Game of Thrones House Sigil Dinner Party

"The dragon has three heads," [Daenerys] sighed. "Do you know what that means, Jorah?"

"Your Grace? The sigil of House Targaryen is a three-headed dragon, red on black."

"I know that. But there are no three-headed dragons."

- Daenerys V, A Clash of Kings

In our house, our annual Game of Thrones season finale party is second only to Thanksgiving. Every year, I've done a variation on a Game of Thrones themed party. Last year, I did a Highgarden feast (a sadly ironic banquet for the season 6 finale). This year, I served a 9-course meal, with each course themed around the house sigil for one of the Great Houses of Westeros: Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, Tully, Arryn, Baratheon, Stark, Lannister and Targaryen. I think this Thronesgiving was my favorite so far! Check out the links below!

Full House Sigil Menu:

1. House Greyjoy Squid in its Ink
2. House Martell Butternut Squash Soup with Smokey Peppers
3. House Tyrell Artichoke Bud Salad
4. House Tully Trout with Heirloom Carrots
5. House Arryn Chicken with Butterfly Pea Blossom Sauce
6. House Baratheon Venison with Mustard Sauce
7. House Stark Direwolf Pies
8. House Lannister Wine & Cheesecake
9. House Targaryen "Madness or Greatness" Chocolate Truffles

House Targaryen Madness or Greatness Chocolate Truffles

King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.

- Daenerys VI, A Storm of Swords

This chocolate surprise was the final course in my Season 7 Game of Thrones party, in which I themed each of the courses around a family of Westeros. The Targaryen family's disposition to mad rulers like the Mad King and legendary monarchs like Aegon the Conqueror is an interesting part of Westerosi lore. While the stories and the quote above make it out to be an either/or phenomenon, I wonder if some of the Targaryens are a little of both? Either way, I wanted to represent this dichotomy in the Targaryen course.

I went with chocolate truffles, which are easy to make, and more importantly, easy to make look the same from the outside while secretly containing a flavor on the inside.  For the "greatness" of the Targaryens, I went with lavender - a soothing flavor, as well as the hereditary Targaryen eye color. For the "madness" of the Targaryens, I went with cayenne pepper and cinnamon - a surprising but still appetizing flavor, evocative of the "fire" portion of the "fire and blood" Targaryen words.

I served the chocolates in tiny gift boxes decorated with the Targaryen emblem, and a miniature scroll with a quote about the Targaryens.

Ingredients

House Lannister Wine and Cheesecake

"Podrick Payne edged his gelding closer. He was carrying the royal standard, Joffrey's great stag-and-lion, and struggling with its weight. Bronn bore Tyrion's own banner, the lion of Lannister gold on crimson."

- Tyrion V, A Storm of Swords

This decadent dessert was served as the dessert course for my Game of Thrones Season 7 party. Each of these courses was designed to look like the sigil for one of the Great Houses of Westeros. I also tried to capture some of the personality of the houses. Lannisters represent themselves with a gold lion on a field of crimson, but they are also recognizable for their prominent display of their considerable wealth. Many of the Lannisters - or at least Tyrion and Cersei - are particularly fond of wine. A rich dessert that incorporated wine therefore seemed fitting, so I went with Shinee's "Cheesecake Bars with Wine Gelée." I then decorated each little cheesecake bar with a golden lion made from stenciled Lustre Dust.

Lustre Dust is a fantastic ingredient to have up your sleeve for kicking your recipes up a notch. Available in many different colors, it is edible glitter. While it is edible, I am not sure if it is digestible. Do Lannisters shit gold? You'll find out! 

Ingredients

House Stark Direwolf Pies

"It was too far to make out the banners clearly, but even through the drifting fog she could see that they were white, with a dark smudge in their center that could only be the direwolf of Stark, grey upon its icy field. When she saw it with her own eyes, Catelyn reined up her horse and bowed her head in thanks."

