A Galaxy of Squash: Zucchini Bread Muffins and Pie from a Pumpkin!

My garden did two things really well this year: zucchini and a miracle pumpkin that came from the seeds of a store bought pumpkin I made soup out of last year. But what do you do when you have more squash than you know what to do with?

You make zucchini bread muffins and real pumpkin pie straight from a roasted pumpkin, that’s what!

Zucchini Bread Ingredients:

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

¾ cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

1 large egg, lightly beaten

½ cup canola or vegetable oil

¼ cup milk

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup shredded zucchini

¼ cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips

¼ cup chopped walnuts

First, preheat your oven to 350°F so it’ll be ready to bake your muffins. Then combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt in a bowl. In a separate, larger bowl, beat the egg, oil, milk, lemon juice, and vanilla together. Then stir in the dry ingredients until the entire mixture is moistened. After that, it’s time to fold in the zucchini, chocolate chips, and walnuts. At this point, you’ll want to either grease a muffin tin or throw some muffin cups into your muffin tin. Then fill each muffin mold two-thirds of the way full. DON’T completely fill them or your muffins will be difficult to get out of the tin, and will be monstrously big. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. 

These muffins freeze pretty well too, if you want to make a large batch and then save some for the winter. This recipe will give you about a dozen muffins, so plan accordingly. I made tons this summer to keep up with the way my zucchini plant was producing.

Pumpkin Pie Crust Ingredients:

1 ⅓ cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup butter

3 ½ tablespoons cold water

Pumpkin Pie Filling Ingredients:

2 cups mashed, cooked pumpkin

1 (12 fluid ounce) can evaporated milk

2 eggs, beaten

¾ cup packed brown sugar

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon salt

First off, if you don’t want to make pie crust or roast your own pumpkin, store bought is fine. If you are roasting your own pumpkin, make sure to cut it in half, take out the seeds, scrape the sides with a spoon, and roast it at 400 degrees for 20-40 minutes. Placing the cut sides down on a cookie sheet is an effective way to do this. Once you can spear the pumpkin flesh easily with a fork, it’s done. Remove from the oven, and mash. If you end up with more than 2 cups of pumpkin, double your recipe and make two pies!

To make the crust, mix together the flour and salt. Cut your butter into the flour, and then add cold water one tablespoon at a time. You may need only 3 tablespoons, or up to 4 tablespoons, so pay attention to the consistency of your dough when mixing. Mix the dough after each tablespoon of water and repeat until dough is moist enough to hold together. With lightly floured hands, shape the dough into a ball. On a lightly floured cutting board, roll the dough out to about ⅛ inch thickness. With a sharp knife, cut the dough 1 ½ inch larger than the upside-down 8- to 9-inch pie pan. Gently roll the dough around the rolling pin and transfer it right-side up onto the pie pan. From there, unroll it and ease the dough into the bottom of the pie pan.

Once your pumpkin is done roasting, take it out of the oven and let it cool. Then peel off the skin and mash it! If you want a smoother consistency, you can also puree your pumpkin. I just really like getting my hands dirty mashing the pumpkin, and feel the mashed pumpkin consistency of the pie holds together better, but both methods will taste delicious! After you’ve prepared your pumpkin and put it in a large bowl, add your evaporated milk, eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt to the bowl and mix. You can do this with a spoon or with an electric mixer or immersion blender. Regardless of your method, be sure to mix the pie filling well. Then pour the filling into your prepared crust and bake for forty minutes or until when a knife is inserted one inch from the edge comes out clean.

Now that we’ve squashed all that squash away into those baked goods, we’re going to talk about a game that was squashed into the shadow of its predecessors—Mass Effect: Andromeda!

Let’s take a moment also to appreciate how well BioWare did on making the cover for Andromeda a whole lot less gendered than their previous covers. It still bothers me that I have to look at male Shepard’s ugly mug every time I pull up a track from one of the Mass Effect trilogy soundtracks. Star reflecting helmet and practical genderless spacesuit/armor, however, I’m all about.

When Andromeda was first released I lovingly referred to it as Andurrmadurr because it was so buggy that it was nearly unplayable. I put it down for a few months and came back after a hefty amount of patching had been done, and loved every minute of it.

What’s unfortunate about Andromeda is that since it follows the monumental Mass Effect trilogy, it had a lot to live up to—and has been catching a lot of hate from disappointed fans of the previous trilogy and fans who wanted a less buggy game in the beginning. My hope today is to convince you that Andromeda deserves a second chance—because it’s chock full of really important, interesting things for the intersectional and feminist gamer.

If you’ve never heard of Mass Effect before, google it or get the run-down on it from my previous blog post that went up earlier this year.

