One of the themes of my personal blog is food. Since this is my first post on the subject, I will say that my intent is to both write about what I cook, as well my experiences dining out in San Diego and other locations.  I am not, nor have I ever been a professional chef, though as a young man I spent plenty of time working in restaurants and have lots of fond memories.  I fell in love with cooking as an adult a little more than ten years ago and have been working on my skills since then.

It seems like no matter what I choose to do, I’m late to the party. In 2008, I discovered George R.R. Martin’s series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire”, known to many now thanks to HBO as “Game of Thrones”.  The first book was published seventeen years ago. As I was reading, I discovered Mr. Martin’s penchant for writing about food and thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be interesting to make a cookbook of all the meals he describes in these novels?” Well, Chelsie Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer have already been doing that on their blog The Inn at the Crossroads for some time, and they published a very interesting cookbook in 2012 with an introduction by Mr. Martin entitled “A Feast of Ice and Fire.” So much for that idea.

Like any man, I love to grill and often “heat stuff up”, but I do make an extra effort to cook a “gourmet” meal once a week and Sunday is my day. This past Sunday happened to be the season 3 finale of the HBO series, closely aligned to the third book “A Storm of Swords”. My brilliant idea was to reproduce some of the dishes described in the Red Wedding. Well, that was not well received by my wife who said “I’m done with this” after watching that episode, so I said “fine, I’ll just cook a meal from A Feast of Ice and Fire.”

Since, undoubtedly, these recipes are copyrighted by the forward thinking women, I will not provide them here and merely suggest that you pick up a copy of their book. I will describe my experience cooking them and provide some pictures as “food porn”.
Aurochs roasted with Leeks

The main dish was Aurochs Roasted with Leeks. I wasted a lot of time going to my favorite butcher in town (Iowa Meat Farms) as well as Whole Foods looking for a top round cut of Bison and ended up settling on a nice cut of beef from Costco.  I grow rosemary and sage at the house and always keep bay leaves on hand, so used them as the recipe describes. I’ve made a ton of roux’s and thickened many pan gravies with flour, but here I found that using burnt bread as the thickener for a sauce to be a totally unique twist (around since the middle ages) and loved the strong flavor of the Black Pepper Sauce it produced. The roasted, caramelized vegetables were as fantastic and flavorful as the tender mouth watering beef which was accented nicely by the sauce.


My interest in cooking started with a bread machine. My wife had one before we started dating which she had only used once or twice. I took it out of storage and started playing with it while recovering from a back surgery in 2002. I quickly graduated from the machine to the oven, and now bake fresh bread with nearly every Sunday meal. There’s nothing like the smell of baking bread in the house. After reading the recipe for the Black Bread, it was an easy choice. It came out exactly as described, aromatic, with a hard crust and soft interior. It carried the flavor of the Stone Smoked Porter I used and rounded out the bitterness with a hint of sweetness from the honey. Too strong for most of the family, but I loved it.

And then we come to the Wintercakes (Elizabethan style). I’ve never tasted anything like them, and holy crap are they good! Ginger, pine nuts, currants, dried cherries, marsala… not a combination of flavors I would have come up with. They smell great and taste even better, and are so filling that just one these hockey pucks of joy, quartered, was enough to satisfy four people after that feast.

We ate like the kings of Westeros and sipped our (Californian) Strongwine, really enjoying this meal. After the little ones were asleep, we braved the final episode of season three with full bellies. Though I would say it was fairly anti-climactic after witnessing the red wedding the week before, I think we’re all past ready for the royal wedding and what happens there. Mr. Martin, I am also past ready for “The Winds Of Winter” so hurry it up, please!

Wintercakes and Black Bread

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