Eevee Latte

Another day, another recipe, and today's is perhaps the nicest cheat of them all: a latte art latte. I went into this recipe, not a coffee drinker, and I came out of it still not a coffee drinker, but now I know just barely how to use a coffee machine, and I have a greater appreciation for baristas. 

I've been deeply harrowed by this innocent latte.

I would like to preface this by admitting that Eevee is by far my favourite Pokémon, and I loved her from the moment Bebe handed her to me in Pokemon Diamond. Everything about her is so sweet and adorable, and truly, truly truly did I want to do good by her on this recipe. I really did, but fate said no. I did her so dirty, y'all.

Finding the cup was the easy part, I actually already had a near identical mug to the one Cafe Mix presents, and making the latte wasn't too difficult once I figured out the machinery, but it was the latte art itself that ruined me and Eevee's friendship, and for that I am deeply scarred. 

After some debate, I decided to cut out a stencil for the Eevee art out of paper, with any flimsy or detached bits, like the eyes, attached with thin paper strips to avoiding filling in any areas that didn't need to be filled. I made a couple of prototypes, but ultimately settling on the one I cut out best. My next mistake was trusting that that would be enough.

In hindsight, mixing a hot milky latte and cocoa powder with a simple piece of paper was a bad choice. Next time, if there is one, I will first laminate my stencil so I may use it more than once. I, however, did not do this first time around, and having shredded my back-ups on thinking I would not need them, I sealed my fate. The second the cocoa powder hit paper, everything disintegrated, including my will to redo the latte. 

Anyway, if you take anything from this, its that no one is above hubris or stupidity. Either way though, I got a good laugh out of it. The blob I got instead of Eevee was cute in its own way, even if not flattering, so I can't say I was unhappy with it. Just please... don't follow in my footsteps on this one. 

Tastiness

Now, I have never been a fan of coffee, tragically, but I will say that the frothed milk and cocoa powder were a delicious combo, like a hyped up hot chocolate. Pretty good!

Difficulty: Recipe

I'd say this one is a little more tough if you don't have a coffee machine on hand, as frothing up the milk may take much longer on a stove, but its not impossible!

Difficultly: Accuracy

As mentioned, the mug was already done and dusted, but the stencil was a mess. I'd say it evened it out to a medium accuracy.

Final Recipe

Ingredients

    - milk, ready to be steamed 

    - espresso coffee

    - cocoa powder

    - eevee cocoa powder stencil (homemade and laminated)

1. Prepare your espresso in your Pokéball mug, and set aside.

2. With your milk in another mug or small jug, bring to the machine and submerge frothing wand into milk, following any specific machine instructions first. Ours, for example, requires the back to be filled with water before use. Why does it need that you ask? No idea!

3. Hold the milk in position until creamy and of an appropriate temperature. Ideal frothed milk has lots of tiny, fluffy bubbles and wobbles in a really satisfying way. 

4. Pop any large bubbles that may interfere with the cocoa powder by tapping on the side of the container, and then gently pour over the espresso.

5. Moving your stencil over the latte, sift some cocoa powder over the latte using a small sieve or teaspoon, if you're feeling brave. Dab any unfilled spots with a cocoa-dipped cocktail stick. Ta da! One Eevee latte, ready to go! (Hopefully your's is much more intact that mine!)

Dugtrio Sandwich Trio

The Dugtrio Sandwich Trio, as endearing to look at as the Pokemon itself, is the strangest test of my force of will I have ever encountered, and I'm not sure why I chose to torture myself in such a very specific way, but, nonetheless, I survived this random encounter. 

Unlike many of the recipes that will be prepared on this fantasy food journey, this particular lunchtime snack has an official recipe, which can be found here. I followed this the best I could, considering all instructions are listed in Japanese. 

I came across a number of snags trying to recreate this item as closely as possible, and most of this was down to cut the bread. As it turns out, finding accurately curved bread in suburban England is a little more difficult than I had anticipated-- most everyday pre-cut loaves have the typical loaf shape only (almost cut-mushroom in silhouette) and our dear Dugtrio has no hips-- they're surfboard shaped at best. This made my recreation a little more curvy than the game version, but hey, maybe this Dugtrio has a little more junk in their trunk, he might like pilates, I haven't asked. 

The second issue with the bread was how the original recipe added the eyes. In the video, they cut two holes out of tinfoil, presumably to protect the bread in a toaster oven or press, which I, unfortunately do not have. I attempted to recreate this with an oven (as its not safe to put tinfoil in a typical toaster, and I strongly do not recommend it) and gained very little results. My solution was to simply add the eyes after traditional toasting by pasting on some careful globs of Marmite, not just to give some more colour to Dugtrio's otherwise one-tone face, but make the eyes more shapely than the tinfoil technique was otherwise allowing. 

