• Lotsa Lox
• 1 Salmon
• 1 Lemon
• 1 Onion

Lotsa Lox is one of the few Glitch dishes that feature Salmon – the only kind of fish available in the game. If you want to make this dish properly, it takes a little time and effort, but is well worth it.

Lox is salmon that has been preserved by curing, and although the word is sometimes used to refer to smoked salmon, it is really more properly used to to describe salmon preserved through brining. There are many different salmon cures used around the world, but one of the best known is the Scandinavian gravadlax. I’m rather fond of gravadlax, so that’s the one we’re going to use here to make our Lotsa Lox.

Now, the easiest way to do this would be to nip down to the supermarket and buy a pack of gravadlax and serve it up, but where’s the fun in that? No, we’re going to make our own gravadlax from scratch. First, catch your salmon…

You need two salmon fillets, each about the same size and shape. Get the best salmon you can afford, and as fresh as you can. Don’t go for the cheap stuff that’s on offer – remember, we’re going to eat this fish raw. Go to a reputable fishmonger and get something decent.

Salmon Fillets

Next, you need to gather together some sugar, salt and a bunch of dill:

Gravadlax Ingredients

The quantities will depend on how big your salmon fillets are. You need enough salt and sugar to generously cover the two fillets (with one part salt to two parts sugar), and a generous bunch of dill (don’t skimp on the dill, it’s the main flavour here).

Lay out a large piece of cling film and place the two pieces of salmon, skin side down, side by side on top. Make sure the two are the same way around as we’re going to sandwich them together in a moment.

Cover each salmon fillet with the salt/sugar mix, together with freshly ground black pepper and a sprinkling of dill seed, and then place a thick layer of chopped dill onto one of the fillets.

Seasoned Salmon

Now for the tricky bit. You need to sandwich the two halves together without spilling any of the toppings. I find that the best way is to manoeuvre your hands underneath the cling film and in one smooth, swift motion, bring the two pieces together. Once together, bind them up tightly in the cling film, using more if necessary.

Wrapped in cling-film

Next, I usually place this bundle into a Ziploc bag in order to catch the brine that inevitably leaks out. If you don’t have a Ziploc bag, make sure you place this in a suitable dish. Put the salmon in the fridge, and place some weights on top to press it flat. For weights, you can use whatever you happen to have to hand. You can use a rock from the garden, some tin cans – I just use whatever happens to be in the fridge.

Now wait. Leave the salmon in the fridge for seven days. Each day, you should turn the salmon package over and weight it down again. After a week, it will be ready.

Carefully unwrap the salmon. This is your solid piece of gravadlax.

Gravadlax, ready for slicing

Next, slicing. Separate the fillets and using a sharp knife cut into slices. The slices should bemade at a very shallow angle – almost parallel to the chopping board, and fairly thin (about four or five millimetres).

Gravadlax

This is your gravadlax. Now we’re ready for the main recipe: Lotsa Lox

Ingredients (serves 1):

• 1 portion gravadlax
• Red onion, sliced
• Wedge of lemon

Arrange the gravadlax slices on a plate. Place the onion slices on the side and garnish with the wedge of lemon. Eat.

Lotsa Lox

The idea of curing your own fish can sound a bit scary, but it really is worth making your own gravadlax. It will beat the pants of anything you buy in a supermarket. Try it!

• Spinach

Within Glitch, spinach is a most useful vegetable, it’s very quick to grow, and is potent stuff – you can not only eat it to gain energy, but you can also activate it to trigger the High Jumper buff, which as its name suggests, allows you to jump much higher than you can normally – great for getting to those difficult to reach spots.

Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) is a green leafy plant, originally native to central and south-western Asia, but now grown around the world, having been eaten in Europe since the fourteenth century. While the smaller young leaves are popular in salads, spinach is often cooked as a vegetable, or as an ingredient in other recipes.

