Hangover Cures

Depending on how successful your premiere parties were last night, you might have the suffering today.

To celebrate the act of imbibing, and all those who brave the consequences, we’ve put together this list of Westerosi hangover cures. Some are mixtures from the books, some are medieval, and others are…born from our own imaginations.

Feel free to make your own suggestions, too!

Westerosi Hangover Cures:

Castle Black: walk to the top of The Wall.

Stark: go and stand in the snow

Tyrell: extract of blueberry and greens.

Greyjoy: drink more. A bit of raw whitefish and a few swigs of seawater.

Lannister: egg yolk in port or sherry, with honey and a chip of ice.

Arryn: fresh milk.

Dornish: whole spicy peppers.

Bolton: Demand silence and darkness. Take the tongue of anyone who speaks.

Maester Qyburn: licorice steeped in vinegar, with honey and cloves.

Maester Luwin: willow bark in warm beef broth, with plain oatcakes.

Red Priests: burn the offending bottles.

Warlocks of of Qarth: stick pins in the corks of the offending bottles.

Tyrion: A brothel.

Sandor Clegeane: hair of the dog.

Additional Reader ideas:

Braavos: raw oysters

Strong Belwas: Liver and onion smoothie

Dothraki Khal: Mare’s milk, stallion blood and slaughtering a whole Lhazarene village (good cardio).

And we're off!

We’re off to the kitchen to cook for our crazy, food-filled premiere party. We’ll be updating as we go with reports and photos (suckling pig!) on Facebook and Twitter, so keep an eye out.

Best of luck to you all with your preparations, festivities, and viewings.

Be sure to send us some photos! :)

Doggie Bags and Placemats

This is less of a strictly “how-to” post than a sharing of ideas I just couldn’t keep to myself. For full instructions on these crafts, check the GoT party planning guide.

If you are planning a feast of any size for the Sunday premiere of Season 2, you may be dreading the thought of what to do with all those leftovers (if you weren’t dreading it, you should be). Fear not, noble cooks! Do as I do, and send it home with your guests in their very own…

Doggie Bags!

The shields are painted with basic yellow craft paint, and the hounds are stenciled on with a sharpie. Easy. Silly. Fun.

The next project is a bit more in depth, but equally fun. For this, we got several sheets of appropriately colored felt, and decorated them to look like the Westerosi house sigils. We felted ours together, but craft paint would also work well. Much of the detail is drawn on with multicolored sharpies. The result is…

Felt Placemats!

So there you go! Two easy crafts for a successful party.

Send us your cool ideas, and we’ll feature them in an upcoming post!

Rats on a Stick (not really!)

Rats on a Stick

Our Thoughts:

I’ll be honest. When I was browsing food blogs and came across this, all I could think was “Rat”. It’s something about that thick corn cob tail…

Contrary to the name, these “rats” are actually quite good. The flavor is savory, the taste of the onions noticable, as is the parm. Cheesey, chivey potato pancake in flavor, but the consistency is more like a samosa or onion bhaji- soft, but holds together well. It’s extra delicious when served with a salsa or other chili sauce.

But the best part? It’s vegetarian, and could easily be adapted to be fully vegan or gluten free. They’re a fun addition to any party spread for guests who can’t eat meat, as well as for those who can.

Continue reading →

Tolkien on the Realm of Faerie

“Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold…The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

Plan your Premiere Party

With just over a week to go before the premiere of Season 2, it’s time to nail down your party plans.

For starters, be sure to check out our page for Planning a Party. There, we have great ideas for foods both simple and daring, as well as templates for invitations, party favors, and much more. Our personal favorites are the Heraldic Banner Cake toppers, the very impressive Weirwood Tree Cake, Mulled Wine, Pork Pie, and Elizabethan Lemoncakes.

What foods are you planning to make? Are you decorating? Coming in costume? What’s the craziest Game of Thrones superfan thing you’ve done? Let’s make sure everyone watches Season 2 in style!

Tears of Lys (and other “poisons”)

“A dozen crystals, no larger than seeds, rattled across the parchment he’d been reading. They shone like jewels in the candlelight, so purple that the maester found himself thinking that he had never truly seen the color before… In the Citadel, it was simply called the strangler.” -Clash of Kings

” The Strangler”

To make your own Tears of Lys, or other Westerosi “poisons”, you’ll need a few simple things.

rock candy, in purple, clear, and other colors of your choice
small glass vials

Break the candy up into individual crystals. Try not to overhandle it, as the dye is usually applied to the outside of the candy, rather than mixed in with the sugar. Divide a few crystal between the vials, and hand out to guests as party favors. Remember that these are costly and rare poisons, so a few go a long way. For extra instructions, as well as printable Westerosi “poison” labels, check out the GoT party planning guide.

“This is a crueler poison, but tasteless and odorless, hence easier to hide. The tears of Lys, men call it.” -A Feast for Crows

Party Game: try to sneak your “tears” into others drinks throughout the evening. Whoever gets a crystal in his/her glass is “dead” for the purposes of the game. Anyone left alive wins. If there are multiple winners, decide the champion by how many other guests he/she “killed”. You can also use “poisons” of different colors, especially if the drink of choice is white wine or something similarly see through.

Party Invitations

Here’s what we’re using for our party invites. If you’ve already sent out invites, the template would work as a beautiful menu. For full and in-depth instructions, check out the GoT party planning guide.

Step 1: download this image, and paste it into a Word file.

Step 2: Find a fancy medieval font you like on a site like Dafont.com

Step 3: Create a text box on top of the image, then write in the text of your invite.

Step 4: Save as a PDF, then print out as many copies as you need. Try printing on paper that looks like vellum, or on tea-stained printer paper.

Step 5: Add any embellishments you like, such as wax seals, burned edges, etc. The trick to burning edges is to tear them first; in this way, you can better control the burn pattern. We sent our invites out in fancy envelopes, embossed with a special pen, rubber stamp, and gold powder.

Embossed with calligraphy pen and rubber stamp

Peppercrab Stew

“‘I’d work in your castle, milord. I can clean fish and bake bread, and churn butter. Father says my peppercrab stew is the best he’s ever tasted. You could find me a place in your kitchens and I could make you peppercrab stew.'” (A Clash of Kings)

Peppercrab Stew

Our Thoughts:

We bought these crab at the local market, using feminine wiles to coax a few more crab legs out of the fishmonger’s stall into our bag, free of charge. Imitation crab meat can be used for the faint of heart, or if fresh or frozen crabs are not available- although demolishing the crabs by hand and harvesting the succulent meat is half the fun! Our recipe makes a hearty, fiery crab stew, suitable to warm you from the inside out on even the coldest of days on the Iron Isles.

Continue reading →

It’s good to be the King… Robert Baratheon’s Ideal Meal

No wonder King Robert is so large, and there’s little question why the crown was six million gold dragons in debt.

Cheese.

And ale. And venison, mead, bacon, wine, tarts, and a plethora of other tasty, tasty foodstuffs. This meal left two of us utterly stuffed. The roasted veg were all soft and delicious, slightly caramelized from cooking in duck fat and cider. The venison was simply mindblowing. I have no words. The desserts were a wonderful conclusion, and proof of my theory that dessert occupies a different space in the stomach than does dinner. Sweet and delicious, we managed several of each before succumbing to a sensory overload. The honeycakes (forthcoming!) were absolutely divine, though. The Menu

« Previous Page