I love food.  Really.  Truly.  Love food and eating it.  Now let me tell you what I hate.

I absolutely hate the pretension and the marketing and the schmarmy-I’m-such-a-rockstar-because-I-can-do-this-thing-little-old-ladies-have-been-doing-for-centuries attitude.  Cooking is a skill like any other skill.  It’s accumulative.  It’s  hard won with hours of learning and effort like any other craft.  However…. everyone eats.  Not everyone can afford to eat out.  Some of us have to make amazing things happen in the corner of a hovel with a shitty electric stove.  People who dedicate their lives to food often take on a gag worthy air of self importance.  No, you are not that special.

The lair’s kitchen is in reality very, very small.  The refrigerator is in an awkward place.  There are too many appliances shoved into it’s corners.  The fire alarm is incredibly sensitive.  I go on a mission to organize the holy shit out of the kitchen every couple months, and I usually fail.  It isn’t a place where a constant stream of nourishing meals come out.  It’s more of a place for experiments when I have the energy to conduct them.

One of my last experiments broke the hand mixer, and I vowed to stop buying fifteen dollar hand mixers and just get a Kitchenaid already.  My next experiment will be whether or not I can make a couple loaves of bread every week instead of buying the good stuff for 4.50 a pop at the store (Teh Overlord is miserly like that).  I convinced myself that I needed a really expensive stand mixer before I could complete this goal–to make two loaves of bread a week.  Just two.  One likely to go straight into the freezer because I don’t eat that much bread.  Why…don’t I just knead it by hand?  Right.  Ok.

Minion Stew is finally headed towards food in a big way.  I struggled with it for awhile.  For one, I’m a Super Villain.  I’m not Susie-homespun baking pies in a frilly apron.  If I’m in the lair I’m experimenting with the edible in a somewhat hazardous environment.  It takes a special sort of finesse to be able to say, “yeah, I added more cinnamon and a dash of vanilla, what?  I’m HARD motherfucker.  Don’t you forget it.”  It takes more finesse to post pictures of turkey pot pie right before posting a tribute to Evil.

…but that’s who I am.  Hungry, tactless and Evil.  A Villain with a messy kitchen.  No use trying to hide it.

Above all, however, this is cooking for the common minion.  There are hundreds of food blogs with beautiful pictures and amazing props and set up.  I don’t trust them.  That isn’t what Minion Stew is about.  This is cooking for the proletariat and the food curious.  The Hungry Villain in training.

Pictures!

 I did indeed make a turkey pot pie, pulling together a few Thanksgiving leftovers.  It’s actually a turkey pot pie/ shepherd’s pie hybrid, on account of the layer of mashed potatoes.  Correction smoked turkey pot pie.  Things like this aren’t planned.  They just happen.

Yes, Villains do celebrate Thanksgiving.

In this time of Thanksgiving, Villains will often pause a moment to be thankful for those things we have taken, and those things that we are able to keep. Whatever it is you have earned through the force of your will, and the gift of your talents, take stock and be thoughtful. Those acquisitions that others covet, that are yours fought well to take and keep - cherish those things most of all. -Lord Malignance

 Money shot.  That’s a lair-made sour cream dinner roll, just like your grandma never made.  Snowflake.

…and this is a loaf of sour cream white bread.  We aren’t reinventing wheels.

We’re feeding Evil.