Spinach

Spinach is well-known for its high iron content, but the legend goes that it’s been misrepresented over the years. According to the story, a paper listing the amount of iron in various vegetables misplaced the decimal point, resulting in the figure for spinach being overstated by a factor of ten. It’s a nice little story about how incorrect information can quickly become widely regarded as absolute fact. Sadly, this particular story was thoroughly debunked in a paper by Dr. Mike Sutton in the Internet Journal of Criminology, and it turns out that no paper misplacing the decimal point ever existed. Of course, that means it’s still a nice little story about how incorrect information can quickly become widely regarded as absolute fact – it’s just that the erroneous ‘facts’ are actually the story itself.

Another story of spinach that Dr. Sutton discusses in his paper is that it was this supposed extra iron that gave the cartoon character Popeye his strength. Again, this particular claim is oft-repeated, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. It turns out that Popeye really eats Spinach for its high Vitamin A content – a Popeye cartoon from 1932 makes this absolutely explicit, with the sailor saying “Spinach is full of Vitamin “A” an’ tha’s what makes hoomans strong an’ hefty”.

So, be sure never to believe anything you read about spinach. Not even this.

• Lemburger
• 1 Bun
• 1 Meat
• 1 Cheese
• 1 Tomato
• 1 Hot ‘n’ Fizzy Sauce

Burgers have a somewhat undeserved reputation as junk food. It is indeed true that there are some pretty poor examples out there, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have good burgers if we try. The Lemburger is an important foodstuff in Glitch: it’s not only named after one of the giants, but there’s a whole quest dedicated to making them and then donating the results to Lem. Now, for a giant to have such an insatiable craving for these burgers, we can only assume that they must be pretty good. No fast food here, these are real burgers. Burgers fit for a giant.

There are many ways to make a burger, and so many of them are overcomplicated and just plain wrong. The Lemburger has only a handful ingredients, and simplicity is key. If you start messing about adding things to the patties, or trying to cram in too many toppings, you’ll end up with an inferior result. A small number of good quality ingredients is the only way to get the perfect burger. Let’s take a look at those ingredients, one by one.

The bun. We covered buns in a previous post, and the sourdough buns shown there are perfect for this. If you don’t want the hassle of making your own buns and plan to buy them from a store, please be sure to get decent quality bread. We don’t want any of those pappy white dough balls covered in sesame seeds here. This is going to be a quality burger; find some decent bread.

The meat. Our burger is going to be made with meat. Just meat. Nothing else. We’re not going to adulterate it with any of that stuff that people put into burgers in an attempt to make them more interesting. No chopped onions, no herbs, no added egg to bind it all together. Just pure, unadulterated beef. There’s plenty of debate about what the best cut to use is, and there’s a case to be made for many cuts. Here, I’m going to recommend rump steak. It’s easy to get hold of, it has good texture and about the right amount of fat. Again, use good quality steak. Don’t use the cheapest meat you can find – cheap meat is cheap for a reason. Go for the good stuff – it’ll be a little more expensive, but the animals will have had better lives, and it will taste dramatically better. Organic, grass-fed and properly hung would be perfect.

Cheese. A little melted cheese is the perfect topping for a burger, but once again, too many burgers are spoilt by the use of inferior ingredients. There’ll be no synthetic yellow-orange plastic gunk on our burger, what’s needed here is a good mature cheddar. Hint: if your cheese comes in pre-packaged slices, you’re probably using the wrong stuff.

Tomato: Again, use good tomatoes. So many supermarket tomatoes are completely devoid of any flavour whatsoever – if you’ve ever tried growing your own, you’ll be fully aware of the difference. Small independent greengrocers and farm shops often have better produce than the big supermarkets, use those if you can.

