There’s plenty of talk nowadays about eating like how our ancestors used to, clawing birds directly from the sky and absorbing the vitamins from grasses through our skin and whatnot. And there’s overwhelming evidence that our modern habit of sitting in our own filth as cereals are poured into our gullet by carpal tunnel robots is going to kill us. But what if the best diet for modern people isn’t human at all?
You don’t have to be a vole to benefit from the Redwall Diet. Have you ever seen a shrew with diabetes? I have, and it’s terrible. But that’s entirely beside the point. The point is that eating like a character in Brian Jacques’ popular Redwall series is the key to health, strength, improved digestion, longevity, and ferret resistance. It’s a diet that consists primarily of unprocessed grains, home-brewed ales, fresh produce, and cheeses the size of your head (with the occasional pike from the abbey pond). You won’t feel deprived on this diet, but you will be asked to work hard — if you’re not lifting a sword the length of your own body over your head, you’re building a bell-tower out of sandstone while trying to escape Tsarmina, the Mad Queen of Mossflower (and she’s fast).
You’ll start to notice a difference almost right away. Fighting an army of monitor lizards will get easier. You’ll have more energy for trying to understand what moles are saying to you, and for participating in medieval-style siege assaults. You’ll be dropping jerkin sizes faster than you can say “Eulalia!”
Day One (Mouse Day)
- Rise at dawn. Eat a fish that you have caught yourself, then solemnly prayed over.
- Try to understand a sparrow, then skip lunch while solving a riddle.
- Consume the fruit of wisdom carefully. Digest it fully.
Day Two (Mole Day)
- Deeper’n’Ever Pie
- Deeper’n’Ever Squats
Day Three (Abbot Day)
- As much cheese as you can roll up from the cellar without sacrificing form. Roll with your legs.
- Eat something with a damson in it
- Merrily dip your paw in cream while frolicking, then lick it clean
Day Four (Stoat Day)
- Invade and pillage something for at least four hours
- Eat whatever you find in the larders
- At least four bottles of good plum wine, followed by a nap
Day Five (Ublaz Day)
- Ascend a bell tower as rapidly as possible as often as necessary until you escape your fox rival
- Eat and drink only what you yourself have prepared and placed in your flask
Day Six (Ungatt Trunn Day)
- Eat nothing. Move even less. Your back has been broken and you have been left helpless on the beach, slowly watching the tide come in.
Day Seven (Badger Lord Day)
- Eat a stag, antlers and all.
- Pushups
- Repeat until sundown, then die defending your mountain fortress of Salamandastron
Tags: brian jacques, food, health, medieval-style siege assaults, redwall
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Redwall post greatly appreciated, as ever. Bravo.
UBLAZ. There are some deep, deep cuts here.
I, your faithful Abbey Recorder, approve.
That said, needs more trifles. Approximately 3 dozen more trifles.
Dandelion products also.
AND AND AND vegetable pasties full of gravy.
Lotta people talk about where the “meadowcream” comes from; not enough attention paid to what the heck these herbivores are making gravy outta.
The Dark Secret of Redwall Abbey
I could do these, but what about a Hare Day:
– eat all of the food from days 1-7
– do it again
-this time with as much hot peppers and spicy things in general
-some dandelions to top it all off.
-wot wot!
Good show!
Duck and weave between each bite.
Meadow cream. Meadow cream on everything, whatever meadow cream even is. And damson wine. And the otter’s hotroot soup. God, those books made me hungry.
I always assumed it was a lot like pouring cream: a thin custard made with egg yolks, cream, and a tiny amount of sugar. It is legit amazing, and the perfect summer dessert recipe. (Easy, can be prepared in advance, AWESOME with fresh berries/peaches/cherries, delicious.)
Where are they getting this milk? There was a cow in one, right? But it’s outside the Abbey walls? Are cows sentient? Do they sell their milk for rent/ festive cow accessories? Do they have a symbiotic relationship with their milkers, or do they just drink from their business partner’s udder and spit, drink and spit? Can cows spit?
Let’s just pretend that it’s a vegan milk substitute.
Do you have a recipe link for pouring cream? I went looking for a recipe, but the internet claims pouring cream is just a synonym for single cream (aka table cream, aka 18% milk fat cream).
This recipe is very clearly cheating (Gelatin!!), but it was the first one under “pouring cream recipe”: http://ifood.tv/cream/109836-pouring-cream
This is much more likely what LeastBittern is talking about: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/baking_and_des…
Thank you!
