Jalapeños: Same Pepper, Different Challenges

For those of you who have never eaten with me in person, I like spicy food. One of the things I like about spice is all the different places it can come from. This month, we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite versatile spicy foods, the jalapeño.

As a spice fiend, jalapeños don’t really feel all that spicy to me anymore. Sure, I still get a kick out of them, but when I think of jalapeños, I often think of their citrus overtones and their appetizing crunch.

To illustrate my point, let’s talk about jalapeños in pho! Pho is one of my favorite winter time foods because it combines hot soup with all the vegetables I start craving as winter goes on. But pho without jalapeños lacks the same citrus taste as pho with just lime in it. While lime can give the soup a light citrus taste, it’s the jalapeños the dish depends on to highlight that bright, flavorful note in the soup. Pho doesn’t have to be spicy, and jalapeños that have steeped in the gelatin rich beef broth of the soup are often more mild than outright spicy.

If you’d like to try jalapeños in pho, here’s a good recipe for you.

But I do love the spice of jalapeños. So much so, that I’ll even eat them just roasted from the taco truck in Boring. If you want to create your own roasted jalapeños, just hold it over an open flame until the skin blackens. Then seal it in a plastic bag or a tupperware to let it steam for a minute or so, and remove the skin to enjoy the sweetened and spicy flesh of the pepper. This is a great way to soften up a jalapeño to include in any recipe of your choosing, but also a great way to prepare them if you want to appreciate jalapeños on their own.

Another option is stuffing the pepper with cheese and then deep frying it to create a jalapeño popper. I prefer my poppers a little less deep fried and a little more roasted, but the beautiful part of this method is that you can cut the heat of the jalapeño by using thick cheeses like cream cheese to stuff your poppers. Some of my favorite jalapeño poppers come from a sushi place in Portland called Miyamoto. They call them jalapeño ninjas. But if you want to try making your own at home, here’s a handy recipe for you.

Jalapeños aren’t the only versatile thing I’ve been enjoying lately. Two weeks ago, I finally played the first game from Danish Indie studio, Ultra Ultra.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, here’s the premise:

ECHO’s mechanic is that the Echos will always learn from you. What’s interesting about this is how many times the game forces the player to use that in different ways.

The player has a number of abilities available to them—but depending on the level and the objective, some will be more valuable than others. For example, I never lethally shot an Echo in the light while the Palace was watching. I also avoided crossing water and sprinting when the Palace was watching. However, in some stages, I wasn’t allowed to keep these abilities from the Echos—forcing me as a player to adapt and play the game differently.

But that’s not all.

It turns out the game trailer is lying to you: the Echos don’t want to kill you. They want to acquire the cube on your back. That’s right, the red cube on En’s back is what they’re after—and they’re willing to kill to acquire it.

At a certain point in the game, the player loses the cube. What that means is the player is now working with a Palace full of Echos who learn from them—but that don’t want to kill them.

In that instant, the mechanic that was already so engaging is turned on its head. Suddenly, stealth is no longer an option. Thinning the Echos’ numbers isn’t beneficial. Teaching them to do things for you is easier, and more beneficial. The mechanic is the same, but the goal changes from strategizing to survive the Echos to making them work for you as you encounter them.

Once the player reclaims the cube, however, the Palace has another surprise in store.

Hyper Echos are the “perfect” version of En. They don’t require her to do something in order to be able to do it. They also attack the less advanced Echos in the palace and kill them as if they were En herself.

The mechanic of the Echos learning from En remains the same, but the goal changes once again. Instead of strategizing to create weak enemies or to use the Echos to complete puzzles and help En advance through the Palace, the goal becomes to balance the talents En gifts to the Echos so that she can survive encounters with them, while making them more difficult targets for the Hyper Echos to capture and kill.

Making Echos that are good distractions for the Hyper Echos is exceptionally beneficial to En, because while she may survive an encounter with an Echo that can do everything she can, En will never survive an encounter with a Hyper Echo unless she manages to kill it before it kills her—and, let me tell you, managing that is HARD.

Not only are Hyper Echos twice as tall and twice as fast as En, they kill her in one hit once they catch her. There’s no way to push them over or sneak up on them like with the other Echos either. A Hyper Echo dies after two shots from En’s gun—but killing them like that draws the attention of all the other Echos in the area.

You see now why having Echos that can distract Hyper Echos is so beneficial.

All in all, I was blown out of the water by how many different ways Ultra Ultra managed to challenge me with one simple mechanic. The game was more challenging and more rewarding than any other game I’ve played since Undertale.

If you still need convincing that this is the very next game that should be on your list, don’t take my word for it. Take the word of everyone who’s reviewed it so far:

Once you’re done playing and as in love with this game as I am, go support Ultra Ultra by liking their Facebook page, and Twitter.

(I’m shamelessly plugging them because I want them to make a sequel. Help me out, y’all!)

And maybe enjoy some tasty jalapeños when you need a break from playing. Enjoy!

