May the Fourth be with you! Or, in this case, May the Fork be with you! May 4 is Star Wars Day, which is a great day to immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe by watching the movies and shows, reading the books, or getting creative and recreating pieces of the world for yourself. One way to celebrate this or any holiday is to make food for the occasion, and if you go down that road, you have a lot of options to choose from. There are lots of blogs like this one and even a bunch of different cookbooks with Star Wars-themed food. The types of food usually fall into three main categories: word play (like Qui-Gon Jinn-ger Snaps or Greedo’s Burritos), food that looks like things from the universe (like pretzel sticks partly dipped in colorful melts to look like lightsabers), and food that recreates something from the universe itself. The two recipes I have here fall into that last category.
Tatooine is a central part of the Star Wars saga, so I’m focusing in there to bring you two recipes from that world: Dustcrepes and Bantha Steak Soup. Star Wars media has given us a pretty good idea what’s in both of these, so I’ll give you those clues plus my notes about how I adapted them before sharing my original recipes. I’ll also include pictures of the original foods and my recreations next to them.
Dustcrepes
References
You can start the day off right with some dustcrepes and nausage, which are described as “a Tatooine favorite” in the Legends book The New Jedi Order: Star by Star. If you want to read the full passage, it’s the start of Chapter 22, but the quick summary is that Luke Sywalker’s wife Mara is trying to make him breakfast during some rare alone-time. It’s a valiant effort for the inexperienced cook, but one that leads with her dustcrepes getting too brown and rubbery and her nausage getting puffed and blackened.
Dustcrepes also appeared in the online game Star Wars Galaxies, which is where the above pictures come from. In the game, it’s described as a light crepe, and to make it, you need wheat, herbivore meat, and an optional light food additive.
It doesn’t specifically mention in the text what Luke drank for breakfast, but the books frequently reference his love of hot chocolate, so that’s a reasonable companion to the meal.
Adaptation
This one is the more straightforward of the two, since it’s safe to assume dustcrepes are basically just crepes. In this case, they’re wheat-based crepes, which we know from the game.
You can fill your dustcepes with some kind of herbivore meat. Since it’s white in the picture, I’m going with chicken. The picture also shows something green in there, and I’m choosing to mix mine with spinach, since that goes well with chicken. Also, the picture shows the filling layered, with a chicken layer on top of the green layer, but I’m mixing them together with a little bit of mayo to add some moisture and help keep it together. As you would assume from a name like “dustcrepes”, they can be a little dry on their own.
Mara serves her dustcrepes with nausage on the side, which is most likely sausage.
Recipe
Ingredients
Crepe:
- 1 c. whole wheat flour
- 1/2 c. milk
- 1/2 c. water
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- 2 Tbsp. butter, melted (plus more for buttering pan)
Filling (Optional):
- 2 (20-oz.) cans of canned chicken
- 1/2 c. mayonnaise
- 1 c. fresh spinach, chopped
Directions
- Combine all of your crepe ingredients in a mixing bowl. It should be a little runnier than pancake batter, but not by too much. If your batter is too thick, you can add a little milk, and if it’s too runny, you can add a little flour.
- Melt a little butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat.
- Pour 1/4 cup batter into the skillet. Pick up the skillet and tilt it so that some of the batter runs off the top to hit the bottom. Move the batter around in a circle so that the crepe grows in size. When the batter stops moving, put the pan back on the heat.
- Let it cook about 30 seconds, or until the first side easily comes away from the pan. Then flip it over and cook the other size for about 30 more seconds.
- Remove the crepe from the skillet and repeat with the rest of the batter.
- You can either eat your dustcrepes plain or mix together all of the filling ingredients and spoon a little bit of the mixture inside each crepe and fold it over
- Serve your dustcrepes with sausage and hot chocolate.
Bantha Steak Soup
References
After your dustcrepe breakfast, you can have some Bantha Steak Soup for lunch and/or dinner. This one isn’t actually from a book; it’s only in Star Wars Galaxies, so even though this is a literary blog, the soup recipe is here as a bonus. If you played the game, you could earn a bowl of Bantha Steak Soup on Tatooine, and when you examined it, a recipe would appear. That means the challenge here isn’t to start from scratch. Instead, I had to find real-world alternatives to Star Wars ingredients based on what we know of them.
