Dining With The Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook (15 page)

This recipe is equally good for terrorizing humans after whisking the Earth to the Medusa Cascade or coming up with a quick emergency appetizer when your usual Whovian viewing site is unavailable because an unexpected invader needs to be exterminated.

Dalek Caan’s Corn (S4E14 - Journey’s End)

6 fresh ears of sweet corn/maize
raisins or dried cranberries
nori
butter
salt

Admit it. Corn on the cob (maize to readers outside the United States) already kind of looks like a Dalek. All it takes is a little bit of creativity and some work with a butter knife to turn that golden corn into a crazy (yet delicious) Dalek.

Bring a large pot of water to a full boil. Once the water is merrily boiling away, dump in your half dozen ears of corn, put the lid on top, and turn off the heat. Don’t move your pot. Now walk away for the next 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, drain the corn and fill the pot with cold water. Give the corn another five to ten minutes to cool down. Once you can handle it with your bare hands, it’s time to have some fun.

Cut each of your cobs down so it’s only about six inches long. You want to keep the tapered top but create a nice, flat bottom so it can stand upright.

Measure about an inch from the top of your corn cob. This is your Dalek’s head. For the next couple rings down, use a butter knife to loosen the kernels without removing them. Carefully cut thin strips of nori and tuck them between the loosened kernels. This will make the dark grill effect just under your Dalek’s head.

Skip a ring of kernels so you have a nice, thick yellow band. Under that, cut away one entire ring of corn kernels. Fill it in with a thicker strip of Nori.

Now it’s time to switch directions. Instead of going around the corn cob you’re going to use the edge of your butter knife to cut straight down and remove an entire row of kernels. Leave three rows of maize, remove one row of kernels, leave three yellow rows, remove one, and continue until you’ve gone all the way around the cob. Replace each of the missing rows of kernels with a strip of nori.

Look at the three strip wide rows of corn kernels. Go to the middle row and remove one kernel near the top. Replace it with a raisin or dried cranberry to create the Dalek's armor dots. Count down three kernels, remove one, and replace it with another bit of dried fruit. Keep going around the entire corn cob. If you don’t want to use dried fruit, you can just as easily substitute nuts, miniature chocolate chips or any other small, round food of your choice.

Finally, use Pocky sticks or pretzel sticks to make your Dalek’s arms and eyestalk. You’ll need to get a sharp knife and cut into the cob itself in order to make the limbs stay. Alternately, you can shove a bit of pipe cleaner between some kernels for the egg beater arm and an unfolded paper clip pushed into the end of an oversized chocolate chip for the plunger arm. (Microwave the chocolate chip for 2-5 seconds to soften it first.)

Go ahead and cut the remaining corn off the discarded portions of your cobs. Put it in a bowl, top with butter and salt, and leave it discretely tucked away behind the corn Daleks for those who want to enjoy the pure flavor of corn without the admittedly odd additions of the nori and nuts or fruit.

Jackson Lake Cocktail (S4E15 - The Next Doctor)

1 shot/45 ml gin
1 cup/400 ml strong, black tea
2 tbsp/30 ml sweet orange juice
1 tsp/5 g sugar
1 tsp/5 ml maraschino cherry juice
3 drops orange bitters
1 maraschino cherry

1851 is a little early by most Steampunk standards, but that didn’t stop the prop department from cramming this episode full of gears.

There was a certain temptation to go crazy with heavy, fatty recipes topped with gear shaped crusts, but that’s material for another cookbook. I really wanted to make Cyberman cinnamon pull-apart brain bread decorated with aluminum foil faces and antenna. While that resulted in many delicious experiments, in the end none of them looked enough like a Cyberman for my tastes. Feel free to give it a try, though.

I also toyed with the idea of a “Tardis” hot air balloon mezze plate, but that ended up looking more like it belonged at a kid’s uninspired birthday party than at a dinner full of ambitious Whovians.

After two failed experiments, I realized what this episode really needed was a good, stiff drink.

Brew a cup of strong black tea. If you’re a regular tea drinker, just add a couple of lumps. If you’re not, add a teaspoon of sugar. Stir well until the sugar is fully dissolved.

Now add the gin, for England’s most popular spirit of the mid 19th century. Soften the flavor with the orange juice, and maraschino cherry juice. Finish the drink off with three shakes of orange bitters to represent Jackson Lake’s tears.

You can either serve it warm in a comforting mug or you can pour everything into a cocktail shaker full of ice, pound the shaker like a weeping man who has lost his memories, and strain it into a martini glass. (Americans who enjoy iced tea are likely to appreciate the later version.) Either way, garnish the glass with a fresh maraschino cherry and enjoy.

Squash Stingrays (S4E16 - Planet of the Dead)

1 head of red cabbage
3 medium yellow squash, halved and seeds removed
6 large, fresh basil leaves
1 cup/226 g cream cheese
1/2/113 g cup sour cream
2 tbsp/30 g Herbes de Provence (or your favorite herb mix)
1 tsp/5 g kosher salt
1/2 tsp/2.5 g fresh cracked black pepper

Skate (a relative of stingrays) immediately came to mind when I saw those flying stingray spaceships. However, skate is expensive, tricky to cook, and unless your guests are experts at identifying cooked fish, the final product won’t be instantly recognizable as something from a Doctor Who episode. Those of you who like inside jokes (and are very good at cooking delicate fish) are welcome to give it a try anyway. The rest of us will be over here in a corner making silly stingray shaped spaceships out of yellow squash.

