Foreword by Hermione Potter:
When Harry Potter told me he was writing a book, I expected it to be of his further adventures of robbing tombsbreaking curses, violently killing inept morons who think that their heritage is more important than magic itselferadicating threats to freedom, and his ability at finding our little girls more incredibly loud *Hello Kitty!* products than should ever exist! Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a first draft of this cookbook sitting on my pillow one night.
Foreword by Harry Potter:
For those of you who knew me in school, I'm sure you're shocked to see me doing something like this. For those that actually knew me, they know I've done more than my fair share of cooking as a child. And one would think I would hate it. But I don't. It's relaxing. One of my favorite things is to spend the day in the kitchen with our kids, creating a meal, teaching them how to cook as well.
One day, I was remembering a potions book I had as I looked at a recipe I wanted to try for dinner. I had a bit of an epiphany. I went back to one of my favorite recipes, a rather simple Harvest Stew utilizing early harvest crops. And one of the kids' favorites as well. The major ingredients of this Stew are home canned tomatoes, snap beans, lima beans, three types of mushrooms, broccoli, yellow carrots, sweet corn, mustard greens, onions, peas, and spinach. And a handful of spices. This recipe is later in the book but I'm still going to discuss it.
As I was reading this recipe, it said to chop the carrots into large chunks and dice the tomatoes roughly. And as I was reading this, I realized that aspects of potions could possibly used in cooking. And so, after dinner and the kids were off to bed, I began making a dozen or so at the same time, changing just a variable in each one.
After a few weeks of testing this out on the same dish, I then made it the regular way and the fully optimized way. We had guests who've had the same stew before but when they tried this one then the original dish, it was like eating sand and couscous. One is infinitely better than the other. And that was how it is with Early Harvest Beef Stew. Which they now call Potter's Early Harvest Beef Ossobuco. For those that don't drink, the spell to remove the alcohol from wine is Vinus Corruptionem. The appendix at the end has a compendium of all spells used and how to perform them.
A/N: The idea for this came from a musing on cutting veggies to the correct size for what you're cooking and a moment in a Harry Potter/Sword of Truth crossover idea I had where I was freewriting and wrote:
Harvest Stew, Harry thought. His favorite dish of Molly Weasley's. Always different because of the availability of foods, always incredibly delicious. One of the few dishes Molly Weasley had been hesitant to give out the recipe of. Because it was a melding of potions and cooking, utilizing potioneering skills that I never thought to combine with cooking of food.
And from that, I had the idea expand and the idea of the fanfic/cookbook was just stunning. The story will have some of my favorite recipes that are in the public domain that I will then potioneer up as it were.