Finally, getting Dugtrio to stand on its own uh... nubbin legs, was insanely difficult, especially with all three of them struggling together. After a number of attempts to try to give them the stat boost they needed to hold themselves up, I eventually elected to hit the B button and prevent evolution: this was now a relaxed and reclined Diglett, who didn't need to stand up because he was uhh... napping. Everybody loves a relaxed 'Mon, and while attempts to prop the trio up were tried and tested, there was little that actively changed this without the integrity of the sandwich being at risk. 

Additionally to this, I also adapted the type of lettuce I used, as only iceberg was available, and didn't cook the prosciutto ham prior to applying it to the sandwich, just as it didn't need to go in the oven, and doing so was saving both precious time and energy. 

All in all, the recipe took about 20 minutes to complete, including prep, but not including the time it took me while experimenting for the best result. Experimenting took most of a weekend, but, worth it in the end for a very Diglett-looking sandwich!

Tastiness

I may be slightly biased, as I am not the greatest fan of tomatoes in the world, but, as far as sandwiches go, the Dugtrio Sandwich Trio is fairly basic. The overall combination works in terms of cohesion, and the number of layered ingredients certainly makes for a hearty sandwich. I think next time I would also like to add something else to the face, other than burnt in circles or Marmite eyes; a family member suggested I try raisins, and I can imagine that would drastically change the flavour combination, for worse or better. I think wasn't by any means bad, but it would not be my partner Pokémon of choice, as to try to consume three sandwiches this big in one go may take the strength of a Fighting type much greater than me. 

Difficulty: Recipe

Its a sandwich with a face. I'd say its pretty beginner level!

Difficulty: Accuracy 

Recreating the game image was going to be difficult enough, and initially I thought with a real-life recipe to assist me, this would be an easy recipe to complete. I was not correct on that one. As the recipe is in Japanese, and I was unable to translate it, I was guessing at certain steps at what they were asking me to do, and I had to adapt some anyway to work around aspects that were not working, namely the application of the eyes. 

Mainly, the presentation was the most difficult part of this one-- finding a round wooden board to hold my sweet Dugtrio friend securely was far more time consuming than the actual sandwich construction, and faffing over the bread type took a lot of time prior to making the recipe. If anything, I spent the most wasted time on this recipe debating on how much of a cop out it would be to avoid making the companion tomato soup and finding a visually identical mug to with it, and once I demoted my sandwich-y boy to a first evolution, I decided the soup was overkill. If you're not going for total accuracy (which I was, and its quickly becoming my nemesis in this project), then this is a cute set of sandwiches that are, all things considered, pretty fun to make! I would recommend telling any guests about the cocktail stick holding on the nose ahead of time though. Nobody likes an unwelcome tongue piercing. 

Final Recipe

Ingredients

    - white bread/brown bread (whichever best dugs your trio)

    - iceburg lettuce

    - sliced prosciutto ham or bacon

    - sliced cheddar cheese

    - large beef tomatoes 

    - plum tomatoes (sliced lengthways)

    - mustard

    - butter spread

    - marmite (for eyes)

Dugtrio Version

1. First, prepare your ingredients. You'll need 6 slices of your bread of choice, 6 slices of ham or bacon, 3 slices of cheese, (at least) two beef tomatoes sliced evenly-- you should have 4 tomato slices per sandwich-- two plum tomatoes sliced in half (one half will be extra), some mustard and butter ready to spread, and marmite on standby for the eyes. All vegetables should be rinsed before using. 

2. Toast your bread. This can be either by oven, or conventional toaster, dealer's choice. 

3. Add butter to your first 3 slices of toast, and mustard to the other 3, spreading evenly. 

4. Gently lay a leaf or two of lettuce across the buttery slices, making sure there's enough to cover the whole of every slice. 

5. Add the prosciutto or bacon on top of the lettuce. If using prosciutto, cooking is optional, but if using bacon, fry in a pan on on a grill until fully cooked before adding to the sandwiches.  

6. Next, on goes the cheese. I had one big slice ready for each sandwich, but small chunks also works fine. 

7. Tomato goes on. Add two tomato slices per sandwich, placing them vertically down. 

8. Add some more lettuce on top of the tomato. 

9. Flip over your mustard bread slices onto the rest of the sandwich. 

10. Time for those Dugtrio eyes! I used a small stencil made of tinfoil to dab on the marmite correctly, but do freehand if you're confident enough to! I wasn't, hence the magic that is tinfoil stencils. 

