After a heat wave this week, the weather has finally started to turn where I live, which means my ranger and I have been spending more time by the fire—and apparently eating ash yams.
Welcome back to my cozy season in Skyrim, where I’m slowing down, wandering wherever the road takes me, and attempting to cook my way through The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook. Here’s what happened this time.
Kitchen Adventure: Baked Ash Yams
Since the weather grew cold in my neighborhood, I decided to warm up with Baked Ash Yams from Morrowind.
According to The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook, Dunmer fleeing the Red Mountain volcanic explosion packed up their yams and brought them to Skyrim, where the Nords put their own twist on them. You can see these yams in all their glory here:
My Cooking Experience: First, this recipe was like If You Give a Moose a Muffin. To make Baked Ash Yams, I needed Spiced Butter. To make Spiced Butter, I needed Nord Spices. To make Nord Spices, I needed to order several ingredients I didn’t already have. And so what I thought would be a simple sweet potato dish became a culinary project spanning the entire day. I felt victorious by the time this mini-marathon was over.
Also, a confession: the recipe calls for yams, but I bought sweet potatoes because I thought they were the same thing. Apparently they’re not, but I don’t think they’re different enough for it to matter!
The sweet potatoes took a little longer to bake than I thought—just by 15 minutes, but I was still impatient to try these! Once they were done, I was supposed to cut an X on top to open them up. This is when they proceeded to fall apart, making them un-photographable. So no pictures of this one.
As for the taste, the flavors are an excellent blend: sweet potato, goat cheese, and Spiced Butter. Those Nord Spices in the butter (lots of cardamom + a little cinnamon, cloves, mace, and pepper) are perfection with the sweet potatoes. I ended up mashing it all together into a soft delicious mush.
Again, not very photogenic. But I do believe that sometimes—and certainly in this case—the uglier a meal is, the better it tastes.
I will show you some of the ingredients I whipped together, though!
As I ate my yummy mash, I thought of the hardy people who grow these hearty vegetables, first in Morrowind and now in the wintry lands of Skyrim. Considering they grew well beneath the shadow of the Red Mountain, I have to admit they did taste strangely… volcanic.
Final Verdict: I would absolutely make this again. It was a great, easy blend. Next time, I might even nuke the sweet potatoes in the microwave for a quicker cooktime, then mash them up with the Spiced Butter and goat cheese over some quinoa and kale.
Skyrim Adventure: Joining the Companions
Aslaug has joined the Companions, a free-wheeling group of warriors with a storied history in Skyrim. Their hall, Jorrvaskr, is an overturned ship, and all of Whiterun was basically built up around it.
Out of curiosity, Aslaug wandered into their hall and almost immediately bumped into Njada Stonearm, who took an immediate dislike to her and practically kicked her out.
But Aslaug is nothing if not determined. She made her way into the barracks and found the unofficial leader Kodlak Whitemane. (No one is actually in charge of the Companions, but he’s the closest thing they have to a leader.) Next, she showed the incredulous warrior Vilkas that she could throw a punch. (Vilkas still isn’t convinced she belongs, but I like to think he’s slowly thawing toward her.)
Vilkas has a twin brother named Farkas. Where Vilkas is the brains, Farkas is the brawn, I guess. They both seem pretty brawny, though.
Farkas sent Aslaug on her first quest to prove her honor. This took her all the way to Markarth. In this stone fortress, she had to track down a priestess named Orla and beat her up. I can’t say it was Aslaug’s favorite thing to do, especially since she had to pickpocket a key and sneak into a temple to get to Orla. But joining the Companions is important to her, so she was willing to do whatever it took.
Next, a senior member of the Companions named Skjor sent her on a mission to Dustman’s Cairn. Farkas tagged along to make sure she was honorable. Together, they fought a lot of draugr and retrieved a Fragment of Wuuthrad, an ancient battle axe wielded by a legendary warrior.
It was in these dusty Nordic ruins that Aslaug tried her hand at conjuration magic and fell in love with sneaking around, conjuring a two-handed battle axe, and taking out draugr before they even saw her coming.
Side note: I wanted to make Aslaug a stealthy hunter with a longbow, but honestly, I’m having way too much fun with two-handed weapons right now. In my very first Skyrim playthrough (almost 15 years ago!!), I played a two-handed warrior and had a blast. Since then, I’ve tried archery and destruction magic, but my typical build is a conjuration mage. This time, though, I might end up going back to my roots as a two-handed warrior, for a truly nostalgic playthrough.
Oh, and one more thing. While fighting alongside Farkas in Dustman’s Cairn, Aslaug witnessed something strange: Farkas transforming into a werewolf.
He told her it’s a secret of the inner circle. I guess she might be sworn to secrecy now, too? Either way, she has questions.
That’s it for this week’s adventures!
If you’re playing Skyrim along with me, I’d love to hear what your Dragonborn got up to this week. And if you tried one of the recipes, tell me how it turned out!
Until we meet again around the hearth,
Ashley
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