Best Fandom Cookbooks For A Variety Of Occasions
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We all must eat. For those of us who enjoy our fandom(s), there are many ways to celebrate our interests while incorporating them into mealtime. For those of us with families and children, this can be a fantastic way to get the kids engaged at mealtimes and try new foods.
Browse through any bookstore, and you will find that there are many different cookbooks that connect food to fandom. I will go through some of my cookbooks that I have at home and have proven favorites with the whole family.
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For the Younger Crowd: ‘Sesame Street’
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A favorite when my children were younger, we still use C is for Cooking: Recipes from the Street, Let’s Cook!, and Sesame Street EATS: 50 Recipes from the Neighborhood (Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition) as staples in our kitchen. These cookbooks are designed for young children to accompany their beloved adults in the kitchen, along with their beloved Muppet friends. Susan McQuillan, a Registered Dietician, compiled the recipes for C is for Cooking: Recipes from the Street, and Let’s Cook!, so all of the recipes are heavy on healthy while having a whimsical touch.
Who wouldn’t love biting into a bright green Oscar Monster Muffin? These cookbooks introduce children to cuisine from around the world, using Grover’s Global Travels to introduce Gado-Gado from Indonesia and Chinese Meatballs with Sesame Rice, while having comfortable standbys such as Big Bird’s ABC Chicken Noodle Soup and cute ways to get the little ones to eat their veggies with Elmo’s Little Trees and Sunshine. There are cute pictures to accompany each recipe, tips to expedite the recipe for maximum efficiency, and, of course, comments from our Muppet friends: The Count extols children to count the number of eggs in Zoe’s Easy Cheesy Waffles and Abby Cadabby explains how pumpkins grow and why they are good for us in her Pumpkin Muffin recipe. A lot of fun for the whole family.
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More Adult Fare: ‘The Geek’s Cookbook’ (Liguori Lecomte)
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If you would rather have a more adult fare, this might be for you. Billed on the cover as “Easy Recipes Inspired by Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and More!”, this slim book is by Liguori Lecomte, a chef who describes himself as a “food gamer”. With chapters divided into “Cinema”, “TV Series”, “Video Games”, and “Comics and Animation”, these recipes get their inspiration from a variety of sources and use a variety of ingredients. For the “Matrix Burger”, Lecomte calls for half an ounce of Cuttlefish ink, an ingredient I haven’t seen in too many other recipes.
It turns out that you don’t use it for writing on your food, but it mixes in with the other ingredients. You can also recreate the donuts eaten by the Albuquerque police in “Breaking Bad”, but with blue meth sprinkled on top, in the “Donuts & Blue Meth. B****!” recipe. Not sure I’d want my kids to start asking me questions about that one, but the end result does look tasty.
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Comic Cookbooks: ‘Peanuts Family Cookbook’ (Published By WeldonOwen)
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This is billed as “Delicious Dishes for Kids to make with their Favorite Grown-Ups”, so no need to edit anything here, and the recipes call for ingredients that are usually found in most kitchens. Each of these recipes also has a correlating comic that shows where the food in the recipe got its inspiration. As it says in the introduction,” Family meals were an important part of Schulz’s day, and as a father of five, his children’s mealtime antics sometimes influenced the strip. Schulz also remembered how the school lunch period could be a time not only for meaningful conversations but also for personal turmoil, which found its way into Peanuts on several occasions”.
These inspired dishes range from snacks like “Joe Shlabotnik’s Baseball Snack”, which is a variation on Chex Mix, to dinners with “Miss Othmar’s Favorite Chicken Pie” (you can use a frozen pie crust for this!) to breakfast with “Woodstock’s Eggs-in-a-Frame”. Along with the original comics, there are also cute illustrations showing the Peanuts gang enjoying the food that is mentioned. With Valentine’s Day coming up, you can make “Peggy Jean’s Chocolate-Dipped Shortbread Hearts”, which is a pretty simple sugar cookie recipe (as long as you are adept at rolling the dough) with the added twist of dipping the cookies into melted chocolate. Of course, there is also the “Sweet Babboos”, a cute variation on a jelly thumbprint cookie. If you want to wait until next fall, you can wait in the pumpkin patch with your “Great Pumpkin Pie” (this one includes making your own crust from scratch). These are pretty easy recipes that kids and adults can whip up easily together.
