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Mylo Rolfe

December 2024

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mylorolfereads: My icon on social media, a pig with a book (Default)

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
mylorolfereads: My icon on social media, a pig with a book (Default)
Think of a well-crafted imaginary world that you'd love to play in. Beautiful artwork, crackling writing, a soundtrack that makes your heart swell... truly there is nothing quite like a masterwork.

You know what's even better? When the creator really, really didn't have to go that hard... but did anyway.

One of the first and most wholesome examples that I think of for this is the Pinball Number Count song from Sesame Street. (In fact, a lot of early Sesame Street music could qualify for this example, but I'll use the Pinball song because it's one of my favorites.) Picture, if you will, being an incredibly famous and influential group, but still have to do a song for a new children's show that you're not sure will be successful. You could easily throw together some cute little number that kids can clap along to, or you could be the Pointer Sisters and give us one of the most iconic songs in children's television ever, a surprisingly complex fast jazz piece with the most incredible steel drum solo I have ever heard.
 
 
 
 
 
 



Pictured: Legends
 

Putting out a skillful musical number for a children's TV show instead of a throwaway tune is pretty great, and there have been a lot of Sesame Street sketches featuring some absolute genius artists both influential and obscure. Though it's less preschool-friendly, the same concept applies to Parappa the Rapper and its equally great spinoff, Um Jammer Lammy.


A big-hearted but kind of dumb kid


For the uninitiated, Parappa the Rapper is a rhythm game series that takes place in an almost psychedelic world (designed by Rodney Greenblatt) where everyone is paper-thin and "people" range from humans to furries to anthropomorphic walking flowerpots. The plots are very loose and don't make much sense, and the lyrics to the songs are written by one of the game's Japanese creators, who is fluent in English but not fluid enough to sound completely natural.

But you'll be screaming every single one of them along anyway, because the music goes harder than a bat out of hell.

One of the few songs you might be able to pass off as typical to its genre is Um Jammer Lammy's Fright Flight, which is some of the crunchiest metal to have ever graced my ears. With it's constantly changing time signatures, its a headbanger's dream, and the chaotic, disjointed lyrics ("My knee's in pain/So is my brain") are great even if you prefer growling to screaming.

And... it's sung by a military vet with a case of cartoon amnesia who flip-flops back and forth between spacey old man and grizzled drill sergeant every time he's bonked on the head, which happens repeatedly as one of the panels in the plane he's flying keeps coming loose. No, seriously.



His name is Captain Fussenpepper, by the way.
 

Other songs follow the same pattern, though with more overtly cartoony lyrics. For instance, Parappa 2 gives us a boot camp training song by Sista Moosesha, a sibling to the driving instructor in the first game. This track's got a brass-based beat that could easily be the theme to bad bitches everywhere.

As if to prove just how much the dev team loves music, each song has its own flavor of rap (or rock), all of which really, really didn't have to go as hard as they do. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Fright Flight is the previous level's song, Baby Baby, which is sung by a baby bunny who's part of an extended immature joke revolving around the phrase "breeding like rabbits." This is a toe-tapping 50s-style rock track with lyrics about being an obnoxious little kid. (I think my diaper is wet/I think the bed gon' be next!)



"I wanna go to bed RIGHT NOW, Mama!"

I could gush about each track in this game but an entire blog post about how great each song is is not very exciting, so instead I'll just link to the MilkCan version of Power Off, Power On! because it's my favorite song in the whole series and let you judge for yourself how good the unusual time signature in the chorus is. (Incidentally, that male voice is the guy behind Rhythm and Balance in Sonic Adventure 2!)

What's my point in all of this? Well, Parappa isn't great because it's "funny." It's not Spongebob or Looney Tunes or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where you're going to be shaking with laughter as you follow the character's antics. Parappa is great instead because none of it takes itself seriously--except the backing music, which is done completely stone-faced despite the kooky lyrics. 

Projects where everything is off-the-wall and dumb except for one extremely skillful element, come pretty close to giving me the shivers. Creating a good juxtaposition between wacky elements and serious elements is really difficult, and Parappa manages to do that flawlessly. There's a special kind of magic there, I think. I'm not sure if that's because it shows that even someone with passion for their work can still create something silly, or because I'm just not a fan of gritty, overly-serious media in general.

It's probably both, because I feel the same duality applies to Captain Underpants: stupid, silly books, written for the very serious cause of uplifting children with reading challenges.


(Also, more recently, kids with two dads.)

There's not much more I want to say on this subject so I'm gonna close this post here and hopefully have a more entertaining entry next time around.

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