11. Using a wooden cocktail skewer, position and attach the plum tomatoes halves as a nose. 

12. Present, and you're ready to go! 

Diglett Version

1. Exactly the same as above, except you make just the one sandwich boy! Enjoy!

Project Outline

Pokemon food! We've all seen it, we've all wanted it, and we've all liked pictures on Pinterest of people trying to recreate it. Every person I've ever known has had to feed themself at least once in their lifetime, and Pokemon makes that reality so much more fun with bright colours, silly names for things, and happy, happy animals friends that are always along for the ride. The food options in Pokemon are pretty varied, up until the most recent game however it was-- it was mainly sugar. Lots and lots and lots and lots of sugar. No wonder Red doesn't talk, its likely the poor guy has no functioning teeth left. 

But Sword and Shield brings a brand new plethora of foods from curry with apples, to curry with spam, and not only that, but Pokemon Cafe Mix, new this year, brings in even more scrumptiously visual recipes for all the pokéfamily to enjoy. However, it does bring to mind the question: are these foods actually good? In game, you're a ten year old child, by yourself, in the middle of nowhere, trying to make nutritious meals in a giant wok so uhh... probably not, uh-- but its worth testing!

Surviving in the wild area is all about using the local flora and fauna to your dietary advantage, and you can use anything you find in the wild to help you cook up that perfect meal for Pikachu-- like that shady man in the woods that sells you bones-- whose bones are they? Are they human? I don't know, but I do hope that they'll make good curry, and that's what's important! The various meals that the Pokemon world has to offer boast tons of in game advantages, friendship boosts, status healing, fame (for some reason?), but so many of them are made by inexperienced hands, and without a recipe, so how good are they really?

Food as a concept within games is very interesting by nature; its one of very few things that can't be entirely replicated in game-reality-- eating a curry with Inteleon may fill me with warm emotional fuzzies, but it does nothing to functionally fill me up, y'know? There's no simulated way to eat, as any food 'eaten' within a game does little to impact reality, and the in game rewards are often not for the pleasure of eating, but the necessity, as meals function as HP or Stat boosts, to prevent in-game starvation, or to gain a temporary effect. In Pokemon, food is predominantly purely for the Pokemon themselves: even famous interregional snacks like the Casteliacone or Shalour Sable, which are seemingly human grade, are never for the player themselves to eat; more for Pikachu, I guess. Mystery Dungeon games allowed somewhat of an in for a player seeking Pokésnacks, as once positioned as the Pokemon they were newly able to munch on Apples and Gummis, but Sword and Shield have been the only main games so far to visually indicate that humans are able to eat food too, at the player's discretion and imaginary flavour choice of course. 

Why then, do we seek to eat within games, or for that matter, why seek to recreate them in real-life? Would this suggest eating them in games alone is not satisfying, but then, in that case, why eat in game at all? Why play games that function entirely for cooking, like the ever-iconic Cooking Mama, if you never get to reward yourself by eating the meal you worked so hard to make? It's certainly a question that plagues my mind, and within this project, I hope to find some answers.

Therefore, over the course of this project, I will be attempting to recreate every single food item from the Pokemon franchise, and ranking their tastiness to see how effective they'd really be in helping you make friends with Pokemon... while keeping within certain parameters. 

It would be wildly unrealistic of me, considering the amount of time I have to complete and present this project, to expect to make every distinct Pokemon food ever announced for the franchise. The curry varieties in SwSh alone number past 150, so uh, nope, not doing that. Not only is that not feasible in the time I have, but eating all that curry alone would do murder on my stomach, and I like myself untarnished by Gigantimax spice, if you don't mind me saying-- I am only mortal. 

Instead, I'm going to be working under a number of restrictions. I won't be making any recipe that falls under the following criteria: foods that are just an ingredient (Moo Moo Milk, Poké Beans, etc), anything that doesn't have a precise real-life equivalent (Pokemon Food, Max Soup, etc), any inedible or harmful foods (Grimy Food, Lookalike Foods, etc), anything I wouldn't be able to ethically source (Slowpoke Tail, Smoke-Poke Tail, etc), and anything that requires specific or industrial equipment to make, or that I cannot make with the resources I currently have access to, such as the various Gummis, Candies, and carbonated drinks. I also will not be considering any food that's not from the games, so anything franchise-linked that comes from the anime, comics, manga, advertising or merchandising is out. 

I will be making one meal at a time, going through the various recipes one by one, to judge each individually on tastiness, difficulty of recipe and difficultly to replicate. In this way, I can give a fair review to very item, starting with Pokemon Cafe Mix's Dugtrio Sandwich Trio, and space out the challenge.

Hopefully, they'll come out just as tasty as they do accurate.