#Cooking Romance

[franticvampirereads]

Chef’s Kiss is the perfect fall romance read on a stormy fall day! This was just so cute and it really captures the feeling of existential dread of that “now that I’m done with college/university, what do I do??” that I think most of us have felt at one point or another. This graphic novel combines that with finding a new path in an unexpected place with a healthy sprinkling of romance thrown in for good measure. It was just the cutest and I loved that it really highlighted the different aspects of working in a commercial kitchen. It was really fun to see Ben learning new things and adding his own touch to the recipes. Anyway, this is getting five stars! And if you haven’t read it yet, you really should!

[afabstract]

This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans Review: No Beans, Nor Sizzle

In "This Love Doesn’t Have Long Beans," a chef’s quest to find a restaurant heir turns into a predictable enemies-to-lovers tale. While the cooking scenes are appetizing, the romance isn't as sizzling.

⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram) When Chef Oab’s love life goes up in smoke, he cooks up a contest to find a worthy heir for his bean-free restaurant. But little does he know that his top contestant is secretly working for the shady businessman trying to take it all! Directed by Nui Suttasit, the Thai series “This Love Doesn’t Have Long Beans”…

[lazylittledragon]

as promised some koralina lore (the lore is 5 and likes dancing)

[myah--reads]

Cover Reveal!

Mixing up Mayhem by Heather Nix is releasing on October 31st! Keep reading for the blurb and preorder links!

Blurb:

Things are finally looking up for thirty-five year old Jackie Miller. She’s scored her dream job as head pâtissier at the top restaurant in the country, she’s going to propose to her girlfriend, and she’s flexing her creative muscle with a showpiece dessert that will blow the socks off of the Seattle food scene. 

Or so she thinks.

When she meets a hellish princess in an explosive mishap, her whole life gets flipped upside down, and Jackie has to figure out how to juggle an unexpected breakup, an unexpected houseguest, and some unexpected feelings which might just lead to heaven on earth.

Preorder Now at: https://amzn.to/46u4lB3

[cathedraldecay]

and she will CONTINUE to serve it in drag

[ellie-writes-games]

Lucanis Lunchboxes: Inedible Minestrone

What if Lucanis packed Rook lunchboxes with little notes in them throughout the main story?

On the map, a "!" icon appears in the hallway just outside Rook's room in the Lighthouse. A temporary chest here holds a one-of-a-kind Valuable and a letter from Lucanis that is added to the Codex. Triggers after the Act 1 pantry scene, Lucanis romance only.

[SPOILERS] Read the letter from Lucanis below the line:

Spite's first attempt at cooking. He hasn't gotten the hang of it quite yet, but he's trying! What would you want Spite to try to cook for you? (He's open to suggestions.) I'm planning on writing more of these with the longer-term goal of modding these notes into DA:TV.

Maybe one day he'll even make something edible. We're all rooting for him.

Enjoying my work? You can leave me a tip on Ko-Fi | Have a request?

Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.

This is fanfiction written by me, @ellie-writes-games. These are NOT actual screenshots from the game. Peace, love, and mad props to the DA writers.

[novelbear]

cute (and clumsy) cooking prompts 🥣🍪

a prompt list by @novelbear ᵔᴥᵔ

"come make tanghulu with me!" "no. we burnt all the sugar last time. you remember? we managed to burn. sugar."

accidentally using sugar instead of salt (or vice versa) and trying to quickly think of a way to cover it up before the other finds out

teaching the other how to use a certain tool (can opener, potato peeler, etc.) since they're somehow doing it so terribly, dangerously wrong.

bickering over whether or not they should follow the recipe word for word

"cheese? i thought you said peas. i bought peas." "...eh, i guess that's fine too. put them in."

setting like three separate timers for different things and then forgetting which timer went to what.

one lying about knowing how to cook and promising to walk the other through a recipe for a date idea (then having to spend all day trying to perfect the recipe themselves)

^ or they can just wing it and chaos ensues naturally

finding out the oven is broken after already prepping everything together

"god, could you stir any slower?" "you try this then!"

^ *proceeds to stir perfectly fine whilst the other glares in annoyance*

having to pause and tend to the other because they burnt a singular finger

"did you wash those?" [very obviously lying] "....of course."

sweetly lifting a spoon to their mouth to taste a little of the food

^ this immediately backfiring because the food was still too hot.

[after the meal is successfully cooked] "so we agree we're not attempting this again, right? "not for a long while."

one ordering delivery halfway through and the other just stares in disbelief

^ "you're serious? we're working our asses off here and you ordered chicken." "we had a rough start, okay? i thought we would have given up by now."

dancing and making fun out of having to clean up the mess in the kitchen

spending the next day in bed together as they had somehow given themselves food poisoning.

[clouvu]

Obsessed with their friendship 🫶

[joytri]

In the end, it's the memories you make

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[selfryed]

every day i get more addicted to this specific era of gee (basement era if you will)

[afabstract]

Cooking Crush Review - Easy Reliable Recipe

"Cooking Crush" is a 12-episode Thai series about friendship, love, and culinary dreams, starring Gun Atthaphan Phunsawat and Off Jumpol Adulkittiporn. Read this spoiler-free review.

⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram) Prem, Dynamite, and Samsi are best friends and culinary students aiming to participate in a cooking competition that could change their fortunes. However, Prem lacks the confidence to join, but gets an ego boost when he meets Ten, a medical student who falls in love with Prem’s Tom Kha Gai soup and persistently asks for personal…

[thenationofzaun]

Still haunted by this interview

So enforcers killing the sisters' parents, the very first scene of the show, the introduction to the brutal class conflict and theme of oppression that was the bedrock of season 1, the inciting incident that traumatized the girls forever, that changed Vander forever, leading Silco to lose all respect for him and begin plotting his coup, literally the beginning of the end for the Vander and Silco tragedy, and by extension the Vi and Jinx tragedy, the incident that Jinx avenges in Season 1 in a brilliant full circle moment, these girls seeing the gunned down corpses of their parents dumped like trash on the ground, THAT scene...........................

......was conceived to give Caitvi some relationship drama......

[nematode7]

I apologize in advance about the person I’ll become when this game comes out

[forsapphics]

Wlw cooking/baking 👩🏼‍❤️‍👩🏽🧈🥣🍪🍕🍲🍱🍳🍾👩🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏼

[ellie-writes-games]

Dragon Age Masterlist

Codex Entries

Lucanis Lunchboxes - What if Lucanis packed Rook lunchboxes with little notes in them throughout the main story? A Belated Gift <- START HERE Gnocchi with Pesto Grilled Dalish Cod Magister's Honey Pastry Prociutto with Antivan Salad Assan's First Catch Emmrich's Cake Nevarran Chocolate Cherry Torte Spite's Inedible Minestrone Toasted Vanilla Gelato Dalish Stripweed Nettle Soup Spite's Shoelace Bolognese

Party Banter

Burn After Reading - Bellara and Lucanis discuss her writing projects. Spite is along for the ride. Emmrich steps in for some paternal support. Pt 1 Bellara's Book Notes <- START HERE Pt 2 Bellara's Unread Book Pt 3 Bellara's Writing Anxieties Pt 4 Bellara Takes A Leap Pt 5 Work Knives, Home Knives Pt 6 Two Sets of Knives Pt 7 Bellara's Other Book Pt 8 Spite Wants To Set A Flame Pt 9 Spite Has Questions Pt 10 Spite, Love, and Limes Pt 11 Lucanis Enlists Emmrich's Help Pt 12 Emmrich Gives Spite "The Talk"