Dining With The Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook (16 page)

Admit it. You’re expecting fish fingers and custard. Of course you are. Everyone loves fish fingers and custard. That’s why I have a whole chapter dedicated to it. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at all the other things the brand new eleventh Doctor finds total rubbish. A new mouth is confusing.

The sliced apples, carrots, and yogurt with bits in actually go together pretty well. People serve fruit and veggies with yogurt dip all the time.

You can either pile everything into bowls so they can sit on the same platter, or set up two adjacent platters with a symbolically carved apple on each one so people know they belong together.

If you're going for two platters, slice the apples (squirt lemon juice over them to keep them from browning) and arrange the apple slices, carrots, and yogurt on one plate. Put the beans, bacon, and bread and butter on another. This is hands down, one of the fastest and simplest things you can serve your guests. Make sure both plates have one whole apple with a smiley face carved into one side.

If you’re feeling extra schmancy you can always surround the rubbish with a baked eel in jelly as a stand in for the multiform that lives upstairs from Amy Pond, but that requires you to actually like eel. If you do, the recipes in this book probably seem downright mundane.

Confidentially, if you want to sexy this up with the addition of an Atraxi spaceship you can always cut one of those giant eyeball shaped gumballs in half (available in both candy stores and in gumball machines near the exit of many groceries.) Get some pre-made sugar cookie dough. Roll it out, cut it into a big spikey snow flake, and suddenly you have an Atraxi spaceship. Bake the sugar cookie according to package directions. While the cookie is still warm, squish the sliced eyeball into the middle of the spaceship and let it cool into place. Position it in one corner of the plate so it can creepily watch everyone eat.

Alternately, if you’re Scottish, you can just fry something.

Bow Tie Pasta with Protesting Star Whale Brains (S5E2 - The Beast Below)

1 lb/450 g bow tie pasta
4 tbsp/60 ml olive oil
1 lb/450 g cherry tomatoes
1 medium red onion, diced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
6 large fresh basil leaves ripped into small pieces
3 tbsp/45 g pine nuts
1 tsp/5 g salt
1 tsp/5 g fresh ground black pepper
1 lb/450 g of prepared meatballs or your favorite cooked sausage cut into 1 inch chunks
juice of 1 lemon

Any fully prepared Doctor Who theme party has to include glasses of water on the floor. While you cook, remind your guests to watch the glasses for vibrations.

This is another one of those mildly steampunky episodes that made me want to slap gears and keys and unnecessarily intricate locks onto random foods. Instead, in honor of The Doctor’s new look, this is an excuse to whip out some bow tie pasta, because everyone knows bow ties are cool.

Confidentially, I was stupidly excited when I found red bow tie pasta online. I was sure it would be perfect for this recipe. In reality, boiling the pasta leeched out most of the color. Instead of red bow ties, I had these sort of anemic grey ones that looked like the sort of fashion statement you'd expect from the Silents.

If you find red bow tie pasta, feel free to give it a try. You may stumble across some higher quality stuff than what I found. Just to be safe, though pick up a box of the regular stuff while you're at it. If your dyed pasta bleeds out, the bright red cherry tomatoes will give the bow ties lots of color. Don’t stress over it.

Slice your cherry tomatoes in half. They’ll be pretty darn wet, so let them sit and drain in a colander. While the tomatoes are draining, cook the pasta according to package directions.

As the pasta merrily boils away, cook the onions and garlic in one tablespoon of oil. Once they’ve started to brown, empty them into a large mixing bowl. Don’t clean your skillet. Instead, return it to a medium heat and add the pine nuts. Stir quickly, gently browning them. Pine nuts have a nasty habit of going from golden brown to horribly burned shockingly fast, so keep a close eye on them. They should be done in 3-4 minutes. Empty them into the same bowl with the onions.

By now, your pasta should be finished cooking. Drain it, rinse it with cool water, and set it aside while you finish mixing up the rest of the sauce.

Add the rest of the olive oil, the juice of one lemon (make sure to strain out the seeds), your salt, pepper, ripped basil leaves and drained cherry tomato halves to the sautéed onions and garlic. Give it all a good, hearty stir. Once everything is well blended, add the drained bowtie pasta and mix it all together until the pasta is well coated.

If you chose to protest, you can now add some pre cooked meatballs or your choice of pre-cooked (pink, brainy looking) sausage to represent the Star Whale brains. If you’re a vegetarian, or you chose to forget, leave it a clean, meat free dish that merely celebrates the inherent coolness of bowties.

Before you let people dive into the dish, make sure they either Protest or Forget your party. It’s for their protection. After all, this could be a wild night.

Open Faced Dalek Ironsides (S5E3 - Victory of the Daleks)

15 cherry tomatoes grown in your home victory garden
4 slices national loaf
4 slices bacon
4 leaves of lettuce
2 tbsp/30 ml mayonnaise
1 tbsp/15 g fresh basil or other garden herbs

Oh, look. A new Dalek paradigm. Because Skaro, Dalek Sek, and the pig people weren’t enough. This time, though, the biggest Dalek innovation is that they suddenly come in candy colors!

Don’t worry. You’re not getting an M&M’s themed Dalek recipe. Instead, in the spirit of this episode, we’re using authentic World War II ingredients to make a surprisingly Dalek-tastic sandwich.

