So…if you missed the excitement a couple hours ago, I accidentally published this post a day early while it was still an unfinished draft. AND IT WAS UP FOR A WHOLE HOUR BEFORE I REALIZED IT HAPPENED. * Cue death by embarrassment *
The full story is this: last night when I started drafting the post, I put the wrong date into the schedule bar. So it published at 11 am today…instead of 11 am tomorrow, when it was meant to be all finished and shiny. SOMEONE HIDE ME.
Funny thing is, I NEVER fill out the scheduler until the post is finished. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do it this time.
So after a giant round of panicking, I scrambled to finish editing and uploading my pictures, so subscribers wouldn’t click on the email containing this post and wonder what the heck was going on. EEP. I’m so sorry, guys!
Anyway, I should probably put my shame aside and try to focus on what this post is really about: namely, the Three Musketeers.
Our recipe today is a tribute to my favorite musketeer, Athos. I’ve got a soft spot for prickly characters, and he’s nothing if not stern and stoic. The only time Athos makes an exception to his rule of restraint is when it comes to wine. Athos LOVES him a good burgundy. This is proven when his friends get separated from him for two weeks while traveling, and they find him barricaded into an innkeeper’s cellar, drunk on four casks of wine and guilty of eating most of the innkeeper’s delicious hams.
I just read The Three Musketeers for the first time last year, and I was hugely impressed. Considering the size of the book and the time when it was written, I was expecting it to be a little slow and wordy. Instead, I laughed my way through the first chapter and rooted for D’Artagnan and his musketeer pals all the way to the end. Before the book was over, I knew I had to make a menu for it here on the blog.
Of course, Mulder and Scully never actually eat alien cookies while on a case, but concluding an X-Files menu without an alien dish felt just plain wrong. These green and gray sugar cookies are a great dessert to celebrate the conclusion of the new season or a wonderful gift for the person in your life who wants to believe. You can use whatever sugar cookie recipe you want (I used the same base recipe as our Fairy Dust Star Cookies from Peter Pan). The royal icing recipe is one I found by Julia M. Usher.
Last week I posted about Scully’s penchant for craving junk food during autopsies, but anyone who watches X-Files knows that Scully’s eating habits swing to the other extreme just as often. She’s a regular salad eater when it comes to lunch, and she’s been known to snack on yogurt with bee pollen. In fact, Mulder once teased her for eating an ice cream cone only to find out that it was a “non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicle.”
Dana Scully’s ability to get hungry while performing an autopsy is the stuff of legend. In fact, she almost always finds herself craving whatever the victim’s last meal was! I like to think it’s because her work reminds her that life is fleeting, so—since she usually eats so healthy— she should order that bucket of fried chicken while she can. This combination of the macabre and the silly made me want to create an entrée that pays tribute to Scully’s autopsy munchies.
Normally I wouldn’t have our first non-book inspired menu so early in the year, but I’m a wild X-Files fan. So you can only imagine how much I flailed when I heard a new season was coming out. I decided I didn’t care that it was only February and that it might be a bit weird to follow up King Arthur with a sci-fi show. I was making an X-Files menu, come hell or high water contaminated with a symbiotic black oil alien species.
Full disclosure: this cake pan was the whole reason I got the idea to do a King Arthur menu to begin with. I saw it on ThinkGeek several months ago, and it immediately went on my Christmas list. I’m pretty sure it was designed to appeal to the Game of Thrones crowd, but I couldn’t help thinking it’d be just right for a King Arthur dessert. The cake recipe itself is a chocolate pound cake from BHG. It was perfect for getting the pan’s little details to stand out! I decorated mine with raspberries, mint, and whipped cream, but you can decorate yours however you want. You’re king (or queen) of your kitchen! 😉
Avalon, the Isle of Apples, is said to be King Arthur’s final resting place. It’s described as a beautiful, ethereal, magical place…so of course I wanted to include it in our King Arthur menu! This savory tribute to Avalon’s namesake fruit is filled with sweet gala apples, butternut squash, and pearl onions topped with blue cheese. The rustic style and hearty flavors combine to make a side dish reminiscent of Arthur’s grand medieval feasts.
In the King Arthur legends, there are countless accounts of feasts and merriment, but descriptions of the specific dishes they ate are rare. We know from medieval history that these feasts probably involved a lot of savory pies, boiled vegetables, fruit, and roasted meat. I’ll admit I fantasized about roasting a whole pig for this recipe just like they would have done in the olden days, but whole animals are a little difficult to source these days (and I’m not exactly sure how I’d cook one if I found it). Still, large beef roasts were equally common, so I decided to use my go-to pot roast recipe to make a dish very similar to the sort of entrée you’d expect to see at a medieval feast, yet prepared in a way that fits a modern kitchen. Inspired by the Questing Beast which Sir Pellinore so valiantly pursued, this delicious roasted beast is fit for any king’s table.
We kicking off the New Year with the granddaddy of all classic stories: the legend of King Arthur! I’m a big fan of ancient myth and folklore (you should see my Irish myth collection), and the Arthurian legends are some of my favorites. What’s not to love about epic tales of grand quests, noble knights, and a brave king? In fact, the reason I waited so long to make a King Arthur menu was because I wanted to wait until I had enough blogging experience to do it justice. So here we go! 🙂
The appetizer for our King Arthur menu is inspired by the beginning of Arthur’s story: his retrieval of the sword from the stone. These easy, delicious cheese bites are just the right snack to kick off a long afternoon of knightly adventuring…or at least reading about knightly adventures! The perfectly British combo of Camembert and English cheddar is balanced with toasted nuts and sweet-tart dried cranberries—a truly kingly dish! 🙂
