The Apothecary Diaries
Season 1: Culinary Experience Guide
Boazi Buns
For this dish, I bought frozen Boazi Buns from my local asian market and steamed them at home per the package’s instructions.
If you would like to make them yourself, here is a recipe you can follow.
Maomao’s Chocolate
Jinshi asks Maomao to make aphrodisiacs, and she uses ingredients like milk, butter, sugar, honey, and cocoa powder to make chocolate. She then dips an assortment of nuts, dried fruit, and cakes in the chocolate for a yummy treat.
This is the plate of items she dipped along with the cakes. It looks like dried oranges, dates, goji berries, Jujube, maybe peanuts. These are just my guesses. I already had some dried fruit and nuts, so to not be wasteful, I used what I already had. I dipped everything in milk chocolate and let them harden on a parchment-lined baking sheet in my refrigerator.
For the square cakes, I found these at my local asian grocery store, so I added them to the serving tray.
Matsutake Mushrooms
For this dish, I kept it simple by marinating the mushrooms in a soybean paste sauce and then grilling them on a cast iron pan with grill marks to give it the illusion of the charcoal grill that is used in the anime. Unfortunately, I don’t have an actual charcoal grill 🙁
To make the sauce, I added about a tbsp of soybean paste, 2 tbsp of soy sauce, 1 tbsp of honey, 1 tbsp of aged vinegar, a pinch of salt, and 1/4 cup of water to an airtight container.
Then I sliced the mushroom lengthwise, added the slices to the container, and closed it. I gave it a good shake to incorporate all the ingredients and let it marinate in my refrigerator for a few hours.
To cook, I sprayed some cooking oil on the pan with grill bumps and cooked the mushrooms on both sides until the grill marks showed. To serve, I just added some finishing salt on top.
Note: If you can’t find Matsutake Mushrooms, King oyster mushrooms have a similar look and are easier to find.
The Garden Party Soup
This scene still gives me chills… It’s so good!
You can actually find the original recipe for the soup served on Reddit. (See Below)
I wanted to keep it simple though, and I’ve always thought the soup looked like a miso soup, so that’s what I served. I already had all the ingredients to make it. Plus I organized this whole food tasting for my husband, and he LOVES miso soup, so I knew it would be a big hit with him.
Below is a good recipe. I just made the broth and added chives on top because the anime soup looked like it only had green onions or chives, nothing else.
Booze!
For this episode, a high-ranking official passed away due to an excessive amount of salt in his booze, so I decided to serve a sake margarita. Sake is a very popular Japanese rice wine, and margaritas use salt on the rim, so I thought it would be a perfect combination.
Sake Margarita Recipe
I used a small single-serving bottle of sake and poured it out of the bottle into a mason jar. I then added small pebble ice to the bottle.
In the mason jar, I added 2 oz of lime juice and 2 oz of orange liqueur. Sake has enough sugar, so we won’t be adding any other sweetener. I also added a pinch of salt, and then sealed the mason jar with a lid and gave it a good shake.
Using a funnel, I filled the sake bottle up with the margarita mix. It only used about half, so I stored the mason jar in my refrigerator so I could refill the bottles for a second margarita.
Finally, I added some salt to the rim and served with a straw.
These were so delicious! Sake was very complementary to the orange and lime flavors!
Orange and Honey Ginger Tea
Gyokuyō is hosting Lishu for tea, and she offers this delicious-looking honey that is described as orange peels boiled in honey. I immediately thought of this Citron Honey Concentrate I get from my local asian grocery store.
Lishu has a lot of food allergies, so they ended up switching to ginger water, so I thought it would be a nice combination to serve ginger tea and then scoop some of the citron honey into the tea as a sweetener.
This was so incredibly lovely. The flavors worked so well together.
Eel and Seaweed
Eel, if not prepared correctly, can be toxic, so I would suggest ordering it from a Japanese restaurant.
For the seaweed, I bought freshly prepared and seasoned seaweed from my local asian market. If you haven’t tried fresh seaweed, I encourage you to do so. I don’t normally like seafood, but it’s not overally fishy tasting when it’s seasoned well. It’s actually very refreshing.
Chicken Skewers
For these skewers, I bought pre-marinated ones from my local asian market and grilled them at home.
If you would like to make them yourself, though, here is a great recipe you can use.
Yakitori (Japanese Chicken Skewer Recipe)
Blue Roses
Blue roses play an important role in the final act of this season, so to illustrate their beauty, I decided to serve a Blue China Cocktail.
This cocktail is a beautiful, vibrant blue just like the roses. This cocktail was also created in Japan but is named Blue China. I thought that was fitting for a Japanese anime about a fictional Chinese dynasty.
Blue China Recipe
- 1 oz Lychee Liqueur
- 1.5 oz Blue Curaçao
- Sparkling Grapefruit Juice
To make this cocktail, add ice to your glass and the Lychee Liqueur and Blue Curaçao. Mix well and fill the rest of the glass with the Sparkling Grapefruit Juice.
To make the garnish, I used this rose chocolate mold. I melted down blue chocolate I bought from the baking section of my local craft store. Add the melted chocolate to the rose molds and let them harden in the freezer for about 10 minutes. Then pop them out and set them aside.
To attach the chocolate roses to these metal cocktail picks, I used a lighter to warm up the metal and then carefully punctured the chocolates. The heated metal will help the food picks slip through the hardened chocolate. Add some extra melted chocolate to the sides to secure the chocolates, and store the food picks in the refrigerator. When it’s time to serve, add the prepared chocolate garnish on top of the cocktail.