- Catelyn VIII, A Game of Thrones

This adorable mini personal pie was the meat course of my Season 7 Game of Thrones Party. For this event, I made each course resemble the banners of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. For some Houses, like Tully or Baratheon, I could serve the actual emblem. This approach was a dead end for House Stark, since wolfmeat is not widely available...

I instead chose to recreate the direwolf shape. I ordered a Stark cookie cutter from Etsy however USPS lost it and it didn't arrive on time! As a back-up plan, I ordered a full-sized wolf (well, coyote) cookie cutter from Amazon and used just the head portion to cut the dough.

Because wolves are carnivores, it seemed appropriate to make the Stark course a meat course, so I used my cookie cutter to shape a pie crust for a meat pie. I'd previously made Inn At The Crossroads' Beef and Bacon pie and liked it; the dried fruits are an unusual touch that tastes medieval. I can imagine much of the fare at Winterfell incorporating preserved fruits and vegetables due to its short growing season, so it seemed like a great starting point for a recipe. I made a few changes to the original medieval-inspired recipe. For example, soy sauce is an excellent way to add depth to a recipe but wouldn't have been available to medieval Britons.

Ingredients

House Baratheon Venison Meat Loaf & Mustard Sauce

The visitors poured through the castle gates in a river of gold and silver and polished steel, three hundred strong, a pride of bannermen and knights, of sworn swords and freeriders. Over their heads a dozen golden banners whipped back and forth in the northern wind, emblazoned with the crowned stag of Baratheon.

- Eddard I, A Game of Thrones

This venison dish was served as the Baratheon course for my Season 7 Game of Thrones party. Each of the nine courses was inspired by the heraldry of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. Game meats feature heavily in Westeros feasts, and Robert Baratheon was particularly fond of hunting, so it seemed fitting to represent the Baratheon crowned stag with venison.

Even though deer roam wild around my neighborhood, the only venison my local grocer stocks is ground. For last year's Game of Thrones party,  I incorporated ground venison into a Highgarden-themed venison stew, which was delicious. This year I decided to mix it up a bit, and make a meatloaf. Meatloaf can be a disappointing venture, sometimes turning out too dry or bland. Fortunately, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has done some very thorough research on perfecting meatloaf so I started with that recipe. Because venison can be so lean, rather than replacing the beef with venison at a 1:1 ratio, I increased the quantity of pork slightly and increased the amount of gelatin. The texture turned out to be just about perfect.

I contrasted the dark brown of the meatloaf with a golden mustard cream sauce. I wouldn't have immediately thought to pair mustard and venison together, however I'd tried the combination this summer at Le Square in Montreal and found it delicious.

Ingredients

House Martell Butternut Squash Soup

In centuries past, many a host had come down from the Prince's Pass with banners streaming, only to wither and broil on the hot red Dornish sands. "The arms of House Martell display the sun and spear, the Dornishman's two favored weapons," the Young Dragon had once written in his boastful Conquest of Dorne, "but of the two, the sun is the more deadly."

- The Queenmaker, A Feast for Crows

This roasted root soup served as the second course in my Season 7 Game of Thrones party. For this event, each course was inspired by the banners of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. While many of the Great Houses chose commonly eaten animals as their heraldry, the Martells did not. Early on in my menu development, I recognized I would either need to reject the nutritional needs of my dinner guests, or make the Martell course a vegetable course. (Westerosi lords ought to follow the lead of the Onion Knight and pick a vegetable for their banners!) The Tyrell green and gold seemed like a natural fit for the salad course, so the Martells became a soup course.

I selected butternut squash for its appropriately orangey-yellow hue. I stirred in some chipotle peppers as a nod to the deadly hot sun and the fiery nature of the Dornish people. I tried a few different red garnishes, including sun dried tomatoes and pickled beets, eventually selecting roasted beets for their more sun-like appearance. Skewers both provide a convenient way of perching the beet "suns" over the soup while also representing the spears shown on the house banner.

Roasting the squash before blending it into the soup adds a wonderful complex sweetness which pairs amazingly with the smokiness of the peppers. I think this course ended up being one of the favorites of the night!