Sauce: A little relish never goes amiss. Now, the Lemburger specifies Hot ‘n’ Fizzy sauce, but we haven’t covered that particular recipe yet – we’ll deal with that in a future post – so for now we’ll just improvise a little. For this recipe, I took two of my current favourite sauce/relishes: What A Pickle’s Tomato Chilli Jam, and Mr Singh’s Hot Punjabi Chilli Sauce. Both these are excellent on their own, and combine together beautifully. I suggest here, you try something similar, and find a good quality tomato relish, and a good quality chilli sauce, and blend the two. I don’t recommend Tabasco or other similar sauces here – they’re a little too vinegary for this kind of thing.

So, with all that in mind, let’s get to the recipe.

Ingredients:

• Rump Steak (allow around 200g (8oz) per person)
• 1 bun per person
• Cheddar cheese, sliced
• Tomato, sliced
• Tomato relish
• Chilli sauce
• Salt and pepper

Rump Steak

Take the steak and chop it reasonably finely. The best way to do this is by hand, with a sharp knife. If you must, use a food processor, or a mincer, but chopping by hand will give you far superior results, I promise. It’s nowhere near as hard as you might think, and there’s way less washing up to to do once you’re done. As you go, trim any gristly bits or excessive pieces of fat, but don’t remove all of the fat – you need some in there to help keep things moist.

Chopped Steak

Now, this bit is very important. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, add any salt to your meat. The salt breaks down some of the proteins within the beef and will dramatically affect the texture of your finished burger. Never add salt to the chopped steak, only ever season the shaped patties immediately before cooking.

Form the steak into round patties, about one inch thick, one per person.

Burgers

Once you’re ready to cook the burgers, sprinkle each side with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and place them straight into a hot frying pan. You can, of course, use the grill here if you prefer, but I think the pan gives better results. Cook the burgers until done to your liking, flipping a couple of time during the process. I like them so that they’re just pink at the very centre – you can do yours more or less depending on personal taste.

Once cooked, remove from the heat for a moment to rest, and cut the buns in half and toast lightly under a hot grill. Lay each burger on the bottom half of a bun, and lay a couple of slices of tomato on top. Then place a slice of cheese on top and place under the grill until the cheese is just starting to melt. Remove the burgers from the grill, place a generous spoonful of the tomato/chilli sauce mix on the top and cover with the top half of the bun.

Serve with some salad on the side. You can serve with fries if you like, but these burgers are pretty substantial and rather filling in their own right.

Lemburger

Over the years, I’ve made (and eaten) a fair few burgers, and I have to say that the ones I made for this post are amongst the best I’ve had. It’s well worth taking the the extra time and effort to do these properly, they were utterly delicious.

If this has whetted your appetite for burgers and want to learn more, I can thoroughly recommend Serious Eats: A Hamburger Today - a very comprehensive web site that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about making burgers, with plenty of tips and recipes to try out.

• Cheezy Sammich
• 1 Bun
• 1 Cheese

Now that we’ve learned how to make Buns, we can start putting things inside them. Welcome to the world of sandwiches, or in Glitch-parlance, sammiches. People have been eating breads of various kinds along with other foods for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the idea of placing slices of food between two pieces of bread started to catch on.

Sandwich is a small town in the English county of Kent. In 1729, ten year old John Montagu became the 4th Earl of Sandwich, inheriting the title from his grandfather. As the story goes, the Earl grew up to be a keen gambler and enjoyed playing cards. Rather than waste good card-playing time eating dinner, he would request food to be brought to the card table and ate whilst playing. He realised that placing the meat between pieces of bread allowed him to eat the food easily without getting his fingers greasy, and this meal quickly became a firm favourite. Fellow card players thought this was a great idea and were soon to be found asking that their food be served in the same way as Sandwich’s and the term sandwich quickly entered the language.

You can make sandwiches out of pretty much anything, and there are several examples within Glitch. For our first sandwich, we’ll start with a nice easy one, the Cheezy Sammich.

Ingredients (serves 1):

• 1 Bun (or two slices of bread)
• Cheddar cheese.