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Best Cookie Recipe: ‘The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookiee Cookies And Other Galactic Recipes’ (Robin Davis)
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Who could resist a title like that? And I love the way the pictures, taken by Frankie Frankeny, are staged with the action figures acting alongside the food. Han Solo shoots the ketchup onto the “Han-Burgers”, Obi-Wan Kenobi uses his light saber to fend off the toothpick sticking out of the tomato in the “Obi-Wan Kebabs”, and the gang from Jabba’s palace hanging out on top of the Jello for the “Jabba Jingle” makes this book a delight to peruse. This is another family-friendly book for kids to use alongside their favorite adults, and there is easy kid-and-adult-friendly food in here.
You can make your own “Yoda Soda”, which I think would go over well at a birthday party, and there are four ways to make “Jawa Jive Milkshakes”. You can start your day with “Twin Sun Toast”, have a “Greedo Burrito” for lunch, and then finish with “Crazy Cantina Chili” for dinner. And to top it all off - Wookiee Cookies! This starts as a basic chocolate-chip cookie recipe, but it calls for both milk chocolate and semi-sweet chips, which, in my opinion, gives a more complex taste. The recipe also calls for cinnamon, which really ups the taste factor and sets these chocolate-chip cookies apart from others.
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Travel-Guide Cookbook: ‘My Pokemon Cookbook: Delicious Recipes Inspired By Pikachu And Friends (Victoria Rosenthal)
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We just acquired this cookbook during the holidays, so my family hasn’t gotten a chance to really get into it yet. But, looking through the pages, I like how each section is divided into Pokemon regions, such as Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, Alola, and Galar. Within each region, each Pokemon character has a recipe inspired by it. The author says in her introduction that the book is meant to be “family-friendly. Pokemon has fans of all ages, and another goal of this book is to bring the family into the kitchen and combine a love of Pokemon with a love of food…
There are a few more complicated recipes that will require extra care and a helping hand, but there are also plenty of meals that are easily approachable for anyone new to cooking”. There are the adorable “Pikachu Lemon Tarts” that use pretty common ingredients - you just have to watch how you decorate! “Pyroar Bruschetta” plays off of Pyroar’s 10,000 degree fire-breath and uses Calabrian chile peppers to get a little heat going. So, while this isn’t a travel cookbook of Earthly countries, it is a cute way to get to know Pokemon regions and try new ingredients in otherwise familiar food. I especially like that there is a “Dietary Considerations” page at the back. This page checks off which recipes are gluten-free, nondairy, vegan, and vegetarian. A nice consideration, especially for those of us who have to worry about food allergies!
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Best History Book: ‘The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook’ (Dinah Bucholz)
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For being “unofficial” and “unauthorized”, Mrs. Bucholz certainly did her research to make this a very informative book! With over 150 recipes, Dinah Bucholz researched every mention of food in the Harry Potter book series. This leads to some very interesting recipes and background information, as food is mentioned in many Harry Potter scenes, to what the Dursleys have for dinner, Hogwarts feasts, and the meals that Mrs. Weasley conjures up. As the series takes place in Great Britain, some of the recipes have ingredients that might be unfamiliar to American kitchens, such as treacle, or light, syrup, but there are suggestions for substitutions.
The reader gets to learn about society’s great debt to Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten, who invented Dutch chocolate, eliminating pools of grease floating on top of mugs of hot chocolate; that walnuts used to be pickled when used in pie recipes; and how baking soda revolutionized baking on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1800s. I have used many of these recipes with my own family, and we have yet to make one that wasn’t tasty - even mashed parsnips were very good!
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So this has been just a small taste of the different fandom cookbooks that are out there. Each has a unique cuisine and allows the budding cook(s) to branch out and try something new, even if it’s taking an old recipe and adding one new ingredient or spice to it. If you try any of these, it will be sure to spice up your meals and give your family and companions something to enjoy together!
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Photography by Avraham & Nathaniel Gorin
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