Milady de Winter is one of my all-time favorite literary villains. She’s the sort of cold, evil manipulator that you just love to hate. In fact, she’s such a good bad guy that my favorite chapters in The Three Musketeers are the five chapters she spends in prison doing nothing but scheming. Naturally, such a wonderful villain deserves a spot on our menu.
And given her name, I knew the recipe I made in her honor had to be winter soup!
Since I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe, I had to go hunting for one while planning this menu. This particular winter soup—my own slight variation on one I found by Chungah Rhee–is fragrant and wholesome. I chose it because it includes an extra step that many soup recipes don’t: it calls for roasting the vegetables before adding them to the soup. I think roasting vegetables ALWAYS makes them better, so I had my eye out for a recipe that took advantage of roasted veggie goodness. And this is definitely it! If I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe before, I’ve sure got one now! 😉
St. Patrick’s Day is coming up fast! Luckily, classic lit books (and some modern day classics) offer lots of potential St. Patty’s Day recipes. Here are some of my favorites:
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.
Reading kit time! These are steadily becoming one of my favorite things to post. I love picking out the most iconic items in a story and hunting down cool versions of them for a kit. And The Three Musketeers has loads! Below you’ll find a list of items you can buy to build an awesome musketeer reading kit for yourself…or your three best friends! So don your feathered cap and get ready for an adventure! 🙂
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.
Food and books. They’re kinda my thing. So much so that my blog has changed the way I read. Now when I’m reading a book strictly for pleasure that won’t appear on the blog, I still reach for my pencil to make a note when the author mentions food. It’s made me notice a few things, most especially that authors can get really creative in how they use food to forward the story.
As a rabid X-Files fan girl, I cannot express in words how excited I was to make an X-Files menu this month. There is absolutely no joy like being able to marathon the first six seasons while still feeling like a responsible adult because it’s “research.”
Though to be honest, I was a little nervous about timing my menu to coincide with the new season. If the new episodes were terrible, there was a good chance I’d spend most of February sobbing into a pillow instead of cooking. And I’ll admit, the first episode didn’t help my nerves much (for those who haven’t seen it, it was…weird). Luckily, Season 10 got steadily better with each episode, and I was soon gleefully reminiscing over the good old days while I re-connected with all my favorite characters.
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.
Making an X-Files themed tea can be tricky. Should I stick with something green in honor of little green men? Go with a blend meant to encapsulate the personality of one of the characters—but if so, which one do I choose? In the end, I decided to make a tea inspired by Fox Mulder’s perpetual tendency to keep an eye on the sky. I combined two aptly named Adagio teas, Lemon Cloud and Foxtrot, into a tea fit for everyone’s favorite spooky FBI agent. 🙂
The Truth is Out There Tea
Inspired by Fox Mulder’s perpetual tendency to keep an eye on the sky, this natural, refreshing blend of Foxtrot and Lemon Cloud is a great caffeine free pick-me-up before a long night of UFO hunting.
This blend brings the delicate flavors of chamomile, mint, and lemon together in a flavorful yet soothing rooibos-herbal tea. Rooibos is a red tea with a taste all its own (warm and slightly earthy, brightened by its natural sweetness). It’s ideal for mixing delicate, herbal flavors that would get lost in a strong black tea. In this tea, I combined Rooibos Lemon Cloud with Foxtrot. Lemon Cloud is a straight rooibos with a lemony twist, and Foxtrot combines rooibos with chamomile and peppermint. I love the way the faint lemon undertone complements the gentle mint flavor. It’s also caffeine free, which makes it a perfect bedtime tea. I can just imagine Mulder and Scully sipping this during a stakeout!
P.S. I’m curious how this would taste with just a little more lemon flavor, so I’m going to make a test version that includes lemon grass. If I like the change, I’ll make it a permanent addition to the blend. 🙂
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.”