This really couldn’t be simpler. Cut the bun in half, horizontally. Grate the cheese and sprinkle on the bottom half of the bun. Place the other half of the bun on top. Eat.

Cheezy Sammich

You can, of course, use pretty much any kind of cheese here, but I think it’s hard to beat a good mature cheddar when it comes to a cheese sandwich. Here, I’ve followed the Glitch recipe pretty faithfully and not added any extra ingredients. To make things even better, though, spread a little butter on each half of the bun, and some thinly sliced onion or a generous dollop of Branston pickle is always a welcome addition.

• Bun
• 1 Flour
• 1 Pinch of Salt

In Glitch, the bun is one of the simplest things to make. It only has two ingredients: flour and salt. What could be easier? But wait a moment, flour and salt? Where’s the yeast? You can’t make a bun without yeast, surely?

Well, of course you can. People have been making leavened bread for thousands of years, and for most of that time they haven’t been specifically adding yeast into the mixture. Instead, they’ve relied on the natural yeasts that surround us to work their little bit of magic and make the dough rise. It’s a technique that people still use today, and one of the most common ways people do this is in the making of sourdough bread.

To make sourdough bread, you first need a sourdough starter. A starter is simply home-grown yeast culture. If you know somebody who makes their own sourdough, you can alway ask to borrow a bit of their starter, and use that to kick-start your own, but making your own starter from scratch is very straightforward.

Some people faff about with all sorts of things when making sourdough starters, adding grapes, raisins, yoghurt, old socks and other such titbits in an effort to get things going. In reality, you don’t need any of that stuff (in fact, I believe they will actively hinder a good starter) – all you need is flour and water, and a little patience.. I’ve made a number of these over the years, and they’re really very easy. All it takes is a little time.

Here’s what I do:

Take a cup of flour and a cup of water, and mix into a smooth batter. Don’t worry about the odd lump or two though, the starter will make short work of those. For the flour, I tend to use organic white bread flour, but you can use whatever takes your fancy. If  you want to hurry things along a little, you could, for this initial mixing, replace half of the flour with rye flour – that certainly gives things a kick start. Rye flour typically has an abundance of natural yeasts present and you’ll get a vigourous starter much more quickly.

Some people say you shouldn’t use tap water, but in my experience, it hasn’t been a problem. Sometimes I have used tap water that was then boiled and then allowed to cool—actually, (i.e. what was left in the kettle from when I had a cup of tea earlier), but mostly I just use it straight from the tap.

Finally, put the batter into a jar. Glass is best, simply so you can see what’s going on inside. Make sure you don’t seal the jar though. As the yeasts feed, they give off gas as part of the process, and so you need to allow these gases to escape. I use an old preserving jar and removed the rubber ring from the seal so the lid is loose fitting.

Place the jar somewhere warm. It shouldn’t be hot, a comfortably warm room temperature should do nicely. I just leave the jar on the side in the kitchen on the surface above the hot water tank where it stays reasonably snug.

Leave overnight.

After the starter has sat around for around 24 hours, you will need to feed it. By now it, will probably have separated a little – there will be a thin watery liquid sat on top. That’s good – it’s a sign that there’s something going on in there. Just stir that back in.

Sourdough Starter

For the first feed, pour the starter into a bowl and add a half cup of flour and half cup of water. Again, I often use half rye flour and half organic bread flour at this stage. Beat the mixture until it’s all thoroughly mixed together and pour back into the jar. Put the jar back in its warm spot and sit back for another 24 hours.

Leave overnight.

From now on, the feeding ritual looks something like this: Pour half the starter into a bowl and discard the other half. Wash out the jar (it starts to get a bit gunky if you don’t wash it out occasionally). Add half a cup of flour and half a cup of water to the starter in the bowl and beat until smooth. Return the starter to the jar and wait another day. Repeat for the next few days and hopefully the starter will grow stronger.

