It’s time for “Cooking With Cary!”

This isn’t really a review of Personal Trainer: Cooking, just a fun story about me playing it. I got the game at a Black Friday online sale for only five bucks! You can’t get a real cookbook that cheap! It’s basically an interactive cookbook on your DS where you can view more than 200 international recipes and have a virtual chef call out the steps to cook your selected dish.

 

Late last Saturday night, teenage brother Jeff was bored and wanted to make something using the Personal Training: Cooking game. He wanted to make something easy and short, and also one that we had all the ingredients for. We didn’t want to go out to the store, it was already after 10 at night. Jeff said it was too bad one of the recipes wasn’t a bag of chips!

So what did we make? Welsh Rarebit. It’s a fancy name for a grilled cheese sandwich. There were two reasons why we made that dish. One, we had all the ingredients. Well, sort of. The recipe called for white bread, but we only had wheat. Grated cheese? Well we had Velveeta slices, so that would probably work. Cayenne pepper? Paprika is red and peppery, so we used that instead. Mustard Powder? We had regular yellow mustard, that’s kind of the same, right? As we were picking out ingredients from the pantry, I felt like Sam & Max on the mock TV show “Cooking Without Looking” on the Season One PC and Wii game.

Another reason why I wanted to try Welsh Rarebit was because I’m a big fan of Winsor McKay’s work. He was a comic strip artist from the early 1900’s, and one of his earliest successful strips was “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend.” In the comic, someone would eat a strong food like a Welsh Rarebit and then have a very strange and surreal dream. Winsor McKay later went on to draw one of my favorite newspaper comics strips of all time: Little Nemo in Slumberland (which was also an awesome NES game from Capcom). When I told Jeff about the Welsh Rarebit comic, he said, “So we’re going to be making a hallucinogenic food? Cool!”

So how did it turn out? Well, we basically just made cheese toast with a little bit of kick to it. And worst of all, it didn’t give us any weird dreams that night! Darn! Oh well, I have enough weird dreams as it is on my own. But it wasn’t a total loss. Because I used the DS in-game timer to toast the bread, the cooking game let me unlock the classic Game & Watch title Chef as a mini-game! No regular cookbook can do that! Next time, Jeff and I will make a potato and bacon soup recipe using Personal Trainer: Cooking. We may have to go the store this time! The next “Personal Trainer” game Nintendo just came out with is Personal Trainer: Math. I’m definitely NOT getting that game. I hate math! Cooking’s a pain, but at least you get to eat stuff when you’re done. You can’t eat numbers!

No Responses to “It’s time for “Cooking With Cary!””

  1. Glad you’re not my chef. 😉

  2. Hilarious Cary, great story. My wife admires your bravery in your creative “ingredient replacements” she’s also given this product an AOK – even though she’s a little far beyond it in ability.

  3. I know a few experience cooks and I did not recommend this game to them because they already knew everything in it. –Cary

  4. Hi Cary
    When I was looking it at what I thought would be fun is to try new recipes or ones that I haven’t made yet. But even more using it with the kids because they LOVE to cook. It is VERY cold here this weekend and may try out something with the kids. Will post about it!

  5. So, it’s basically just and electronic cookbook?

    WOW!

    Well, I guess that the price and number of recipes sort of make up for the fact that all it is is and electronic cookbook.

  6. who do i play the first game??

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