Meaty

Blog Azeroth – Shared Topic for the week of July 25th, 2011
Shared Topic Idea: Making a WoW Cooking Recipe IRL

Have you ever attempted a WoW cooking recipe IRL? Have you found someone else’s recipe and tried to follow it? There have been folks that have used their own Unidentified Cooking Utensils to produced recipes and some have worked better than others. Share yours! Or perhaps you can follow a recipe. but not create one and there is this fascinating recipe that you need created for you by someone with the right skills? The reverse might also be a consideration: What IRL foods are missing in Azeroth?

– Kallixta

*sounds of clicking keyboard* Let’s see. Ok, food this week. Off to Wowhead for some inspiration. *clickity click* Hmmm, that looks pretty tasty… that too. Wait a second. *click clack* Oh dear. I think I need to lie down.

15 minutes later

Alright so my introduction was a bit dramatic. I did discover something interesting about World of Warcraft from this shared topic though. WoW has a grand total of about 200 recipes (some of which are Alliance/Horde overlaps). Assuming the Alliance and Horde recipes are slightly different due to local ingredients, an Azerothian cook could have each saved in their compendium for just the right occasions. Now, out of those couple hundred recipes, some take more ingredients than others, some require exotic alcohols, and some even require elemental substances. But almost every single one requires meat.

Looking back at my history with cooking (Aliera has gathered nearly every single one of these recipes and lacks only those available to Alliance from quests), I am sure that hundreds of stacks of meat have been turned into tasty, grilled meals. And, being a strongly omnivorous individual in the mortal world outside Azeroth, I am just fine with depictions of meaty goodness in my game.

But there is a gotcha. For the past eight months I have been sharing my life with a wonderful girl who has the unfortunate situation of being vegan by necessity (she has been vegetarian for the majority of her life and recently has developed issues with milk making her quite ill). As a result, my eating habits have changed somewhat.

Now I am fortunate that she understands my love of the fleshy bits of animals and how good they taste when pan fried so I am able to continue eating meat. However, we do cook together and so I am much more conscious of the ingredients entering our food than in previous years.

So in looking through the list on Wowhead, I was somewhat startled by the obvious truth that Azerothians love their meat. I decided to look through the list and pull out all the recipes that I could make with my lady that we could share together.

There are nine of them, two of which are drinks, another three are dessert items, and of the remaining four, three are seasonal items and only last for short periods of time (no preservatives!). There is one main dish that serves as the year-round go-to for Azeroth’s vegan population. Runn Tum Tuber Surprise.

I have a knack for putting up with repetition. Filing papers doesn’t bother me, I am happy to slap stamps and labels on envelopes, and eating the same thing often is no big deal. But every meal of every day is just too much. So it seems I have found a facet of the game that Blizzard could expand upon. Please, Blizz, for those of us who are unable to eat meats and dairies due to dietary restrictions, can we get a main course salad or a pasta with tomato sauce? Anything but more tubers.

(As an aside, my girl and I are still thinking about opening up a little blog regarding our cooking and finding or making recipes that are vegan or vegetarian yet still appeal to meat and milk lovers. When that gets off the ground, a little segment on creating Azerothian delights might not be out of the question…)

~ by Aliera on July 26, 2011.