no-name Asian market in town that actually had them in stock. I ended up buying them and being able to cancel my online order in time before it shipped!
It’s crazy how a sudden whim after seeing a movie (Anora, if you’re interested), helped me get all the ingredients needed for this dish.
My Cooking Attempt
There honestly wasn’t a TON of ingredients for this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish. That is, if you were looking for something other than mushrooms. There were five types of mushrooms that I used for this week’s dish.
First, I washed and sliced up the King Oyster Mushroom. I last used this ingredient with Week 47’s Trapper’s Quiche (and in fact, it was the Featured Ingredient of the Week for Week 37’s Boscaiola!), and so I was quite familiar with it already.
Setting the sliced king oyster mushroom aside, I then got out my shiitake mushrooms, removed the stems, and sliced them up too.
Setting aside those new slices into the same glass bowl, I got out the baby portobello mushrooms, removed those stems, and then sliced them up too.
Getting out the cluster of oyster mushrooms once I put the sliced baby portobello mushrooms into the glass bowl, I then roughly chopped those up.
Throwing those into the glass bowl as well, I finally turned to the cluster of beech mushrooms. Even though the cluster quickly fell apart as I was roughly chopping those up, I eventually got through it all!
They then got added into the glass bowl with all of the other mushrooms. This is genuinely a LOT of mushrooms that I will be using to make Mushroom Sauté!
I pulled out the fresh rosemary next, stripped a tablespoon’s worth off of the stem, and then chopped it all up. As I was working with the rosemary, I could really smell the herb in my kitchen!
Setting the chopped rosemary to the side, I put a pan on the stove and turned the heat up to medium-high. Once the pan was heated up, I added in the olive oil and butter, and I let it all melt together before adding in all of the mushrooms on top.
I sautéed the mushrooms for 12 total minutes, making sure each mushroom slice got a decent amount of time in the pan. By the time my timer went off, they had shrunk considerably to fit into the pan!
I then added in the salt and chopped rosemary after pulling the pan off of the stovetop…
…and I then mixed it all together!
And here is what the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea looks like!
If you couldn’t tell from the ingredients used in Mushroom Sauté, then you should know that this is a very mushroom heavy dish. When I tried it out, my first thought was that if you don’t like mushrooms, then you aren’t going to like the dish. The mushrooms were good, but I couldn’t pick out which mushroom was which when I was eating it. The rosemary and the salt really did elevate the mushrooms though and I was surprised at how much the rosemary cut through everything else.
Ultimately, Mushroom Sauté is a very simple dish to make that is definitely not for everyone!
Afterword
The side notes on this dish in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook say that you can use whatever mushrooms you want to make this dish, and I think that’s a good idea. I had a hard time finding beech mushrooms here where I live, and it was ultimately only because I stopped into a very small Asian market in a random part of town that I was able to find any to use. I imagine that for most people, you would have to substitute out that ingredient, and that it wouldn’t affect the legitimacy of the overall dish any.
Let me dive into ‘thank yous’! Starting off: I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I am almost two-thirds of the way through this cookbook, and it has been an adventure so far. 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 in Cooking Eorzea. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You can (and really should) check him and his works out over on X.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online. This column wouldn’t be possible without it, and I wouldn’t have made so many of the friends in-game that I have without them, either.
Two Weeks From Now
There will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, as I am unexpectedly unavailable to be able to make the dish and do the ingredient shopping.
That said, Cooking Eorzea will return (barring yet another serious mishap) in two weeks with Popotoes Au Gratin! I’ve already verified that I can get the ingredients locally and so I will have no problems making it.
Please look forward to next time!
What are you planning to do this summer, if you’ve decided on anything yet?
What video games are you currently playing?
Let us know in the comments below!