Sourdough Starter

After a couple of days of this, you should have a working starter. Once you’ve got your starter, you should keep it in the fridge where it will lay pretty much dormant for quite some time. Once every week or two, take it out and give it a feed, just to keep it ticking over.

Now it’s time to go make some buns. Note that proper sourdough bread takes time to make, it needs time for the flavours to develop. This isn’t your common-or-garden store-bought pappy bread. This is proper bread. You should start this recipe in the morning of the day before you want to make the buns.

Ingredients (makes 12):

• ½ cup sourdough starter
• 6 cups strong white flour
• 2¼ cups water
• 1½ tsp salt

Mix the starter with 1½ cups of flour and one cup of water in a large mixing bowl. Cover with a cloth and leave at room temperature for 12 hours.

Add 1 cup of flour and ¼ cup of water. Mix well until smooth. Leave for 12 hours.

Sourdough Proving

If all’s going well, the dough should by now be looking reasonably active. If you skimped on size when I said ‘large mixing bowl’, you might well be regretting that decision.

Punch the dough down, add 1 cup of water and mix it in. Put one cup of flour aside to flour the board during kneading and add 2½ cups of flour into the bowl, half a cup at a time, kneading it in as you go. Once it starts to get too stiff to mix in the bowl, turn it out onto the floured board and continue kneading until all the flour is mixed in.

Don’t skimp on the kneading – it’s an important part of the process. Expect to spend around ten minutes on it, maybe a little more. After a while, you should feel the dough develop a smooth elasticity – that’s when you know you’ve done enough.

Now, divide the dough into 12 round balls, and place them on a floured baking tray. Cover with a cloth and leave them to prove until they’re doubled in size – about three to four hours. Once risen, if you’re feeling flashy, you could paint the tops with a little beaten egg or milk and sprinkle on a few poppy or sesame seeds, but they’re just as nice left plain.

Buns, proving

Bake in a preheated oven at 190°C (375°F), or 180°C (355°F) if you’re using a fan oven, for around twenty five minutes. Once they’re done, remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool.

Buns

As an alternative, rather than Buns, you can also make Large Buns, or as they’re more commonly referred to, Loaves. Instead of dividing the dough into 12, divide it into two and place in two 1½ lb loaf tins. Slash the top of each loaf a couple of times with a sharp knife and leave until the dough rises above the tops of the loaf tins. Bake as above, but for around 40 minutes.

Sourdough Loaves, Proving

Sourdough loaves, fresh from the oven.

Home-made sourdough bread is absolutely delicious, and if you want to experiment more, there are very many different recipes to try out. The internet is full of them, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty tracking some down. I bought this book a little while ago, which has a comprehensive description of sourdough baking and many recipes – it’s well worth a read if you want to learn more.

Sourdough Bread

• Pinch of Salt

It’s probably fair to say figuring out how to get salt is one of the first real challenges that many Glitches face. Salt is important stuff, it’s a vital food, essential for our well-being, and more importantly, is a key ingredient in very many recipes, both in Glitch and in the real world.

In Glitch, salt is deemed to be a spice, and so it manufactured just like any other spice by grinding allspice. In reality, salt is actually a mineral, and we have to work a little harder to get it. The substance we commonly refer to as ‘salt’ is actually sodium chloride, although the salt we eat in our day-to-day life will most likely have a few other things mixed in with it, either naturally, or added artificially during the refinement process. Typical additives include anti-caking agents such as sodium ferrocyanide which is used to help keep the salt free-flowing, potassium iodide to help combat iodine deficiency, and fluoride salts to help prevent dental decay.

Halite, or rock salt can be found in large beds formed by the evaporation of lakes and seas millions of years ago. Britain’s largest salt mine is found in Winsford, Cheshire where the salt deposits were formed by the evaporation of sea water during the Triassic period, 220 million years ago.  Salt can be extracted from these underground salt mines by excavation or by forcing water through a drilled shaft to dissolve the salt and bring it up to the surface.