Now that you understand that Mass Effect is a sci-fi title set in space where multiple alien species coexist and collaborate, imagine they decided to take a little jaunt over to the next galaxy. A one-way trip that takes 600 years in a cryo-stasis pod with the hope of establishing a new home. When Ryder wakes up in Andromeda, it’s to the reality that the previous intel on livable planets in the Andromeda galaxy has become a little outdated. One mission later, she’s replacing her father as the human Pathfinder and tasked with finding a way to make a home for herself, humanity, and all the other people who came to Andromeda with the dream of a new life.

We’ll be using female pronouns for the player character in this blog post, as Sara Ryder is the twin I’ve picked both times I’ve played through Andromeda, and she’s the one I know best. Her twin Scott Ryder will also be mentioned, as whichever twin the player doesn’t pick also plays a role in the story. The reason? Andromeda is a family story. While Shepard’s story in the Mass Effect trilogy was more of an epic, Ryder’s story is one of discovery and new life.

The theme of family doesn’t stop with Ryder, however. Many of Ryder’s team mates are also very attached to their families. Drack, the old krogan warrior, is a grandfather. His granddaughter Kesh serves on the Nexus as Superintendent. Vetra, your turian artillery and trade specialist, is a big sister. Peebee is an asari misfit who finds a place on the team. Drack’s granddaughter Kesh, Vetra’s sister Sid, and Peebee’s ex-lover that left her with attachment issues all feature heavily in these team members’ loyalty missions—which really brings out the theme of family and how familial connections define us. In tone, this gives Andromeda a focus on nurture and creation that Mass Effect has never had before.

Drack

Vetra

Peebee

These themes and ideas are furthered by the profile of the new alien species the player encounters in Andromeda—the angara. The angara are a hugely emotional species—but in a very different way than has been previously portrayed. Often, emotion is seen as the opposite of logic and is therefore discounted as worthless. It’s also been coded as “female” in our own culture for a very long time, which has a whole other set of associations that I won’t bother to get into, but you get the idea. It’s a big deal to see emotion highlighted as an intelligent and valuable thing. Plus, the angaran team member to join Ryder—named Jaal, for those of you wondering—is male. This means that we have a male character exhibiting high levels of emotion in healthy ways within the game, which is another great stride for the Mass Effect franchise.

On top of that, we finally have female krogan, salarians, and turians popping up as normal NPCs everywhere in the game—giving the galaxy a more realistic population than the earlier games. Female angara are common as well. As are women in power, from the sleazy human crime lord Sloane Kelly to the powerful and rigid krogan leader Nakmor Morda to the asari and salarian pathfinders. Conversations about diverse family groups, correct pronouns, and same-sex relationships aren’t uncommon either. Andromeda is also the first videogame EVER to feature a sex scene with cunnilingus in it! If that’s not a feminist victory in itself, I don’t know what is—and that scene is part of Jaal’s romance, since I know some of you are wondering. ;)

Although Mass Effect: Andromeda had a rough start—read all about the drama that went down at BioWare here—the game has been patched, and the story and characters were handled with so much love and compassion that you won’t regret squashing Andromeda into your media queue. Especially if you have a side of zucchini bread muffins or pumpkin pie to refuel on between skirmishes.

Oyakodon: Today I am Thankful for my Family

November is coming to an end, and I'm thinking about Thanksgiving. Of course, making a turkey dinner in Japan is a little difficult, but there is a dish that seems to convey the idea of family and makes a meal of itself. Oyakodon (親子丼) or, in English, “parent and child donburi” is a dish that uses both chicken meat and eggs. The use of both chicken and eggs together is where this dish pulls its name from. Some of my western friends thought this was creepy, but I thought it was rather sweet. It reminded me of all the family—both that of blood and that of heart—I have back home that I'll be missing this year.

Here's the way I made oyakodon with my host mother, Motoko Okada:

Ingredients:  4 onions, 3 carrots, 3 small green peppers, 1 small chicken, 5 eggs.

1. Julienne and sauté all veggies (in order of appearance). Add sake, some chicken stock (dried) and a bunch of water and simmer for a bit.
2. Marinate chicken with ginger, onions, garlic, salt, and sugar for a nice taste. Best if done the night before.
3. Remove chicken from marinade and grill.
4. Mix eggs and cook separately.
5. Once everything is cooked to taste, lay ingredients over a bed of rice and serve.

Here’s another recipe too, if you find my hurried notes too inexact.

It felt right to make this with a maternal figure during this time since it’s still Thanksgiving in my silly American heart even if the people in Tokyo aren’t celebrating it. But it got me thinking… How often do we see healthy familial relationships in media? Can you count the number of them you’ve seen in the last week? Are you only using one hand? Yeah…

When I first heard the name oyakodon and was told what it meant, it actually immediately reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Fire Emblem: Awakening.

