Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, with extra helpings of Catastrophe these last few weeks. Today, we’re going to talk about the Overwatch Cookbook, a little about Overwatch, and a little about the cookbook’s author, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. We’re going heavy on Nerd stuff today, folks.

It’s Over, Game and Watch

Oh good, Title Jon is going even deeper. (Is he, though? LIke., sure, the Game and Watch is an older system, but Mr Game and Watch was in 2 Smash Bros games) That’s fine. Alright, brief summary for those unaware: Overwatch is “inhales deeply” A Team-Based Multiplayer First-Person-Shooter with a diverse cast with various roles and unique powers, created by Blizzard Entertainment. If you don’t know what that means, imagine a game of Capture the Flag or Dodgeball, as played by opposing D&D parties. You have your team, which is facing off against another team, and various members of each team specialize in different roles to accomplish the objective. And it’s made by the people who made Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, etc.

Do I need to credit this image? It’s a picture OF their logo.

In Overwatch, there are Tanks, Damage, and Support: Tanks take or block a lot of damage, protecting the rest of their team. Damage…deal damage. They take out the other team’s players. And Support characters do something that helps the team, that isn’t taking or dealing damage. Typically, this means they’re a healer, running around undoing the damage their team has taken, but they also frequently make their team mates faster, or stronger, or some other effect.

Now, full disclosure: I have played Overwatch a couple times, but personally I’m more of a MOBA player (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) which is a very similar type of game, but instead of being a first person shooter, you’re floating over the battlefield telling your character where to go. You’ve probably heard of League of Legends from this genre, which is the most famous and biggest one, but I play Heroes of the Storm, which is the MOBA made by Blizzard, using characters from all their franchises, including Overwatch. This makes a huge nerd even by “people who play this type of video game passionately” standard, since Heroes is much less popular than several other ones, to the point that Blizzard itself a couple years ago moved a lot of the team working on the game, and have stopped adding content to it at the same pace that they used to.

But look, smashing walls as a giant plant monster is fun, okay?
(Spoilers: you can’t do this in the game anymore. They changed how this map works. You CAN smash walls in a giant mech suit, though.)

So, this is a video game about shooting people, moving carts around maps, and blasting superpowers through walls…how does it have a cookbook? I’m glad you asked, and the answer lies in a combination of the lore of the game, and a genre of cooking projects that I’m calling “Fandom Food”. To explain both of those better, let’s talk about the background of the game itself, and the background of this cookbook’s author.

Watching, Munching, Noshing

So, I already briefly summarized the background of Overwatch in our Pelmeni post at the start of the year, but to sketch it out a little better: At a relatively unspecified future implied to be in the late 2000’s MAYBE early 2100’s (some site I saw targeted it as 2074…or maybe 2104), the world has had a very tumultuous couple of decades: around 40ish years before the game, a company called Omnica created Omniums, which made Omnics. (Branding!) Okay: to break that down: Omnics are classic sci-fi robots: Intelligent machines vaguely human-shaped, and capable of performing a variety of tasks. Omniums are the factories used to create them, which are themselves basically a giant robot shaped like a building, run by a self-improving algorithm. They made omnics to handle basic labor tasks, and a lot of war robots. The company ended up collapsing, and the factories were shut-down.

And then, 30 years before the game, they un-shut-down. For no apparent reason, the factories turned back on, and started making robots again. Robots they had coded to attack and kill humanity. Out of nowhere, armies of robot soldiers, tanks, artillery platforms, and so on just started getting pumped out, causing world-wide devastation. To combat this threat, Several governments created various super-human/trans-human projects: powered suits for humans to pilot against the robots, genetically and cybernetically enhanced soldiers, etc. The UN proposed that the members of these varying projects be joined into a single team, “Overwatch”, to coordinate and work together to stop what was now being called “the Omnic Crisis”. The team was formed, and succeeded, taking out the vast majority of omniums, and reprogramming others to create only standard, non-combat omnics.

Yes, the character on the far left is a gorilla. He lives on the Moon, and his story is nowhere near the weirdest one on this team.

Following this, Overwatch was transitioned to a peace-time organization, basically super-powered Interpol. At the same time, the group created a sub-faction, “Blackwatch”, which was…well, essentially the super-powered CIA: a team meant to discreetly handle international issues that the group could not openly face…typically via ‘non-standard information gathering’ , or extracting targets to face international law, often recruiting from outlaws and international criminals. In particular, they struggled against an international terrorist organization that had risen to power in the days proceeding the Omnic Crisis, Talon. This, predictably, goes to shit, with Blackwatch going too far, being outted to the world, and leading to both groups being dissolved about 8 years ago. This plunges the world into relative chaos, as now there’s no super-powered police forced, and 2 years ago, Overwatch illegally reformed when their identities and home locations were stolen by Talon agents, including former Blackwatch members. So now the illegal team of super-police fight the international super-terrorists, and that’s why you’re shooting rocket-launchers in the streets of Brazil in the game.

Nice story, fairly simple as these things go. And VERY ripe for A: the game to add characters from various global communities to highlight that this is a franchise that can appeal to everyone. (There’s a Chinese cryo-scientist, a Japanese cyborg ninja, a Brazilian super-DJ, etc etc) and B: a GREAT place for fandom food, because, yes, we are still a food blog despite me just spending basically 1,000 words explaining video games.

So, “fandom food”. Very easy idea: in almost every fictional world, there are foods. Because, you know, people have to eat. And a growing thing some fans like to do is recreate the foods discussed in their favorite world, and share them with friends. There are HUNDREDS of recipes for “Lembas bread” from the Lord of the Rings, for instance.  These especially got popular in the mid 2000’s/early 2010’s, since the internet let people share their recipes with each other, and having ‘watch parties’ became more acceptable, and easier. It was a fun way to share your interest in a setting with your friends: ‘hey, before the new Harry potter movie, come to my house, and we’ll have the DVDs of the old ones playing, and we’ll serve drinks and food from the story!”

