Star Wars: The Life Day Cookbook- Official Recipes From a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Yesterday was Life Day. It's like Star Wars Christmas. First established as part of Star Wars canon, the Wookiee people's most sacred day was introduced in the Star Wars Holiday Special on November 17th, 1978. The special is notable not just because of how bad it was, but also because it contained a small animated segment that marked the debut of the galaxy's greatest bounty hunter, Boba Fett! 2023 marked the 45th anniversary of all that and it just so happened that yesterday coincidentally when I finished reading this Life Day themed cookbook.

The book is written as if it really did exist in the Star Wars universe. The writer is acclaimed chef of Maz Kanata, Strono 'Cookie' Tuggs, who is a main character at the Star Wars experience at Disney, was also the writer of the Galaxy's Edge cookbook from 2019.

There are over 3 dozen recipes written from Cookie's perspective. He talks about the actual ingredients and the planets that they come from. Thankfully, you're not expected to have bantha meat and mudhorn eggs on hand. Earth-bound writers Jenn Fujikawa and Marc Sumerak assist to translate Cookie's recipes with the human equivalent ingredients. 

If you look over the recipes closely, you'll realize that the Star Wars universe enjoys holiday treats that are similar to ours. Gloomroot Pancakes are the latkes with sour cream and apple sauce we enjoy at Hanukkah. Wroshyr Sap Cider is the hot apple cider that keeps us warm near a roaring fire. There are even some non-holiday recipes involved too. The color-changing Cirilian Noodle Salad is the magical Unicorn Noodles dish I've made with younger students for years now. Can't afford to buy supplies at the Black Spire Outpost? Cookie has you set with several DIY projects to make life day robes, trees and orbs. 

Speaking of the orbs. For Life Day yesterday, I taught some of my Culinary Arts students how to make a mini version of the jelly orbs recipes. I didn't have the right ingredients. But I was able to use a fair substitution. Hopefully after Thanksgiving, we'll give it another go with the required agar agar powder.

The photos in this cookbook were absolutely stunning. So colorful and vibrant. The food stylists behind these portraits deserve beaucoup accolades and I hope they've won some awards for them. 

Lots of great ideas. Maybe next year for some holiday fun in a galaxy far, far away, I might use recipes from this cookbook to my students to do a culinary venture based on Life Day. My student's might not enjoy it as much as me. But it'll be a heck of a lot less stressful than having to do a Thanksgiving themed sale. 

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars. 

As Cooked on TikTok by Emily Stevenson and TikTok

TikTok.

If you ask me, it's the single most important piece of media to influence and inspire amateur chefs and foodies in the last 5 years. In the 80s, it was PBS cooking shows. The 90s and 2000s, it was Food Network. The 2010s was the decade of abrasive chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay. Today, if a student comes to me wanting to explore a new recipe, the idea usually came in the form of a video from TikTok.

Due to the apps questionable tracking methods of users data, I don't use TikTok. Plus my school blocks it. So if a student wants me to see something on the social media site, they usually have to show the video from their phones. So when I discovered this officially licensed cookbook over the summer, I jumped at the chance to buy it for my culinary classes. 

The recipes are all from TikTok users. Add to it some cooking tips from professional chefs such as Blue Ginger's Ming Tsai. Throw in some useful cooking hacks from the TikTok tech team and include QR codes in order to access each recipe and you're as close to becoming a TikTok chef without being an official user of the site.

My students were very excited when I showed them this book. Some laughed, thinking it was absurd to buy a cookbook when I can get all the recipes for free on TikTok. But just about everyone I shred this book with was enthusiastic to use this new resource.

I decided to incorporate this cookbook into my lesson plans under the unit for recipe development as well as the unit for pricing and budgeting. Incorporating social media technology into a culinary business was also explored. We tested out several recipes ranging from a cake recipe that only called for ice cream and flour to a lasagna noodles recipe that called packs of ramen noodles. 

My students were very surprised at how the ice cream cake turned out. But I explained to them that ice cream with it's milk, fat, sugar and eggs has everything else you need to make a cake with in addition to the other ingredient of flour. So if you are in a pinch or can't afford all the ingredients that a cake recipe calls for, you can make a semi-decent cake alternative similar to a pound cake loaf consistency.

The reaction to the ramen lasagna was mixed. Some folks liked it. Others abhorred it. All wanted to know why someone would use ramen noodles to make a lasagna. I explained that a lot of users on TikTok are Millennials and Gen Zers on a budget. You can buy 4 packs of ramen for almost as much as 1 pound of lasagna noodles - or cheaper. Frugal cooking calls for creative substitutions and as a chef who's known for utilizing items about to go bad or expire in creative and affordable ways, it's one thing that I really admire about the TikTok community. 

We also explored food trends and how recipe ideas go viral by making one of the foods that put TikTok on the culinary map: cloud bread. Essentially egg whites, baking soda, some sort of dairy and of course food coloring, these tie-dyed little cakes are like eating a eggy little cloud. We also learned that with something as simple as cloud bread, it's really easy to mess it up. The easiest recipes usually are.

