Posted June 28, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 0 Comments
Are you all ready for dessert? Because I DEFINITELY am! Jiballian fudge cake is an iconic Star Trek Voyager dessert, and I knew I wanted its blue icing and rich chocolatey-ness to have the place on honor in my Voyager menu. I’ve made many chocolate cakes here on the blog, so I wanted to do something a little different. Then I thought: cake pops! I’ve never done them before, and the concept of a Star Trek-inspired pop intrigued me.
The cake in the TV show has blue icing with a few other colors swirled through (looks like purple and silver/white). I thought it would be fun to make galaxy pops reflecting this color scheme, and away we went! I had to try a few different decorating techniques before I found one I liked, but in the end I think these cake pops turned out super cute. What a fun way to end a Star Trek menu!
Read More
Posted June 21, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 0 Comments
Given the title of this post, you’re probably already wondering about the story behind this recipe. It all started with I started hunting through the Star Trek cookbook for any recipes I might want to include in my Voyager menu. I saw the Maquis Breakfast Bars and thought they looked delicious: homemade granola bars with rolled oats, dates, cranberries, dried apples, shredded coconut, and a bit of honey. I haven’t made anything like that before, so I whipped them up one morning. They turned out great…until it came time to cut them. When I tried to slice the giant sheet of baked granola it absolutely crumbled. There was no way I was going to get even a few bars out of it.
Disappointed, I began to nibble on the crumbled bits as I thought about what recipe I should make to replace it. I stopped short. The granola tasted A.MAZ.ING. I couldn’t stop eating it, and after I shared a handful with the Little Mister, he was hooked too. I crumbled up the remnants in the pan and turned it into loose granola, which the Little Mister and I have been eating with our breakfast every morning since (once it runs out, he may mutiny).
Since I loved the flavor so much, it seemed wrong to scrap the recipe in favor of something else. I didn’t want to risk adding more liquid, since it held together really well in the bowl and I didn’t want to risk soggy granola. Instead, I decided to present it here on the blog as granola bowls. I hope you all enjoy it as much as we did!
P.S. The original recipe calls for melted butter and honey to hold the granola together. For a healthier option, I think melted coconut oil would work equally well with the honey. I haven’t tried it yet, but I intend to. I’ll let you know how it turns out! 🙂
Read More
Posted June 14, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments
Chili may not be the first thing you think of when you picture eating lunch aboard a starship, but Voyager’s head chef Neelix takes great pride in creating foods his shipmates find comforting and familiar, no matter what planet they call home. His foray into chili began as an experiment with classic American cuisine…and ended with several crewman in sickbay with heartburn! Luckily, the chili recipe I’m sharing here today has a spice factor that’s easy to customize, so you don’t have to worry about making an unscheduled trip to sickbay. 😉
Fun fact: this is actually my grandma’s chili recipe! Once I decided I wanted to make the Rodeo Red chili from the show, I knew right away this was the recipe I wanted to use. I’ve always loved it, and it’s super easy. It was a go-to cold weather dish for my family when I was a kid, and a lot of times my mom would serve it in delicious sourdough bowls (which is an addition I HIGHLY recommend). It’s actually not that spicy on its own, but I added a few extra ingredients (Tabasco, cayenne pepper, and red pepper flakes) to give it the kick you’d expect from Neelix’s super spicy chili. Enjoy…with some milk close at hand! 🙂
Read More
Posted June 7, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 2 Comments
When I first decided to make a Star Trek: Voyager menu, I started hunting through Memory Alpha for recipe inspiration. Unlike the other Star Trek series I’ve seen, this series features a HUGE amount of food, since the ship’s cook (Neelix) is one of the main characters. As I scrolled through his various creations, algae puffs jumped out at me. They appeared in S3E6 (Remember) when Neelix serves them to an Enaran diplomat, but it isn’t their significance to the series that got my attention. It was the fact that they reminded of a recipe I already make all the time! 🙂
Everyday for lunch, my husband packs a spinach and cheese omelet, which means we ALWAYS have a bag of spinach in our fridge. However, he doesn’t need a ton of spinach per omelet, and our grocery store only sells it in big bags (they technically have small bundles of organic spinach, but it’s rarely in good condition and costs as much as a bag). Which means every week I’m scrambling to figure out how to use up almost an entire bag of spinach before it goes bad.
Enter these delicious, healthy spinach muffins from SuperHealthyKids.com. They feature whole wheat flour, honey, and a whopping 6 ounces of spinach. I stumbled upon the recipe after I decided I couldn’t eat one more bite of sauteed spinach ever again in my life. And these are GOOD. I love them; the Mister loves them; the baby loves them. They’re gone in a day or two every time I make a batch.
