Game Developer’s Conference 2025, also known as ‘GDC,’ was the first lengthy industry event I covered since PAX East 2024. GDC is my absolute favorite event that I cover year-to-year. I always try to mix up the industry events I attend each year, if only because different developers and different publishers go to each one. GDC though? It is always a constant for me. Because oprainfall is a smaller site, I am responsible for coordinating my own meetings, doing my own interview and demo preparations, and getting out my coverage from the event.
I always forget how much work goes into preparing on the media side of things and how much effort goes into writing everything up afterwards, though. It feels like the time leading up to the event, the week of the conference, and then the two-or-so weeks afterwards to get my coverage out all passed by in a blur, and everything else just fell to the wayside outside of it. Including this column, unfortunately, despite how much of an absolute pet project it is for me.
I know I’ve written about this elsewhere this week, but if you don’t stop and look around once in a while in life, then you can miss it. Cooking Eorzea is a very deliberate slowdown in everything that happens in my life. I have to take the time to shop for the ingredients, make the dish while photographing it, and then write it all up.
I hope this past month has been not quite as busy for all of you reading this as it was for me. And just a gentle reminder: take the time to enjoy life, and always make time to do things you enjoy 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 dish is Ratatouille, which comes from The Black Shroud region of Eorzea. It has a difficulty rating of ‘Easy’ and it is the 55th recipe of The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook! It is also the first time that I’ve ever tried Ratatouille, even though I am a fan of Little Chef (as seen at Scrooge McDuck’s Twilight Town restaurant, Le Grand Bistrot) in KINGDOM HEARTS III who comes from a movie titled after the dish.
Here is what the dish looks like in the hands of a professional:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s featured ingredient is…lavender!
Lavender comes from the mint family of flowering plants, and it comes from the Old World. A perennial plant, the flowers are contained in whorls and can be a variety of different colors. I’ve actually visited lavender fields before, and I was more than a little impressed with just how vibrant and scented the entire area was. It is also incredibly flavorful, and it really can enhance a dish’s flavor once it is included into it. Something so unique, and so colorful, made a natural fit for being the featured ingredient of the week!
My Cooking Attempt
Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients! Let’s take a look at the ones I used to make Ratatouille this week for Cooking Eorzea!
First, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and then used the non-stick spray on a sheet of aluminum foil that I had covered my baking sheet with.
Setting the baking sheet aside, I cubed the eggplant. I ended up having to slice some of the longer cuts into half again, in order to make it more cube-like.
I followed that up by slicing the ends off of both zucchini and cubing them both up as well!
I repeated the process with the squash.
I removed the seeds from the bell peppers before cutting both them and the onion into large chunks.
Setting all the vegetables aside, I minced the five garlic cloves after I smashed the fresh bulb and shook the cloves in a container to gently rock the clove coverings loose.
I then all the vegetables together in a bowl. The bowl proved to be too small, though, to mix the vegetables in. I grabbed a large pot and then continually moved the vegetables between the two to help mix them up.
Setting that all aside in the bowl once mixed, I began to make the seasoning liquid. First, I added the olive oil, thyme, lavender, garlic, salt, and pepper together in a small bowl. I then blended it all together until it was also well-mixed.
Once it was well-mixed, I added it on top of the mixed vegetables and then started to rotate them once again between the pot and bowl to make sure that all the vegetables were coated with it.
Once accomplished, I spread the vegetables evenly out over the non-stick aluminum foiled baking sheet and then put them into the oven for 20 minutes.
Once the timer went off, I pulled the tray out, turned and stirred the vegetables on the baking sheet, and then I reinserted it back into the oven for another 20 minutes.
Once the timer went off again, I stirred the vegetables again before lowering the oven temperature down to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
I placed the vegetables back into the oven for another 20 minutes.
I removed the vegetables from the tray once I pulled it out of the oven, and I put them into the large pot. I was really, honestly, surprised at how much liquid there was left on the baking sheet.
I then added two tablespoons of olive oil on top of the vegetables, and I rotated between the pot and the bowl in order to make sure that the vegetables were freshly coated in the olive oil! There was a lot of liquid in the pot and bowl as well, and I had to work to make sure that when I was about to be done, I didn’t have the bowl full of liquid, but it instead stayed in the pot.
And here is the final Ratatouille dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea!
The Ratatouille was interesting – and I’ve never actually had it before, as I said near the start of this week’s column. The vegetables had a stew-like consistency, which I honestly didn’t care for, but apparently it is how this dish is supposed to be. That was just my personal issues with texture, as I prefer veggies to have a bit of a crisp ‘crunch’ to them. They were far from being mushy though, which I attribute to the repeated stirring and baking. What really, really got me though was the seasoning. The lavender and thyme absolutely cut through the (somewhat) bland vegetables, and it really made the entire dish pop in such a pleasant way!
Afterword
This is another dish that I recognize is good, but it isn’t for me. If I was to make Ratatouille again outside of Cooking Eorzea, I would be more cognizant of draining the liquid away before I rotate the dish between two bowls/pots again. I made this dish pretty on-point, though, as is!
Let’s dive into the thank you part of this week’s Cooking Eorzea entry! First up: I want to say thank you to Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and I also want to thank Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these dishes look in a non-amateur’s hands. I also owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series, and you 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 in both 1.0 and in A Realm Reborn. This column wouldn’t be possible without the world that they created for us all to play in.
Next Week
Next week, I conclude the side dishes section of Cooking Eorzea by making Spinach Sauté! This dish hails also from The Black Shroud and has some fairly fun ingredients that I cannot wait to work with.
Please tune in next Friday to see how this dish turns out!
How has your past month been? Have you played anything interesting?
Let us know in the comments below!