Another common way to get salt is by the evaporation of sea water – and salt obtained in this manner is usually referred to as sea salt, especially when used for culinary purposes. Many people believe that sea salt has both better taste and texture for use in cooking, due to the presence of of other minerals. The coarse texture of sea salt also affects the way in which it dissolves in the mouth, lending it a different and more subtle flavour than that given by ordinary table salt.

Many places around the world produce good quality sea salt for use in cooking. The variety I tend to use most is Maldon Sea Salt, from Maldon in Essex.

Hawaiian Alaea Sea Salt/Maldon Sea Salt

As well as adding flavour in cooking, salt is also used to preserve food, and is commonly used to allow meat and fish to be kept for long periods.

Salt’s importance to us is reflected not only in its ubiquity in our cooking, but also in our language. The word salary is derived from the Latin salarium, which originally denoted the payments made to Roman soldiers to allow them to buy salt. The words sausage and sauce both come from the Latin salsus, meaning ‘salted’. Salad originally denoted leaves that had been salted to reduce their bitterness, and is derived from the Latin sal, ‘salt’.

• Fried Rice
• 1 Proper Rice
• 1 Meat
• 1 Black Pepper
• 1 Sesame Oil
• 1 Egg

A quick and easy way to jazz up some plain boiled rice, is to turn it into Fried Rice. It’s remarkably tasty — great for a quick lunchtime snack or a supper dish to share with friends.

You’ll need some Proper Rice, and you’ll also see that the Glitch recipe calls for some ‘meat’. As you most likely know, all meat in Glitch comes from nibbling piggies, and gets used in a wide variety of recipes. Over in the real world, we have access to a much wider variety of meat sources, and so we needn’t limit ourselves just to piggy-based items. In each of the recipes, I’ll suggest the types of meat that I think fit the recipe best.

In Fried Rice, some chopped, cooked chorizo or other spicy sausage works extremely well. Alternatively, some small cubes of pancetta or streaky bacon, fried until crisp, would be a good addition.

So, on to the recipe.

Ingredients (Serves 1):

• 1 tbsp groundnut or sunflower oil
• 1 portion Proper Rice, cooled
• 100g cooking chorizo (or pancetta, or streaky bacon)
• 1 large egg
• ½ tsp sesame oil
• Freshly ground black pepper

Cook the chorizo in a frying pan or in the oven and chop it into cubes. Alternatively, if using pancetta or bacon, chop first into small cubes and then fry gently in a pan until they start to go slightly crisp on the edges.

Chopped Chorizo

Beat the egg in a small dish, together with the sesame oil. Don’t overdo the sesame oil — it has a very strong flavour, you don’t need much.

Beaten Egg with Sesame Oil

Heat a wok or large frying pan and add the oil. When hot, add the rice and stir-fry for three or four minutes. Be sure to keep stirring all the time, or the rice will stick to the pan — keep it moving all the time.

Next, add the chorizo or pancetta, and stir fry for another two or three minutes. Add a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. A pinch of salt might not go amiss at this point, but if you’re using a salted meat such as pancetta or bacon, you probably won’t need to add any extra.

Pour in the beaten egg mixture and keep on stirring until it’s well mixed in. Stir-fry for another couple of minutes until the egg has fully set.

And that’s it, you’re done! Empty the mixture into a bowl, and tuck in.

Fried Rice

Fried Rice is a delicious meal in its own right, but you could also serve it as an accompaniment as part of a larger meal if you wish. You can also experiment a little and try different ingredients  — peas and sweetcorn work well, and some chopped, fried onion wouldn’t go amiss. Red peppers and chillies can add a bit of bite. Have a rummage through the leftovers in your fridge, I’m sure you’ll find some interesting additions.