You get a pretty good bang for your buck with these vegetarian spaceships. Slice each yellow squash in half, lengthwise. Use a spoon to neatly scoop out all the seeds. This process also happens to create your ship’s command center. Line the cabin with a fresh basil leaf.

In a separate bowl, mix your room temperature cream cheese, sour cream, Herbs de Provence (or generic Italian seasoning if you don’t like the hint of lavender), salt, and pepper until they’re well blended. Equally divide the mix between the six cockpits.

Arrange them cockpit side up on a baking sheet and pop them in a 350F/178C oven for 25-35 minutes, or until the squash’s flesh is fork tender.

While the squash is baking, carefully remove the leaves off your purple cabbage. Once the squash is done, you can arrange the squash ships on a plate and start making the stingray-esque wings.

I like to flesh this out with some of the Hath slaw from Series 7, The Doctor’s Daughter
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Carefully pile it alongside the squash in a vague wing shape. Take the cabbage leaves you removed and trim them into the shape of flappy stingray wings and arrange them over the slaw. If you don’t feel like making slaw, don’t worry. You can just pile up a few layers of cut purple cabbage until you achieve the thickness and shape of a stingray wing on each side, and just treat the purple cabbage as a garnish. Either way, you end up with a tasty, edible spaceship that looks like it should be zooming around a doomed planet.

The Fizzy Waters of Mars Cocktail (S4E17 - The Waters of Mars)

1 shot/45 ml pomegranate liqueur
1 shot/45 ml ginger ale
2 lime wedges
pink Champagne or sparkling wine

It was tempting to simply tell people to fill their mouths with red pop rocks and ginger ale for this one. Then I remembered that was explosively disgusting, albeit nicely dramatic.

In honor of Earth’s first extra terrestrial colony, I present the Fizzy Waters of Mars cocktail. Drinking one probably won’t kill you, but drinking six will leave you hung over the next morning, feeling like your body is being inhabited by aliens determined to suck all the moisture from your body.

Simply pour the ginger ale and pomegranate liqueur into a champagne flute. Top the flute off with pink champagne. Squeeze in the juice of one lime wedge to give it some bite and garnish the glass with the other.

The Master’s Drums (S4E18 - The End of Time)

4 cups/720 g prepared macaroni and cheese
8 rounds of puff pastry
nori
butter

Some episodes, coming up with a recipe is a challenge. This one was just the opposite. Oh, the wealth of ideas. You could host an entire party based on this alone. The tentacle faced Ood practically beg for recipes. The Cactus people are ripe with potential. The Seal of Rassilon belongs on a pizza. Heck, The Master spends half the episode wolfing down everything from an entire chicken, gristle and all, to the contents of an entire food truck (including the staff.) To cap it all off, the episode takes place at Christmas and ends with The Doctor’s regeneration. So much ripe potential! How to choose?In the end, I decided to go with the Master’s Drums. They’re beating in his head through the whole series, and if anything deserves a crazy homage, they qualify.

Make whatever kind of macaroni and cheese you most enjoy. If yours normally comes out of a certain blue box loved by kids, I won’t tell. You’re just as welcome to make it from scratch using the fanciest of cheeses. The real point is you should use something you like. However, if you do decide to go with the blue box macaroni and cheese, you’ll need to add about ½ cup of actual shredded yellow cheese as a binder. This needs to be pretty sticky.

Once you’ve prepared your macaroni and cheese, grease up eight round, straight edged ramekins. You want to really butter the heck out of the insides. Otherwise, your drums won’t come out evenly.

Use your ramekins as a cookie cutter and cut out sixteen nice, neat circular discs in your puff pastry. Slide one into the bottom of each ramekin. Now fill the ramekins up with macaroni and cheese. Pack it in there nice and tight. (Remember, if you used the blue box stuff, add some extra cheese to glue all the noodles together.) However tight you think is enough, use the edge of a buttered spoon and pack it in tighter. Now cram the second disc of puff pastry on top.

Bake the drums at 350F/178C for 20 minutes, or until the tops are a dark, golden brown.

Once the drums are finished, let them cool for at least 10 (preferably 20) minutes before messing with them. Trust me. If you don’t let the cheese set as it cools, you’ll end up with nothing but an uneven pile of sticky noodles.

Once the drums have cooled, use a thin rubber spatula to loosen the edges. Carefully upend each drum onto a platter. Cut a sheet of Nori the same thickness as your drum and quickly wrap it around the macaroni and cheese. Once each of your cheese drums is wrapped, get a very sharp knife and carefully cut thin lines along the sides to represent the drum’s support struts.

You should end up with a set of eight edible macaroni and cheese drums. Eating them won’t offset the horrible pounding that’s plagued you since childhood, but they will briefly help curb the insatiable hunger from your failed regeneration.

SERIES 5: THE GIRL WHO WAITED

The New Doctor’s Rubbish Plate (S5E1 - The Eleventh Hour)

apples
yogurt (with bits in)
bacon
beans
bread and butter
carrots (he knows they’re rubbish without even trying)