At the Krampus Kave, we sell Chocolate Frogs, and Chocolate HP wands, so I assure you, it is STILL going fairly strong.

And one person who has personally had their star really come to the front because of this trend is Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who we have already covered once on the site before, I just didn’t TELL you we were. See, Chelsea is the co-author of the blog The Inn at the Crossroads, a long-running blog that recreated foods described in the books of A Song of Ice and Fire (aka “The Game of Thrones books”). And indeed, when it came time to make an OFFICIAL Game of Thrones cookbook, it was her and her co-author who were tapped for the task. That’s right, I somehow reviewed a cookbook without ONCE mentioning the author’s name!

Anyway, since then, Mrs. Monroe-Cassel has gone on a SPREE. She made the Official World of Warcraft Cookbook, the Official Firefly Cookbook, the Official Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge Cookbook, The Elder Scrolls Cookbook, and more. She has become the premier professional for “I have this intellectual property, and I want a cookbook out of it”. So, what does she do with the Overwatch book?

Holy Shit, he’s finally going to talk about the book itself.

So, the first thing to note is that the book is arranged by Character, with almost every character representing a different country (there’s a couple points of overlap, ie, there are two prominent Australian characters, and two prominent Japanese characters, and several from the USA, but the USA ones at least try to pinpoint different regions of the country), and recipes from every continent, and then some!

Yes, in the bottom right, that says “The Moon”. I already told you the Gorilla, Winston, lives there. He gets recipes too, you species-ist.

Now, I’m going to switch up my order for a normal cookbook review, and bring up how this really hits the UNITY OF THEME aspect I like in cookbook. Overwatch is a game of big personalities from around the world, and here, each one gets at least two recipes to highlight it. Further, the method used influences the Voice of the cookbook, as each recipe is presented as an insight or background detail on the character in question, with the entry having a touch of a that character’s personality, but generally being presented almost like a data entry on the character in question, or like, a highlight in a short documentary about them, The characters themselves appear in their sections, with little snippets of their game or digital short dialogue framed as relating to the food in question.

This is Hanzo Shimada, who is heavily dragon themed, and the heart of my favorite Overwatch story:
There is a detention slip where a kid got detention for calling another kid a “#HanzoMain”, which the teacher “Did not understand, but was clearly an insult.” I could explain why “HanzoMain” is an insult, but really, just the idea of it is funnier.

This helps the Chelsea imbue each section with the ‘flavor’ of the relevant character, while still maintaining the overall unity of theme.

I think the text walks a fine line of “recipes that are emblematic of that country, AND are relatively accessible to mainstream American audiences”. For instance, the character of Mei, the Chinese cro-scientist, doesn’t go into the more complicated styles of Chinese cooking, instead having Congee (the rice porridge we made at the start of the year), Rou JIa Mo Pork Bun (sometimes called “the Chinese Burger”, a dish of lightly toasted bun filled with, essentially, Chinese Pulled Pork) , Mantou Buns (basically a donut), and “Winter Warmer Five-Spice Hot Cocoa” (Hot chocolate, with Five spice). All pretty simple recipes, with clear access-points for American audiences. I would say like, one of the most boundary-pushing recipes in the book is the Tamago Kake Gohan, and that’s just because it uses a raw egg.

There’s that sneaky Hanzo again.

So it’s an international cookbook, focusing on stuff you could get a relatively sheltered American family to eat without too much trouble, which is a VERY fine line to walk, and I think the book does an admirable job. And because of that, I think it really touches on a subtle kind of Catapult Effect: there’s not really anything in the cookbook that would make you say “Oh, I can’t do that.” Unless it’s because of an ingredient you can’t stand, or a dietary restriction. Everything feels very direct and looks both pretty, and pretty simple. I don’t think there’s a single recipe that takes up more than one page. (I have to say “think” because I accidentally left the cookbook at home when I came out to work in Leavenworth, so I can’t double-check.)

Lastly, Production Value. It’s a very polished book. The pictures and pages are glossy, the colors are well-composed, it FEELS a little more modern, evoking a cooking website with a large picture showing you the result, and a direct recipe on the next page.

It’s really the little details that stand out to me, though. For instance, one of the characters in Overwatch is Bastion, an Omnic created during the Crisis that, for unknown reasons, powered back on, with a greater interest in the natural world, making ‘friends’ with a bird that had built its nest on the robot’s shoulder while it was deactivated. Bastion is a gentle war-machine, with a fascination with birds, connected with Germany (where it was constructed) and more of Northern Europe. So its recipes are Granola (for feeding the birds) and Bird-Shaped Pretzels.

They look much better from the side. Because, holy crap, that one on the left is adorably derpy.

Which are the perfect mid-point between “stupidly easy” and “impressively complicated/cute”. It’s just little birds made out of dough, but it FEELS like something Bastion (with its undextrous appendages) could make, as a show of peaceful intent. The pictures are crisp enough to make them look both adorable, and like something a child would make. It’s a great moment of the production value and voice working together to provide some amazing unity of theme.

So I recommend the book, especially if you’ve got a friend into the game, or someone just starting to branch out into world cuisines. It’s accessible, pretty, and just all-around a fun time.

MONDAY: LET’S GET SOME LEAFY GREENS IN US…AS A VEHICLE FOR SAUSAGE. WE’RE STUFFING CABBAGE.

THURSDAY: LOOK, I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF A VORTEX OF CHAOS. LET ME GET THROUGH SATURDAY, AND I’LL GET YOU A PLAN.