 Churchill may have been a stout man, but everyone serving under him was on strict, austere rations. Luckily for you, this wartime austerity sandwich will fill your belly while also evoking the new Ironsides.

Cut your cherry tomatoes in half and let them sit in a colander to drain. I know you’re thinking of skipping this step, but if you do, the moisture in your tomatoes will exterminate the structural stability of your bread. While the tomatoes drain, mix two tablespoons of mayonnaise with whatever herbs you grow in your victory garden (fresh basil is nice, but you’re also welcome to use one teaspoon of your favorite mixed dried herbs, such as thyme, or dill).

Now slice your bacon in half length-wise so you now have eight very thin slices. Fry up your bacon until it’s nice and crispy. You can’t waste something as precious as cooking fat, so fry up your slices of national loaf (or whatever brown bread you have lying about) in the bacon grease.

Once all your bread is nice and crispy, cut the top, rounded third off two slices. Arrange whole slices directly above them. Between the curved top and the long, tapered body, you can already start to see a Dalek taking shape. Four slices is enough bread for two Dalek sandwiches.

Spread the slices of bread with a thin layer of the mayo mix. Lay one thin slice of bacon horizontally just beneath the top crust of the bread. Beneath that, lay down three slices of bacon in neat rows. Arrange the cherry tomato halves on top of the lower bacon slices so you have a neat grid of shiny Dalek-armor dots.

A single round slice of olive makes a good eyeball stalk substitute. You can make some arms from a broken Pocky stick and a snipped cotton swab.

If you’ve used up your entire meat ration for the week or you happen to be a vegetarian time traveler, you can omit the bacon (or substitute Morningstar Farms soy bacon) and just toast the bread.

Once you have Dalek shaped sandwiches, arrange the lettuce leaves like a garnish.

If you don’t want to eat these open faced, simply stack an extra slice of toast underneath each of the Dalek’s body segments. When someone dissects the Dalek to callously eat the body, they can simply toss the lettuce on top of the tomatoes, flip the extra slice of bread on top, and chow down on what would’ve been a hearty and decadent sandwich during WWII.

These Dalek Ironside sandwiches are best served with tea, jammy dodgers, and a threat of extermination.

Irradiated Angels (S5E4 - The Time of Angels)

1.5 cups/200 g flour
1.5 cups/200 g sugar
1.5 tsp/7.5 g baking powder
3/4 tsp/4 g
salt
6 tbsp/90 g room temperature, unsalted butter
3/4 cup/100 g unsweetened cocoa powder
3 large eggs
1 tsp/5 g vanilla
1 cup/200 g semisweet chocolate chips (may use miniature chips)
3/4 cup/100 g powdered sugar

I was immensely tempted to whip up a recipe for hallucinogenic lipstick. After all, lip balm is surprisingly easy to make with little more than Vaseline and Kool-Aid. Add some hallucinogens and you’re well on your way to pretending to be River Song - or possibly getting yourself arrested. Wait, that’s part of being River Song.

Since The Doctor doesn’t come to my rescue whenever I write “Hello Sweetie” on a random wall, I decided to go with something less criminal-tastic for this recipe. Instead, the crackled surface of these cookies resemble the irradiated angels onboard the
Byzantium
. Don’t blink while you eat them or else you risk ending up like Angel Bob.

Combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. In another bowl, mix the butter and cocoa powder until you have a smooth paste. Add the vanilla and eggs then give it a good stir. Now, mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.

I know what you’re thinking. The mix doesn’t seem anywhere near moist enough. You’re wrong. Use your hands and really dig in there to mix it all up. Eventually, it’ll end up the same consistency as a very thick brownie batter. Once it does, fold in the chocolate chips and try to get them as evenly distributed as possible.

Put the batter in the fridge and let it sit for about half an hour. This is a good time to go watch an episode of Doctor Who. Don’t worry. The batter will be just fine if you end up waiting 45 minutes. Heck, you could do a four hour marathon without harming the batter.

When you come back, preheat your oven to 350F/178C. Grease the heck out of two baking sheets. Put your powdered sugar in a bowl. Now you’re ready to make some angels. If you have an angel shaped cookie cutter, roll out your dough, cut it into angel shapes, dip the shapes lightly in powdered sugar, and arrange them on your cookie sheets.

If you don’t have an angel shaped cookie cutter, make rough oval balls from the batter, use your fingers to pinch a nose, push in some eyes, and slice in a mouth, then also lightly dunk them into the baking powder before putting the cookies on your baking sheets. It may look crude, but really, as long as you have a face, you’ll be fine.

Bake the cookies for 12-15 minutes, depending on their size. They’ll spread a bit and puff out, which creates the cracked, aged surface you want in an irradiated angel. The longer you cook them, the crunchier they get.

Let each batch cool for about 10 minutes so they’ll solidify. Once they’ve hardened, use a spatula to gently remove them from the cookie sheet and get to baking your next batch.

These cookies are incredibly forgiving. After all, you want your bodies to look rough and weather beaten. If you happen to have an angel shaped cookie cutter, these look awesome arranged in an angry circle surrounding one of your Tardis toys.

Angel Wing Cookies (S5E5 - Flesh and Stone)