Firefly, the Big Damn Cookbook

You can't take the pie from meeeeee....

I am a big fan of many of the franchise affiliated cookbooks, and I have been particularly appreciate of Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who writes a lot of them, including this one.  I was first introduced to her with a Feast of Ice and Fire; she also did Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, the original World of Warcraft, and the Shire cookbook, which are all enjoyable.  Among those of her popular works I don't have are the Elder Scrolls cookbook, the updated World of Warcraft cookbook, and the now official "Game of Thrones" cookbook.  She also runs a blog that updates with recipe and addresses any errata in first editions at the Inn at the Crossroads.

But I digress.  You browncoats are here for the grub.

The book is organized as Kaylee building a cookbook using both ideas from Serenity's crew, along with sample recipes from Blue Sun's expansive catalogue of foodstuffs and sundries, since no settler can head off to the outer planets without a crate of Blue Sun supplies.  The book even includes River's very problematic Ice Planets, and if I ever get a free weekend and a hankering, I may try to build one of them.  Saffron naturally stopped by (though no one was willing to kiss her) to drop off her bao recipe.

I enjoyed the flavor text of the book.  It's not as deep or expansive as some of the recipes in Galaxy's Edge, nor are the recipes usually as creative, understandably.  The recipes are written basically in the character's voices.  The recipes also fit the characters and the environment.  Mal likes a lot of your ranch classics, ribs and baked beans.  Jayne likes basic needs, your pork jerky and spaghetti casserole.  Inara, of course, is incredibly classy, offering up her salad and companion tea.  And nearly everything has the show's light dusting of nonspecific Asian flavor.  Five-spice is the go to spice for most of the recipes and you'll see a lot of sesame oil, matcha, and rice vinegar throughout the book.

Like Monroe-Cassel's other books, the photography in this is very nice, giving you good pictures of the recipes along with table settings and surroundings that keep you very much in universe.  Also like her other books, this one has a listing at the back for all the foods within that are gluten free, vegan, etc, and makes notes of difficulty level (from middling to problematic) for each recipe.

Let's start with some breakfast, shall we?  We were initially planning on making Simon's Eggy Oat Mush, but my darling significant other swore that what turned out to be grits were rolled oats.  They were not.

*However*, my darling SO had never had grits before despite spending an unhealthy amount of time in Myrtle Beach, and as I learned to actually like them in the South, figured it was time to dig into the Blue Sun section and make their cheesy grits.  Unfortunately, as I live outside the 'Verse, I wasn't able to obtain Blue Sun products, so I had to make due with Quaker Oats.

This is a basic cheesy grits recipe that's then baked for an hour after you prepare them on the stovetop.  The recipe adds in some sweetcorn, which were substituted with some finely chopped defrosted vegetables.  I know; I know.

They were very good; baking very much transforms grits into their more polenta like rather than oatmeal like (in texture, not in flavor) manifestation, and my man is now a fan of grits.  Though this was a Blue Sun recipe idea, I feel like it would have also fit Jayne's contribution well.

For dinner, it was to be Mal's Shadow ribs with a double contribution by Shephard Book, both in tomatoes as a side, and in his mulled wine (must have been fun at the Abbey!)

The ribs:

They look decent and taste decent, and are pretty embarrassingly easy (the hardest part was finding a bag big enough to marinate them all), but are not wildly interested.  You marinate them in an Asian style glaze overnight and then bake them for 90 minutes.  That's it.

However, I tend to be a person that prefers when ribs kiss fire.  Granted, this is impractical on a space ship, but it would have been nice for Mal to give us that lovely barbecue recipe from his ranch on Shadow.  I would have also gone lower and slower.  But no one is going to complain.  They're ribs.

Tomatoes are in high season (so is corn, but we hadn't planned on needing it for breakfast), so while Book's tomatoes are incredibly simple, I'm glad they were, because they highlighted the absolute perfection of the tomato while giving it a little Asian umami.  This is a recipe to make in the summer, not with some watery greenhouse tomatoes mid January.

Funnily enough these worked well with the ribs both because ribs are heavy and these are light, but also because the sauce for the tomatoes was very similar to the marinade for the ribs.  Stock up on soy sauce if you buy this cookbook!

For the remainder, no pictures (sorry!), the mulled wine was pretty much a mulled wine.  I'm a big fan of mulled wine so no issues there.  You could mix the fruit up if you wanted (the recipe calls for half an apple and canned mandarin oranges, which we used, but you could substitute any seasonal fruit you liked, though the light syrup from the oranges added an extra sweetness).

The other we cooked was Wash's chicken and dumplings.  Sadly, I was not involved in this one as I was extremely focused on falling asleep on the couch.  So my lovely SO did it for me and woke me up when dinner was ready (gotta love him).  We cheated on the biscuits (it's a biscuit-topped style chicken and dumplings rather than a dough ball in the mix chicken and dumplings) by buying them in a can, but it uses a basic white sauce that's a recipe given in the early pages of the book, and it came out to be a lovely variant of chicken and dumplings.  Like the ribs though, I can say there was nothing overtly marvelous about them.  They were competent, and if you love chicken and dumplings, you'll love this book's, but they didn't stand out to me.

Overall, it's an excellent cookbook, and a fun way to accessorize your Firefly/Serenity watch parties.  I can say that having gone through it multiple times now, I could see myself making every recipe in it, with the possible exception of the protein cake, just because I have few occasions where I need to build a layered cake, and even fewer where anyone will respond positively to the can of chickpeas in it.