Those of you familiar with the Fire Emblem series will remember the support system of the previous games that allowed you to build relationships between your army’s units. But in Awakening, the support system also allows the player to meet the offspring that result from the romantic support links. These children travel back to a time before their parents have conceived them in order to prevent the tragic events of the future they come from—in which most of their parents have died and the world has been overrun by darkness and chaos due to the Fell Dragon Grima—in order to attempt to save their parents and to build a future in which they can all live happily together. When Chrom, the main character of Awakening, meets his daughter Lucina and hears her story, he reacts not as a soldier or as the Exalt, leader of the country of Ylisse, but as a father—and it is so much more emotionally powerful than any declaration of war he could have made on Grima.

Those of you less familiar with niche JRPGs will remember The Incredibles. Part superhero movie and part family romcom, each member of the Parr family has a pretty “incredible” power; Dash has enough speed to allow him to play as many pranks as a young boy could think of; Violet’s invisibility and force fields allow her to admire the world of high school without ever having to worry about stepping foot in it; their mother Helen’s ability to stretch makes her more than flexible when it comes to balancing house work, her third baby, and the rest of her family; and Bob’s colossal strength should be more than any father could ever need in order to protect his family. In a way, these powers reflect the things we as normal viewers might stereotypically wish we had in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t it be great to be fast enough to get away with pranks? To not have to worry about what might happen to you going out on a Saturday night regardless of what you were wearing? To be able to stretch far enough that you could be in three places at once? To be strong enough to protect everyone you loved?

But the point that is very quickly made is that no matter how incredible someone is, no one is ever strong alone. From the beginning of the movie, Mr. Incredible starts losing to the machine that Syndrome made. It’s not until the entire family starts working together that they’re able to defeat both the robot and Syndrome. The toll it takes on Mr. Incredible when he thinks his family has died is also indicative of how important familial bonds are to us. The Incredibles really drives home how much of a superpower familial love is.

Now, those are conventional families portrayed by media. When it comes to less traditional forms of family, Steven Universe and Gravity Falls have it made.

Steven  of Steven Universe is the offspring of Greg, a human, and Rose Quartz, a sentient alien rock called a Gem that we would typically gender as female on sight. Because of his dual lineage, Steven has a very interesting familial structure. His mother gave up her physical form so he could be born. Steven lives not with his father (although his father does run a car wash nearby) but with Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst—all of whom are also Gems—as one of the team members of the Crystal Gems. It was decided this would be the best living situation for Steven because only other Gems could possibly hope to teach him to control his own Gem powers.

When the series starts, the viewer knows very little about Gems. As the series continues, we learn that they come from all sorts of situations and backgrounds, and that the Gems Steven’s mother led to earth are considered radical in their ways of doing and thinking by “homeworld” Gems. We learn that Amethyst was artificially made, that Pearl would be restricted to servitude instead of being allowed to engineer, create, and fight the way she does as a Crystal Gem team member, and that Garnet—who is made up of two other Gems that are in love—wouldn’t be allowed to exist as a fusion of these Gems. Steven’s family is full of diversity. It is the acceptance, communication, and love the characters exhibit in every episode that keeps it going and allows them to fight off homeworld Gems still hoping to invade and colonize the Earth.

Gravity Falls is a show that balances relationships between blood family members and non-blood family members more brilliantly than any other piece of media I’ve ever seen. 

The series centers around a pair of fraternal twins, Dipper and Mabel, who get shipped up to their Grunkle (that’s Great Uncle turned into one word for the purposes of a joke in the series) Stan’s tourist trap The Mystery Shack in Gravity Falls, Oregon for the summer. Once there they meet Soos, the handy man of the shack, and Wendy, one of the gift store attendants. The only people related by blood are Stan, Dipper, and Mabel, but when the apocalypse happens in Gravity Falls as the series finale, and Dipper, Soos, and Wendy break into the Mabel’s dream prison to save her, they are referred to as “The Pines Family” by their adversaries.

And that description is not inaccurate. Series creator, Alex Hirsch, recently discussed a couple of the relationships between the characters on The B Movies Podcast, saying how he really made it a point to fill relationships that are usually fraught with tension with love instead. This is evident in key relationships, such as the twins themselves and the father and son type relationship Soos and Stan have as well.

It also seems to fit, because no matter what happens in the show, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Soos, and Wendy always get through it together.

And if that’s not enough to convince you how powerful and important the portrayal of warm, loving familial relationships is, refresh yourself with this scene from Lilo and Stitch:

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, whatever language you speak. I hope your loved ones are near and that you can see them today, because life is heavy and life is hard and it’s so much lighter when they’re there to help you through it. May you find many a loving portrayal of family in your media and in your living room this coming holiday season.