Cooking with Plonq

For lunch today I decided to clear out a couple of items that have been in the freezer since last year.

I reheated the last serving of the vegetarian (almost vegan) chilli I made last year and served it over pasta that I rolled out from some dough I froze last year.

When I say that the chilli is almost vegan, it's because I added an ingredient at the last moment that was not vegan. I had not set out to make a vegan chilli, but it was only when I added the final ingredient that it occurred to me that it had been vegan up to at point. I don't even remember what that ingredient was now (white sugar, anchovy paste - probably the first, since I vaguely recall kicking myself for not just using agave syrup).

In any event, neither the noodles or the cheese in this dish are vegan - nor am I - so it makes little difference.

The base for this chilli is Beyond Meat which I padded out with texturized vegetable protein when I decided that there was not enough of the former for the size of batch I was making. Other than that, I used vegetable stock instead of beef stock for the liquid, and the rest was fairly standard chilli ingredients. The key thing is that it turned out really good.



I didn't know how the pasta dough would hold up from being frozen, but I let it thaw in the fridge overnight and then rolled it out this morning. It was bouncy and stretchy and all of those things that you want in a pasta dough. Once I had it rolled into a thin enough rectangle on the counter, I dusted it with flower, rolled it up, and cut it into fettuccine-width strips.

The pasta was fine with being frozen, and the resulting noodles held their own with the chilli. I would definitely do this again.

One might reasonably ask if it is worth the effort to make your own pasta, and I would answer that it is. Making pasta turned out to be far less work than I'd have imagined it to be, and the flavour and mouth feel of fresh home-made pasta blows the dried noodles out of the water. The boxed noodles are much more convenient, and I'm not going to stop using them any time soon, but IMO it is worth treating oneself now and then to some good noodles crafted in one's own kitchen.

I won't miss this expansion except when I do

I don't think many people are going to look back on Battle For Azeroth and include it in the list of better expansions. The art team and quest design teams did a marvellous job, and it had some memorable NPCs along the way (Jani, for one). The story was lame, with an unsatisfactory ending that felt rushed (because I'm pretty sure that it was - it's no secret that they skipped a content patch once it became clear this expansion was a dud).

The worst of it, though, was that this expansion felt like it had the most rigorous grind of any when it came to factions and resources. When I say "rigorous" I mean that it was an endless slog. There were time-gated resource grinds you needed to endure in order to make basic, non-optional gear functional. It led to weird quirks where an upgrade in item level was effectively a downgrade if you did not have enough resources farmed in order to unlock its advanced features.

You had to grind out upgrades for your gear later on, but those upgrades were curses that had stacking, negative side-effects. So you also had to grind out resistance that corruption just so you could use those upgrades.

- You had to grind out Azerite power for your next in order to unlock Azerite-powered features in your head, shoulders and chest armour.
- Each new tier of gear unlocked new powers that required more grinding to unlock.
- They added plug-ins for your neck that gave important abilities. You had to grind out those plug-ins, and also grind out more Azerite power in order to unlock the sockets for them in your neck.
- You also had to grind out reputations with new factions in order to get some of the best neck upgrades (get to Revered/Exalted with these gated rep grinds...)
- Later, you had to grind out a long quest chain to unlock a new cloak that was required for the final raid tier.
- Then you had to grind up the levels of that cloak by running scenarios. But you needed a single-use key to run those scenarios. Guess what you needed for the key? You had to grind out 10,000 tokens from gated quests for each key.
- You had to grind out resources that let you buy abilities usable only within in the scenarios, but they were effectively mandatory in order to complete the later stages needed for the cloak upgrades.
- You had to grind out gear with good corruptions on it, then later you could buy the corruptions but you had to grind out the currency to buy those.
- ... and, of course, you had to buy up the corruption-resistance of your cloak in order to counteract corruptions.

It. Never. Ended.
It was not fun.
It was not engaging.

Anyway, every time you reached the end of one slog, the next patch dropped and a new grind began.

I don't see that changing much in the next expansion, but hopefully the story and other parts of the system make up for that. They pruned away way too many character abilities in this expansion, and they are giving most of them back again for the next one. It's nice to see Blizzard learning from at least a few of their mistakes.

A couple of the things I have loved in this expansion are some of the visual aesthetics and the new races. I love the snakes, and I'm a bit sad that they were not a playable race. On the other hand, I am ecstatic that the foxes were made a playable race, and as a result, all four of my main characters are furry now (two foxes, a tauren and a panda).

I flew to the top of the main Horde hub today and snapped a picture of my priest (my main character in the game) staring thoughtfully off into the distance. It almost has the feel of an oil painting to it. For all of its faults, this game has been very visually pleasing to play.


I mean ... she's got little angle wings. Isn't she almost freakishly adorable? (Don't say "yes" or she may smite you.)


I have mixed feelings about moving on to the next expansion. One the one hand, it can't help but be better than this one overall. On the other hand, it's going to feel like tossing out an old pair of shoes that you had finally broken in. Sure, the heels still rub and give you blisters, and they still kinda pinch your toes, but you've gotten used to the pain now, and you've grown accustomed to the bad fit.