There's a bunch of recipes that I personally hope to explore. Full of quirky and creative ideas that can also be rather affordable, I think I found a great modern resource for my culinary students; that's also a book! Sure, my students could use the app on their phone. But one problem I noticed with TikTok is that nothing is written down. Unless you follow the video precisely and can remember all the steps, my students often get lost and tend to forget something important. So while the app is free, having everything collected in a book that can easily be photocopied and shared with multiple cooking teams is a handy tool to help bring a relatable culinary resource safely into my classroom without breaking the confidentiality of anyone's online presence.

Plus a portion of the sale of this cookbook benefits No Kid Hungry; a very worthwhile cause that I support and personally battle every single day within my school's struggling community.

Worth Consuming.

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.

Cooking With Deadpool

This was a birthday or Christmas gift from my Bride last year. You'd think that a cookbook by a fictional character would mostly be useful for entertainment enjoyment purposes and not be very useful to a professional chef and culinary teacher. Yet, this has got to be one of the most technically sound cookbooks that I have ever encountered in the celebrity chef/series franchise cookbook realm.

Segments are on advanced culinary terms like mise en place and spatchcock chicken. Articles on menu planning and the right types of knives to use abound in this book. There's some basic baking and chocolate work. Add in breakfast cookery, appetizers and breakfast and Cooking With Deadpool feels like the year-long Culinary Arts I course that I teach 9th-12th graders! Except Deadpool and his creative team don't seem to mind taking photos of work and the various steps more trickier recipes need in order to be successful executed!

That's not to say that this cookbook isn't oozing with Wade Wilson's signature off-kilter look on things. Each recipe has an introduction made by Deadpool that will dive into his past history as inspiration for the dish. Friend and X-Man Cable provides a couple of recipes for the book. Tex-Mex cooking gets a lot of love in this book. Spider-Man provides his Aunt May's famous recipe of wheat cakes! And yes! There is an entire chapter devoted to the Merc With a Mouth's beloved chimichangas!

While I did really appreciate the technical merits of this book, I did feel like some of the ingredient choices were odd. Okay- it's a cookbook written by Deadpool. It's not supposed to be totally normal. For instance, the tres leches cake uses pomegranate for moisture and garnish. That just sounds strange to me. The Latin American restaurant down the street from me uses cherries and it's A-MAZE-ING! So when it comes to the ingredient lists, feel free to adjust the recipe as needed without changing the steps. I'm making the ceviche recipe for my wife, but I didn't put as much onion or jalapeno as I know that's not quite her taste. As for some of the fusion dishes, like the beef stroganoff inspired meat pies, I admire the creativity and inspiration. Putting chopped celery in a tuna casserole is just blasphemy.

A book that teaches about cooking while very much full of Deadpool humor and lore!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

Written by Marc Sumerak. Recipes by Elena P. Craig.

The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List

A Hanukkah present from my Jewish bride, this book is part cookbook and part chronicle of the Jewish experience in relation to food. This book came about from an article of the same name that appeared on the Jewish culture website, Tablet. Edited by Tablet editor Alana Newhouse, several dozen notable Jewish chefs, restaurateurs and foodies wax poetic on Jewish foods all the way from matzoh to schmaltz to even yes, bacon. Just because it's a Jewish food, that doesn't mean you should eat it...

Names I recognized from this book were Molly Yeh, Michael Twitty (a personal favorite of mine) and Zac Posen. There was one writer whose name I cannot remember and to be honest, I'm glad I forgot it. It was the pseudonym of an African American rabbi. Thankfully, he only wrote 2 pieces in this book. But it was enough to make you lose your appetite. The only times that the F-word appears in this book, it's this gentleman's diatribes full of piss and vinegar that were just unasked for. 

The foods listed in this book are not ranked. There is 1 exception that most of the contributors agreed was essential to Jewish cooking, cuisine and culture. I won't reveal what it was. But I can say that I agree with the consensus. But I did disagree with 1 food that I felt was wrongly absent. Where are the knishes?

If you had me name the top 5 most Jewish foods, the knish, a meat, cheese or potato filled hand pie, would probably be the 3rd thing I come up with. There are some dishes that seem similar in this read. But in a book that arranges by alphabet instead of rank, the Ks were devoid of the knish!

If the Knish is in here under another name, then I really wish that this book had a glossary in the back. There were a lot of Yiddish words that I didn't know and unless I went to Google them, I also didn't understand. A small 1-2 page listing of some of the most common Yiddish and other Jewish terms from other languages was needed.

Jewish cooking gets ignored quite a bit in the culinary world. Most students I teach know that pork isn't Kosher. But they have zero idea what being Kosher means. This book is going to be a great help in that. I'm also hoping to utilize some of the recipes in this book with my students. There's a lot of dishes that are amazingly complex for a cuisine often thought of comprised of mostly peasant food and dishes that grandma made. That assessment could not be further from the truth. I made an amazing red lentil stew from this book. Other than my accidentally forgetting to add the lemon juice at the end, it turned out so freaking well. And there was at least 30 more recipes on my list now to try in the future.

