My Zelda Adventure: Making Yeto's Soup from Twilight Princess

This entry involves a lot of thought-dumping but I felt I had to get something down, at least.

A long time ago, back when my age probably still ended in -teen, I found a recipe for Yeto's Superb Pumpkin and Goat Cheese soup on a blog called The Geeky Chef. This recipe appeared years before the "official" Nintendo version. Comments resassured me that it was very good.

But I hesitated. First of all, the recipe was supposed to take hours--my stomach is notoriously impatient. Second, it contained pumpkin and goat cheese, which, while game-accurate, was a combination of two foods I'm not really fond of.

Still, my curiosity kept returning to the soup every time I had a Zelda phase. Yesterday, after over 12 years of putting it off, I decided to make it.

Huzzah!
 

 

 As I suspected, this was a lengthy recipe--over three hours of work!--but a lot of that time is waiting for the ingredients to roast, then simmer on the stove. That meant I could get some writing work in (and goof off a little, too).

The biggest snag in the plans was the unprofessionalism of the recipe. Of course I know how to roast ingredients... now tell me which temperature to use! In this case, the back of the butternut squash bag had a suggested temperature of 375 degrees, but there were other parts of the recipe where I had to guesstimate. When you're a beginner at cooking, that's not ideal.

 

So how did it taste, you may ask? Well... subtle. Firstly, the butternut squash, which I had to use as a substitute, is a much more subdued flavor than pumpkin. Secondly, I was concerned the goat cheese would be too strong for me and my family, none of which are used to the flavor. So I used half of the recommended goat cheese and substituted muenster for the other half.

That being said, despite how mellow the flavor is, this is one seriously interesting soup. Unless you overdo the amount of stock, this is a thick cream soup with a flavor profile unlike anything I've ever eaten before. Strange, maybe. Tasty, definitely. I'm considering heating up the last of the leftovers right now.

Now for the rambling: thinking about this soup makes me realize that there aren't any foods in my own work that I've attempted to make recipes for, which is strange. For me, food is one of the things that grounds me in a universe, and as a child I was fascinated by the super-long lists of feast foods in the Redwall books in particular. Everything always sounded so good! 

I've noticed that in a lot of my more recent works I've shied away from coming up with new foods in my stories and have stuck to familiar American foods (or, rather, Americanized foods) like burgers, salad, pasta, etc. I think I'll try to change that for my next story.

Now that I think about it, I already did come up with a huel-like drink for my hero Captain Honeycomb, so maybe I'm on the track to food creativity after all.

For anyone who wants to try making this scrumptious soup, the recipe is here: www.geekychef.com/2008/12/yetos-superb-pumpkin-and-goat-cheese.html