J.R.R. Tolkien Inspired Meal!

 

A friend of mine started a new blog, Project A Month, at the beginning of the year. Each month he introduces a project and then he and his design, plan and execute. The first month was to:

Make a meal based on your favorite movie, book, song, or game – Whatever your favorite piece of entertainment is, there’s bound to be some way to make a meal based off it. Maybe food is a central component to a pivotal scene, or perhaps a character happens to be a spicy chicken. Either way, this month you need to think hard about what meal would represent and give homage to your choice. Be sure to take pictures of the process, write down your recipe, and explain a little bit about the choices you made.

I loved the premise of the blog and wanted to participate. I mentioned it to D and she also thought it would fun. The first problem though was coming up with a favorite anything to be our inspiration for the meal. I knew I wanted to do the project with D, instead of us each doing our own, and that meant that the book, movie, song, or game had to have meaning for the both of us… It didn’t take too much rumination to settle on J.R.R Tolkien’s Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as our inspiration. The two of us not only grew up with the books but we’ve read them too each other as well during our courtship and marriage. I felt we got lucky with our pick as Tolkien infused his work with a love of food and eating (especially his hobbits…) Almost immediately I knew I wanted to do a take on the Elves’ magical lembas bread that served as the main staple for most of the Fellowship’s journey to Mordor. D said we should do some sort of hearty breakfast to go with the bread and call it “second breakfast.”

My first thought for Lembas bread was a multigrain loaf, full of nuts and berries. This fits with the description of the bread in LOTR but wouldn’t make for exciting eating or recipe making. I then thought a biscuit might work, something like hard tack but not so bland. The biscuit idea finally lead me to a scone. A scone was perfect: sweet, filling, transportable. I looked up a basic scone recipe and then went to tweaking!

Lembas Bread

• 2 cups flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 7 tbsp cold butter
• 1/2 cup 0% fat greek yogurt
• 1 large egg
• zest from 1/2 an orange
• 1/3 cup candied ginger
• 1/2 cup almonds chopped

Stir together the dry ingredients and zest, then cut the butter into the dry ingredient mix using either a food processor or stand mixer. Beat in eggs and yogurt until dough forms. Finally, mix in the almonds and ginger until just combined. Try to avoid over mixing.

Lay dough out onto lightly floured parchment paper and cover with another sheet of parchment paper. Roll out. fold rolled out dough and roll out again until 3/4 inch thick. Cut dough into shape. Bake at 450° F for about 15 minutes.

We glazed these with a simple glaze of powdered sugar, maple syrup, and almond extract.

 

These, as you can see, turned out great. They tasted even better than they look! I’m somewhat surprised how good they were, this was my first attempt at making my own recipe. If you like scones, and what kind of monster doesn’t, you really should give this recipe a try.

The rest of the meal, the second breakfast, didn’t turn out as well as the Lembas bread scones. We decided on a scramble, that at first was going to have home fries in it but then we took them out (too many carbs.) That left us with sausage, eggs, and broccoli. We had too much sausage (that wasn’t rinsed or drained, too oily) and/or too little eggs. It wasn’t bad and D and I happily ate it. It just didn’t make an impact after the wonderful scones…

I’m glad I went with the scone idea. After making them I did a google search of “lembas bread” and everyone has these boring cinnamon and honey flat bread recipes for lembas bread. I’m sure it tastes good but not as good as these scones were and certainly not as visually appealing! This first project was a success and I look forward to seeing what February’s is!