I'm one of the least artistic people on the planet (5 year olds can draw better than me) so it'd be impossible for me to do any fan art or make a mistcloak or anything along those lines. I also can't write, so fan fiction is out as well.
However, I can cook.
I've always been fascinated by Mistborn and the bay wraps featured in the 1st book always stuck out.
Several skaa women of various ages worked in the shop's kitchen, preparing baywraps -- rolls of thin, flat bread stuffed with boiled barley and vegetables.
After a lot of planning and research I finally decided on my recipe and made my first batch tonight. They came out delicious.
Here is the final result. I pretty much took the general idea, then thought about how to take that to make it taste good.
For the flat bread, I wanted something that was more than just holding it all together. This is where I probably deviated a little. The easiest thing would be a tortilla style wrap, but too me that was too thin and didn't have the right texture. I could also use something like pita bread but that would be too thick and dry. I wanted something that would really add to them. Thus, I went with some
naan(the bread you get at Indian restaurants, that pic was before I got the cooking down, some are over/under done on one side). I don't do a lot of baking so this was a bit of a challenge. In the end (once I got the cooking temp/time down on the grill) I ended up with a delicious bread that had just the most subtle sweetness to them, with additional flavor coming from some garlic butter they were brushed with. They also came out with the
perfect texture, of having a bit of soft spongyness to them. It really goes well with the...
Boiled barley - This was based of an Alton Brown recipe. I've never had barley before (except in beer of course) and had no idea what to expect. I ended up just cooking some pearled barley with water and then adding it to some orange juice, olive oil and tossed it with some bacon (of course), fennel and mizithra cheese, which is a softer goat cheese from Greece with a ton of flavor. This stuff is great, I could eat spoonfuls.
Finally was the
vegetables. This took some thought. I wanted vegetables that I could grill. In the end, I went with asparagus, eggplant and artichoke hearts that I tossed in a dressing made with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar and some dijon mustard. The goal here was to get a bit of acidic flavor to match the subtle citrus flavor in the barley. These came out good and paired perfectly.
After that, it was just a matter of spreading some of the barley on the naan, adding the veggies, to get
this and then rolling them up.
They were great. This was just an experiment batch though, I already have some improvements. For the artichokes I'm going to get full artichokes and just cut out the hearts. I tried to save money/time by getting just the hearts but they way they prepare them didn't work on the grill. I'll cook the hearts sous vide with some tricks to get a really intense flavor then grill them with a olive oil/garlic baste just enough to get some intense grill marks on them. I think I'm going to try some lemon flavor for the asparagus and I still want to figure out something for the eggplant.
I had a lot of fun working with this (and am not even done yet, it will probably take 2-3 more batches until I've settled my mind). I think as I go through other books I'm going to take notes of what the characters are eating and do the same thing. I seem to remember some interesting feast descriptions in Way of Kings....