When I read up on Neelix’s algae puffs, I knew this was the way to go. So buckle up, crew, we’re off to bake some tasty green muffins!
Read More
Posted June 5, 2018 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Teas / 2 Comments
Coffee may be the most iconic “organic suspension” in Star Trek: Voyager, but Vulcan Spice Tea is a close second. It’s a reigning favorite of Captain Janeway, who has been known to share a cup while meeting with her Vulcan head of security, Lieutenant Tuvok. I started this blend with spiced mate tea, a high-caffeine Brazilian tea flavored with cinnamon, ginger, and orange. I paired it with orange honeybush to increase the zesty flavor and honeybush hazelnut to compliment the toastier notes in the mate. Definitely the perfect blend to sip while watching the adventures of the starship Voyager!
Read More
Posted June 29, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments
Last year when I finished my Star Trek Next Generation menu, I posted a Romulan Ale cocktail as my bonus recipe. I loved the idea of ending my Original Series menu with another drink, and I immediately thought of making a multi-colored layered drink as an homage to the different Starfleet divisions.
Turns out, I had no idea what I was signing up for! 😛 My first thought was to make a molecular cocktail in red, blue, and yellow, but I couldn’t get the drink to layer properly. I then decided to try layering plain juices and stumbled across a recipe from Katrina’s Kitchen. She uses juice and Gatorade to make an easy, delicious layered punch in red, white, and blue for the 4th of July. All I needed to do was add a little yellow food coloring to get Starfleet’s signature red, blue, and yellow colors and I was in business! 🙂 The final result was tasty and just plain gorgeous—I couldn’t believe how well the juices kept their layers, even after being jostled around!
Drink up, space travelers! We’ve got a final frontier to explore. 🙂
Read More
Posted June 27, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Teas / 3 Comments
Though Vulcan Mocha isn’t mentioned in Star Trek: Original Series (or maybe it was and I just don’t remember), it’s a very popular drink in later series, and it’s considered to have been part of Vulcan cultural cuisine for centuries. The preferred drink of many Vulcans and non-Vulcans alike, Vulcan Mocha is said to be incredibly potent in its effects, yet sweeter than Earth coffee. I was intrigued by the idea, so I decided to make a tea for it!
I’ve made several coffee-inspired tea blends in the past (like Elementary: A Sherlock Tea and Chocolate Mocha Tea for Ze Little Grey Cells from Hercule Poirot), so I relished the challenge of making something new. Like most of my “coffee teas,” I started with Adagio Tea’s Mocha Nut Mate, a toasted mate blend with distinct yet subtle nutty flavor. It’s a great foundation for building blends, since it marries well with other flavors. For this blend, I wanted something subtle, faintly sweet, and complex—the perfect go-to beverage for the universe’s most logical alien race.
I added chestnut tea to the mate for a lighter, less dominant flavor. Then I put in just a hint of Tiger’s Eye, a unique Adagio blend with flavors of chocolate and caramel. I LOVED the result. Enjoy! 🙂
Read More
Posted June 22, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments
I’ve been wanting to make these cookies ever since I saw on Pinterest that you can use a star cookie cutter to make Star Fleet insignia badges. So when the time came to whip these up, I got out my favorite recipe for royal icing sugar cookies (the same base recipe I used for my X-Files Alien Cookies) and went to work! There are several recipes about there for insignia sugar cookies, so to make mine unique, I did the detailing with food markers—a nice shortcut instead of making multiple colors of icing. And I decorated each insignia with the symbol and color of the three main Star Fleet divisions: Sciences, Command, and Operations!
Royal icing takes a little extra time than regular frosting, but you can’t beat those crisp, clean lines. Plus, the flat surface is super easy to decorate! 🙂
Read More
Posted June 20, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Reading Kits / 2 Comments
This time last year we made a Star Trek: Next Generation marathon kit, so this year we’re doing one for Original Series! We’ve got everything you need to get you through hours of intergalactic adventuring. Let’s boldly go!
Read More
Posted June 15, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes, Pop Culture Corner / 2 Comments
Red Shirts (also known as Redshirts) get a pretty raw deal in Star Trek TOS. The term refers to Star Fleet engineering and security officers who wear a red shirt as part of their uniform…and they have a tendency to die at every opportunity. It’s such a common occurrence that the term “red shirt” has become a pop culture term referring to any character who is killed off to show the situation is serious.
I wanted to dedicate a recipe to the Red Shirts, so I came up with the idea for Red Shirt Fruit Salad! It’s composed of four kinds of red fruit and drizzled with pomegranate dressing (plus some blueberries for contrast). It was easy to throw together and even easier to eat—a dish any Red Shirt would be glad to snack on as a final meal before being sent to their inevitable doom! 😉
Read More