I did find the first one, but even if it hadn’t been for the gelatin, it doesn’t even contain cream, so it’s clearly very wrong.
Oh!
2 cups cream
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons sugar
dash vanilla.
Whisk/stir together in top of double boiler – or a bowl on top of a pot of boiling water – until thick enough that it covers the back of a spoon. Chill before serving, probably, though warm is great too.
Thank you!
If pouring it over raspberries and plums ever gets old, try it on pies and warm chocolate cake, throw it (and vanilla seeds or fruit puree) into a ice cream maker (and when it’s almost done stirring, you could add a thin stream of melted chocolate for chocolate flakes), make a trifle with sponge cake and fruit, take the ingredients for a trifle and place them in separate bowls so people can make a “plate trifle”, or, if you are like one of my friends who likes almost no desserts at all, take about a cup into a corner of the room and sip it, completely adsorbed, for about 15 minutes, while the party spins around you.
WHERE IS THE HOTROOT SOUP, MALLORY???
Seriously – there is a distinct lack of Otter Day filled with hotroot soup, swimming laps, and laughing at the other critters.
PARDON BUT I BELIEVE IT IS THE DANDELION AND BURDOCK CORDIAL THAT IS ACTUALLY THE MOST EGREGIOUS OMISSION
but mallory, on what day do we drink cordials?
It is extremely important that we do not forget the cordials.
Day 3 sounds like a great day.
But there needs to be some more dandelion cordial on here.
and where, I ask, is the October ale?
F**k this “paleo” noise, I’m going to go dig up a root and roast some acorns. And then sleep for three months.
“Autumn” diet: try to make fat account for 30% of your body weight, that you may dream the winter away and avoid eating bark.
You may end up giving birth during your slumber, so do not be alarmed if you wake up with three cubs who look just like you.
If you’ve had sex in the last five months, try to bump the body fat up to 40%-45%. Lactation kills.
“Spring” diet: shit, bark. Bark, more bark, some sprouts that might be edible, and eggs. Lots of bird eggs, in varying stages of development.
The paleo diet is was people in Dinotopia eat.
mallory wrote an article about redwall. oh my god. eulalia.
The Toast + Mallory + Redwall = a recipe for my undying fandom. Well done. wildapplause.gif
Um, I was literally just trying to figure out how to track down a copy of the Redwall Cookbook for giftin’ without resorting to Amazon when I clicked over here. Does anyone have it? Is it good beyond the nostalgia factor? And how is the Toast so exactly matched to my soul?
I have it! The recipe for Shrimp and Hotroot Soup alone makes the purchase price worth it. Om nom.
Leafing through it now, and it’s actually great! Almost every spread contains a water color illustration of animal characters, and a brief one page or half page story. The ingredients are listed in an corner with a light yellow background so they’re easy to discern from the instructions, and the instructions themselves are short and simple. Also, there’s an index. Great layout, and well suited for young cooks, or easily intimidated dads like myself.
A woman at my work used to be on some “diet” or something where you ate a different food and nothing else every day: Monday was bananas, Tuesday was beef, Wednesday was squash, Thursday was fish, whatever and so on. And she constantly tried to get us to join in her stupid trends with her “Oh, I feel so great! You should do it too!” (even though if I had to eat nothing but bananas for a day I’d claw someone’s face off). (Did I mention she was a Certified Nutritionist?)
I really wish she was still doing that so I could print this out, leave it on the lunchroom table, and then go find myself something with no redeeming value for lunch. Like nothing but chocolate. All day. Or “All Orange Foods” diet where instead of eating carrots, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, and squash, I ate nothing but Cheetos, orange Fanta, the “creme” from Halloween oreos, Circus Peanuts, and Cheddar cheese.
The All-Orange meal is one of my favorites! Sunkist, Doritos or Cheetos, macaroni and cheese, American cheese. Worth the indigestion. ::aump::
This is probably not at all good for me, but I think I occasionally eat like this woman naturally? Like I’ll get a sudden intense craving for bananas or pickles or oranges and eat only that for a day and then not eat it again for several months. No idea why your coworker thinks this is a sensible diet though.
This sounds hilarious and I really hope for the sake of her clients there was at least a little more of a system than that.
Monday: Chocolate cookies
Tuesday: Sugar cookies
Wednesday: Coconut bittersweets
Thursday: Raspberry shortbread
Friday: Madeleines
Saturday: Girl Scout Thin Mints
Sunday: Double chocolate
Logalogalogalooog!!!!