Adaptation
Original Recipe
Cube 1 thick bantha steak; trim fat, pat dry. Saute meat in bantha butter until brown. Core, seed, and chop 2 large ootowergs, 3 ripe dropes, 1 small koba if available. Add vegetables to cooked meat, cook til heated through. Put all in pot of boiling water. Cover, simmer at low heat for 3 days. Add roosha to taste. Serves 1-2.
Alteration Notes
- Bantha Steak -> Beef Steak or Beef Cubes: Beef is the bantha meat substitute in lots of Star Wars recipes.
- Bantha Butter -> Cow Butter
- Ootowergs -> Yellow Bell Peppers: We actually get a picture of these from the Star Wars comics. (In the picture above, they’re the vegetable near the steak.) It’s hard to tell if the vegetable is green, yellow, or both. It could be lighting or dressing that gives part of it a different color, after all, but I’ll lean towards the yellow since there’s more yellow than green in the soup. Add to that the fact that you have to take out a core and seeds before you chop it up. There are plenty of vegetables with seeds, but with many, like cucumber or okra, you’d still eat the seeds.
- Dropes -> Tomatoes: There’s absolutely no background information on this one, but we’re looking for a vegetable where the relative ripeness makes a difference (so probably not a root vegetable, for example). They should also be medium or small-sized foods since there are three of them, and we don’t want them to overpower everything else. Besides that, the soup is primarily red. I know this is technically a fruit and the recipe refers to vegetables, but I think that your average Tatooinian wouldn’t be too strict with that distinction.
- Koba -> Butternut Squash: All we know about koba from other materials is that it’s a food that can be stuffed. That doesn’t narrow it down much on its own, since lots of produce can be stuffed. However, if you only need one small one to flavor the whole pot, that rules out smaller foods like potatoes, mushrooms, or peppers. I’m using a butternut squash partially because it’s a larger food that can be stuffed (though also technically a fruit), and partially because of the name, since Star Wars will often tweak real-world names a little for their items. There’s a squash called kabocha that grows in Japan and is similar to a butternut squash and acorn squash in taste.
- Roosha -> Parsley: Our only hint for this is that in one story, a café put a roosha topping on a squid pie. Seafood pies can have a variety of toppings, like potatoes or bread crumbles or even simple herbs and spices. Again turning to the name, there’s an herb called osha that’s in the carrot and parsley family. Osha root was used as medicine by Native Americans, but it’s not always safe to eat, so I’ll just go with parsley, which is often found garnishing beef soups and stews.
- Cooking: I’m making a crock pot recipe rather than making you boil your soup in a pot for three days.
- Other: This is just one family’s version of the recipe (being made by the sister of the NPC Bren Kingal), there’s a little room for other variations. Keeping that in mind, I’m substituting beef broth for the water and adding a little salt and pepper.
Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 lb. beef steak or other beef
- Pepper, to taste
- Butter (about 4 Tbsp.)
- 2 large yellow bell peppers
- 3 ripe tomatoes
- 1 small butternut squash (about 2 lbs.)
- 3 c. beef broth
- 2-3 Tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped
- Salt, to taste
Directions
- Trim the fat from your meat then cut the meat into bite-sized cubes. Pat it dry (so it browns, not steams, in the pan). Season it with pepper, rotating to get all sides.
- Melt 2 Tbsp of butter on medium-high heat in a large pan. Put some of your meat in the pan, careful not to over-crowd it, and brown the meat on all sides. (You’ll know it’s ready to flip when it comes away easily from the pan.) Set this meat aside and repeat as needed until your meat is brown.
- Prepare your produce. Core, seed, and chop your yellow bell peppers. Remove both ends from your tomatoes and chop. Peel, seed, and cube your butternut squash. (If you have trouble peeling butternut squash, you can get it more easily if you soften the skin first. Prick the squash all over with a fork, slice off both ends, and microwave the squash for about 6 minutes, rotating halfway through. The juices will be hot when you take it out, so wait for it to cool or handle it with a towel.)
- Put your peppers, tomatoes, squash, meat, and broth in a 6-qt. slow cooker. Stir and cover. Cook on low heat for 7-8 hours.
- Turn off your slow cooker, mix in parsley along with a little salt and pepper, and serve.
More
To see just recipes on their own, you can open the pdf here:
Let me know in the comments below if you try making either of these dishes for yourself or anything else in the Star Wars universe.
Keep working ,terrific job!