Also, there were at least 1 or 2 books from some of the contributors of this book that I am interested in one day getting my hands on. So, there's a ton of potential more learning and exploration on the horizon for me and my pupils ahead. 

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

Bryson Fars: The Millionaire Creator/Jewel: The Magical Chef (Family Comic Friday)

I'm diverting a little bit on today's Family Comic Friday post. Instead of family friendly comics and graphic novels, I want to highlight a couple of books made for kids BY KIDS!

Last weekend, my bride and I went to the Geek & Grub Market at Fred Fletcher Park in Raleigh, NC. Geek & Grub is held monthly in Raleigh (with other locations like Durham, NC, Charlotte, NC and in Virginia occasionally).  There were food trucks, bakeries, toys, comics, and games. A costume contest! Prizes! Lots of fun for all ages! This month's theme was super heroes and despite the rain, there managed to be a fairly decent sized crowd. 

It was in the vendors area that I met the creators of the 2 books I am featuring, Elijah B. and Jewel L. They're siblings. Elijah was around age 10 or 11. Jewel was younger. I think she said she was 8. It's a family effort as their Dad, Ron L. is the illustrator of their books. 

Elijah B.'s book was titled Bryson Fars: The Millionaire Game Creator. It's an origin story of how Bryson Fars and his older brother and sister worked together to create a video game that combined race cars with football. Bryson is invited to showcase his new creation which gains the interest of a famous video game designer named Sizzle McDougall, who wishes to turn it into his studios' next big online offering. However, things are not all as they seem as suddenly Bryson's program seems to have a virus and cannot operate just as Sizzle is unveiling his new game, one based on Bryson's idea!

Bryson Lars is a chapter book. So I think it's something kids, especially those interested in video games and computer coding & design, will enjoy. I'm thinking those in grades 3-5 is the target audience, as some of the coding concepts can be a bit advanced. But as always, if you have a 2nd grader who can whip up a web page better than you can, then most definitely, buy them this book!

Jewel L,'s book is called Jewel: The Magical Chef. It's a fanciful book written in rhyme about a chef with magical animal friends and amazing cooking skills. One day, a wicked witch cooks up some dastardly treats in hopes of turning the children of the kingdom into goat-creatures. Can Jewel cook up an antidote to save her friends? With the delicious recipe at the back of the book, there's a very good chance that she can!

Jewel: The Magical Chef is a book that younger readers can enjoy. K-5 to 2nd is the age range I put this book. However, if you have a 3rd or 4th grader who is interested in cooking, sharing the fruit salad recipe at the end of this book would be a great way to show aspiring cooks and chefs to craft their own recipes. I'm going to share this recipe with my Culinary students next semester and they're in high school!

Plus, there's several black & white sketch pages in the back that I think you could color. So, consider Jewel: The Magical Chef to be a sort of activity book that's full of fun and perfect for a rainy summer day. By the way- I hear that Jewel L. is working on a recipe coloring book. I'll be sure to snag several copies of that for my students and other aspiring culinarians when it drops!

Both Bryson Fars: The Millionaire Creator and Jewel: The Magical Chef are available for sale on Amazon! These two children can't even drive a car and they've got a pair of books on the biggest online market platform in the world! As American Ninja Warrior's Matt Iseman says 'What's your excuse?"

Elijah B's book will help inspire children to learn about creating their own video games and computer programs (and hopefully they'll stay away from making computer viruses). Jewel L's book will inspire youngsters to cook and create their own recipes. Together, these young writers might inspire the young reader in your life to become writers as well! 

The road to becoming a writer isn't hard. It just starts with 1 sentence on a blank page!

Best of luck to all future dreamers!

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen

    The graphic novel medium is pretty much an untapped resource when it comes to food. Yet, with it's visual aesthetic, you'd think that this would be the perfect venue for it. Maybe that's because no one's been able to crack the code- until now...

    Lucy Knisley's Relish is a glimpse at her life story and how food has had such an impact on her life and that of her family. Her mother was a superstar employee at Dean & Deluca and later a much sought after caterer in Northern New York. Her uncle ran a trendy Big Apple gourmet shop in the 80s and her father is a consoussier of the Manhattan restaurant scene. 

    Added to this neat tale are several recipes. Knisley draws out pictures of each item and provides unique insight into the selection of products, substitution of ingredients, and other variants. Her pasta carbonara recipe is something that I am dying to try out one day soon.

    This 2013 graphic novel by First Second has a suggested reading of ages 6-12 but really, this is a memoir and tribute to food that any age can enjoy. I think it should be required reading at the culinary school where I teach. It's got some many great insights on food trends, what it means to be a chef, and how food brings people and cultures together.

     A really awesome read that I highly recommend. Be on the lookout for other food related graphic novels by Knisley, like I am: French Milk (2008) and An Age of License (2014.)

   Worth Consuming

   Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.