Otter Day:
– Morning: frolic through woodland streams, slide down banks
– Afternoon: fight water rats to the death, preferably by battering them with a loaded sling
– To eat: as much shrimp and hotroot soup as physically possible, with warm bread
I have it! It has Hotroot Soup and Deeper’n’Ever Turnip’n’Tater’n’Beetroot Pie in it! They are AMAZING!!
The recipes are simple, but very tasty. Heavy on the butter and cream, just the way a Midwestern gal like me likes it.
…I might need this.
I can tell you I had it as a kid and I ADORED IT.
They’re rich, but perfectly healthy for a lifestyle of chopping weasels in half with an ancient sword.
I vote for every day being Stoat Day. WHO’S WITH ME?
LOOKIT IT GO!!!!!!!
(Totally stepping on your game here CleverManka)
Aw, bb, the gif game is always better when it’s played with lots of people!
Am super curious about polecats now though.
I want to love this the most, but I see no mention of cordial.
There has not been a Thanksgiving I can remember where I didn’t consider appropriating the stuffing chestnuts for candying purposes. That one bird taught me the best candied chestnuts were the gnarliest.
Now I’m hungry. This was lovely.
“Have you ever seen a shrew with diabetes? I have, and it’s terrible.”
Mallory, you can’t make me laugh that hard while I’m at work.
I tipped over sideways, I was laughing so hard.
“Deeper’n’Ever Pie
Deeper’n’Ever Squats”
Is my new life motto.
There needs to be at least one day of “Eat ALL THE THINGS. Preferably trifle covered in meadow cream and followed by cordial”. Seriously, if you’re not hungry before reading a Redwall book, you definitely will be by the end.
Also, it seems appropriate to leave this here: http://www.redwall.net/kitchen/ Online collection of recipes from the Redwall cookbook, if you’re not lucky enough to have a copy yourself.
Does anyone remember the bit in – I think it’s Outcast of Redwall – where there’s a new Badger Lord in town, and he shows all of the Salamandastron staff how to do their jobs?
There’s this one jaded hare cook who’s been going through the motions for years, serving up nothing but a loathsome gruel for every meal. Lord Badgy McBrockerstripe takes a pan of the gruel, throws in a pawful of chopped apples, shoves the pan in an oven for a sec, and pulls out a fragrant brown oatcake. See? Good cooking is that easy. There will be no shirkers in this badger’s mountain.
I remember making a mental note to try that recipe out, but I never got around to it. I put the question, then: is it remotely possible to go from thin gruel to delectable oatcake in like three steps? Without divinely ordered badger powers?
Oh, oh – was that the lovely badger named after the bad-ass squirrel from the Long Patrol?
(Her name was Russano? Or something? Because “russa” is the name of a squirrel house and she didn’t have one, except maybe it’s a different word to “russa”)
And she fought with a cool stick, and then she died heroically and gave him the stick, and then eventually (maybe a book or two later) he ended up in Salamandastron. I thiiiiink that’s the badger, because I remember him being cool and less-violent-but-still-pretty-violent than the other badger lords.
These recollections bought to you by Refusing To Google Anything.
SUNFLASH THE MACE!
As long as you commit genocide against the vermin with your newfound strength!
as someone who, as a child, had a longheld dream of opening and running a redwall themed restaurant, this article is very important to me. and now i can’t decide whether i’m hungry or i just need to read pearls of lutra for the millionth time…
Stoat day is pretty much my M.O. for holidays with the family.
SUNFLASH THE MACE!
In fourth grade we had a class-wide Redwall potluck. I made cranberry scones and avoided the leek soup like the plague.
(Also, this is the post that finally convinced me to create an account to comment… the mice win again)
While people like JJ Abrams continue to murder my childhood, you, Mallory, continue to shine a light into its darker corners and recapture its joy. Thank you.
While people like JJ Abrams continue to murder my childhood, you, Mallory, continue to shine a light into its darker corners and recapture its joy. Thank you.
i love you mallory and all your words
You should do this! Never give up – they are sooooo sweet but delicious. I am too afraid to make them from scratch, though I think about it…. some day. (Two day recipes, sure! 5 day recipes, ehhh no.) Once in a fit of hardcoreness, I decided to make a mont blanc from scratch. Interesting experience but I decided that I never wanted to peel that many chestnuts ever again in my life. However, chestnuts cooked with apples and calvados on the stove are completely worthwhile and a LOT easier (fewer chestnuts to peel), and you still get to have a lovely sweet vaguely medieval-looking chestnut dish to nom on. Chestnuts for all!
Fantastic.
Fantastic.