Dandelions: Sorely Underestimated and Hugely Versatile

Apparently it’s not uncommon for small children to put all sorts of things in their mouths, but it was a miracle I survived my childhood with all of the poisonous plants and flowers I had at my disposal out in the woods of Boring, Oregon. Although there was a bit of an incident with the Fox Glove flower, there are in fact flowers you can eat that won’t make you sick. Here’s a nice long list of some of the ones you can eat and how best to prepare them. My favorites include rose petals, clover, and nasturtiums—but today we’re focusing on dandelions.

Perhaps the title of a particular Ray Bradbury book clued you in that dandelions could be used as a food source, perhaps you already knew, or perhaps you’re shocked. The dandelion, although often regarded as a common weed, is a plant that can be prepared in many ways. One can harvest the flowers to make wine with, collect the greens to include in salads or other dishes, and even cook and eat the roots. There’s a lot of advice out there about how to harvest dandelions, but let me quickly go over some of the most important stuff:

First of all, never harvest dandelions from areas that may have been sprayed with pesticides, near roads, or where people often take their pets to do their business. Secondly, start harvesting the leaves of the plant at the beginning of the season when the plants are young. Apparently the leaves are less bitter at this time in the dandelion’s lifespan. Continue to collect dandelion leaves until they become too bitter for you, and make note of when that is so you can collect leaves of an agreeable nature in the future. However, be aware that if the leaves are too bitter, you can always blanche or steam them to get rid of some of the bitterness. This is particularly effective when adding them to other dishes, such as a French cream of dandelion soup or a tasty vegetarian dandelion quiche. Third, if it’s dandelion flowers you’re after for cooking or wine making, be sure to get them early, when they’ve just flowered. If you leave them too long, these will also become bitter. And, lastly, if you’re trying to harvest the roots, be sure to dig deep. The dandelion root is long and thin like a carrot, so bring a gardening tool with you to get at the long roots without snapping them. To prepare the roots, simply treat them as if they were carrots—although apparently there is a way to roast them and use them as tea and coffee substitute as well if you’re interested in that!

If you want to make dandelion wine, there are a lot of different recipes and methods for brewing it out there. See here, here, and here for the best three I found.

As you can see, this common garden “weed” has been sorely underestimated and is actually hugely versatile; much like a couple of protagonists in two of my favorite franchises, Kingdom Hearts and Phoenix Wright.

The protagonist of Kingdom Hearts is a boy named Sora. In the first game of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, the player is led to believe that Sora is the main character of the game because he is the wielder of the Keyblade. The Keyblade is a mythical weapon that is said to be able to open and close off hearts. Sora uses the Keyblade to seal off the hearts from shadowy beings without hearts—fittingly called “the Heartless”—who hunt down and devour the hearts of individuals and worlds. The game was intended to be a one-shot, but very quickly was retconned for a series.  As the series progresses, the player learns that there are many Keyblades and that anyone with a heart can learn to summon them. However, the Keyblades are passed down from Keyblade users who deem others worthy of the honor of possessing a Keyblade. Sora was never given a Keyblade by a previous Keyblade wielder. His friend Riku, however, was. When Riku was unable to claim his Keyblade when his and Sora’s home world of the Destiny Islands was attacked by Heartless, Sora “borrowed” the power completely by accident. In short, Sora isn’t special—but it is how he deals with not being special that makes him the main character of the series:

The people Sora is talking about, of course, are his friends. He goes on to say that his friends are his power. The camera swoops out to show all of them behind him, connected through their hearts. To see the full scene, click here. In a way, Sora is the main character of Kingdom Hearts not because he is special, but because he is the most versatile member of the story due to his normalcy and willingness to be part of something bigger than just himself.

Rookie defense attorney Phoenix Wright of the Phoenix Wright franchise is even more of a regular Joe than Sora. Phoenix is a lawyer, and the sort of bumbling sweetie that always smiles and tries his best. His opinion of himself isn’t very high though…

And neither are his friends’ opinions of him…

But everything changes the moment Phoenix enters a court room.

In being the sort of bumbling sweetie that always smiles and tries his best, Phoenix becomes a force to be reckoned with in the court room, because his best must be the exposure of the truth and the protection of the innocent. In every way he is underestimated in his day to day life, but in every case in his video game and manga series, Phoenix fights his way to the truth successfully every time.

The last bit of media I’d like to share with you today is a little more directly related to the dandelion than our last two examples: the sports day chapters of Cardcaptor Sakura in which the Flowery card appears.

Sakura, unlike our other two protagonists, actually is a chosen one—and it is her task to collect the escaped magical Clow Cards that could cause all sorts of havoc if left unchecked. This particular episode takes place during her school’s sports day activities. What’s funny about this episode, however, is that no one thinks anything of the beautiful falling flowers and flower petals until the flowers begin to interfere with the sports day activities.

Flowers are so commonly used as a background panel filter in manga, that even the readers have it pointed out to them by the characters that there’s something strange about all of the flowers all over the pages.

In the end, Sakura manages to capture the Clow Card. Her guardian beast Kero (currently assuming his “power saving” form similar in appearance to a stuffed animal) comments on how easy it must have been since the card is good natured and fun loving.

Just goes to show one should never underestimate the value of anything. Happy dandelion hunting!