• Proper Rice
• 3 Rice
• 1 Pinch of Salt

The very simplest way to cook rice, is simply by boiling it in water — what could be easier than that!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup long-grain rice
• A pinch of salt

Bring a pan of water to the boil, and add a generous pinch of salt. Stir in the rice, and cook for ten to twelve minutes. When cooked, the rice should be soft, but retain a little texture. Don’t overdo it — there’s nothing worse than soggy rice. When cooked, drain the rice, empty in to a serving dish and fluff it lightly with a fork.

Proper Rice

Plain boiled rice makes a great accompaniment to many dishes, or, you can do as we will do next — let it cool, and then we can turn it into something even better: Fried Rice.

A word of caution: raw rice almost always carries spores of Bacillus cereus, which is a rather nasty little bacterium that can generate toxins that play havoc with your gastrointestinal system. It can withstand high temperatures, and so can still be present in cooked rice, even after boiling. Rice left at room temperature for a few hours can cause these spores to germinate and generate toxins. Always serve cooked rice promptly, and store any leftovers in the fridge where the low temperatures will slow bacterial growth.

If you are serving a rice salad, then adding an acidic dressing such as lemon or lime juice, or vinegar will also help curb bacterial growth.

• Rice

We’ll kick off the Glitch Cookbook with a look at one of the most common foodstuffs in the world — rice. It’s the principal food for around half of the world’s population, and for many people is their primary source of energy. It was first cultivated around nine thousand years ago, and now has a well-earned place in our daily diet. Most rice that we come across is Oryza sativa, or Asian Rice, although you might also find some of the less common Oryza glaberrima, or African Rice.

It is thought that there are over 100,000 distinct varieties of rice around the world, most of which fall into one of two types. Indica rices are typically have a long grain and are the type most people are familiar with. Japonicarices have a shorter grain, and are commonly found in risottos, paella and rice puddings.

Rice

The world of Glitch has but a single kind of rice. It’s readily available from Produce Vendors, or if you prefer, you can grow your own from seed. All the Glitch recipes featuring rice are savoury dishes, which leads me to believe that Glitchian rice is of the indica, or long-grained type. If it were a short-grained variety, they would surely have discovered the delights of one the world’s greatest comfort foods: rice pudding. So, the absence of any kind of rice pudding, or indeed risotto does strongly suggest long-grain rather than short.The most basic rice dish of all, is simple boiled rice, or as the people of Glitch call it, Proper Rice. In the next post, we’ll take a look at how to make Proper Rice.

If you’ve spent any time at all playing Glitch, you’ll have seen that food plays a pretty big part in the game. Your character not only has to eat regularly to keep his or her energy up, but there’s a vast array of Glitchian dishes to choose from. As you work through the cooking side of the skill tree, there are dozens of meals, drinks and snacks that you can learn to make.

I felt the world needed to explore the cuisine of Ur in a little more depth, and so this web site was born. The aim is to work through the various foods found in Glitch, and to recreate them in the real world. There will be full recipes included, together with photographs of the finished creations.

Naturally, a little creative licence will be necessary, for not all the ingredients used in Glitch are readily obtainable out in the real world – certainly, the last time I looked, Waitrose didn’t seem to have any butterfly milk in stock. The dishes presented here may not be completely faithful renditions of their Glitchian counterparts, but the goal is to keep to the spirit of the original, whilst ending up with something that you would be more than happy to eat.

So, there I’ve laid out the challenge. At the moment, the cookbook is empty, but over the coming weeks, we’ll start filling in the pages with an array of tempting nibbles. We’ll cover everything from the simplest Fried Egg, to the rich succulence of Ix-Style Braised Meat. On the way, we’ll also take a look at some of the raw ingredients used in Glitch, and compare them to what we have available out here in the real world, so we’ll touch on everything from the mundane Pinch of Salt to unravelling the mysteries of Old(er) Spice. The biggest challenge right now is deciding where to start. Watch this space.