Ingredients

House Greyjoy Squid in its Ink

"Above the Sea Tower snapped his father's banner. The Myraham was too far off for Theon to see more than the cloth itself, but he knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House Greyjoy, arms writhing and reaching against a black field. The banner streamed from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the wind gusted, like a bird struggling to take flight."

 - Theon I, A Clash of Kings

This Iron Island appetizer was conceived for my Game of Thrones Season 7 Party. For this menu, I served nine courses, each inspired by one of the Great Houses. This course was one of the first that I finalized; when something so obviously edible as the Greyjoy's squid (well, Kraken...) is on the banner, the choice is easy!

The Greyjoy colors are black and gold, which also translate straightforwardly into a squid-based dish. Raw squid like you might encounter is sushi is an off-white color, but in its deep-fried state - perhaps more commonly known as calamari - the breading lends the squid the golden hue I desired. While black food is not particularly common, one of the blackest foods just happens to be perfectly thematic: squid ink!

Squid ink has a salty and faintly marine flavor without being strongly fishy. I was able to find it at my local grocery store in the frozen fish section, but it is also available on Amazon and at specialty fish shops. The color is powerful - I bought more than I needed to color the sauce appropriately.

For the rest of the sauce, I chose to keep it simple. I added lemon juice, which I really like with calamari. I shied away from using a roux to thicken the squid sauce; I didn't want to wind up with a grey sauce. Instead, I used gelatin to thicken the sauce. Gelatin is easy to work with, won't alter the color of the sauce, and adds a rich mouthfeel.

The presentation of the dish is very striking, and certainly evocative of the Greyjoy banners flying in the iron isles.

Ingredients

House Tully Trout and Rainbow Carrots

From the sandstone walls of the castle, soldiers and servants shouted down her name, and Robb's, and "Winterfell!" From every rampart waved the banner of House Tully: a leaping trout, silver, against a rippling blue-and-red field. It was a stirring sight, yet it did not lift her heart. She wondered if indeed her heart would ever lift again. Oh, Ned …

- Catelyn XI, A Game of Thrones

This fish dish served as the seafood course for my Season 7 Game of Thrones Feast. Each of the courses were designed to look like the banners of one of the Great Houses of Westeros. 

The Tully course seemed at first to be straightforward. There's a trout on the banner, so naturally a trout should be the centerpiece of the dish, right? A culinary representation of the Tully colors, red and blue, proved a little more tricky. There are not a lot of blue foods, and even fewer that I'd want to pair with fish. (A savory blueberry sauce, perhaps?) Since butterfly pea blossoms make an appearance in the poultry course, I decided to go with blue carrots for with the fish. I mixed these with red carrots, which my local grocery store had just started stocking.

I precooked the carrots to soften them so they can roast alongside the fish. I steamed the carrots rather than boiling them since the color leaches out easily and I wanted to retain as much blue as possible. In general, be careful to keep the blue carrots away from anything you don't want to be blue - that includes red carrots and favorite white tea towels.

The trout recipe is adapted from Inn At The Crossroad's Trout Wrapped In Bacon - also, appropriately, a Riverlands meal. I first made this a few years ago and haven't cooked trout any other way since. I stopped including the bacon long ago since I find it doesn't add much, and adapted a few other elements along the way. 

Ingredients

House Arryn Chicken with Butterfly Pea Blossom Sauce

"The dwarf had been whetting the edge of his axe and making some mordant jest when Bronn spotted the banner the riders carried before them, the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn, sky-blue and white. Catelyn had never seen a more welcome sight."

- Catelyn VI, A Game of Thrones

I made this Vale-themed entree for my Game of Thrones Season 7 Party. For each course, I tried to craft a dish that both visually and thematically represented one of the Great Houses of Westeros. House Arryn was one of the more challenging sigils to translate into something edible. Blue is not a color you eat often (although I've cooked blue food a remarkable number of times). I considered doing something like a blueberry cheese cake, but even blueberries are more purple than blue. I wanted to incorporate the falcon imagery into the dish too, which suggested some sort of fowl course.

My mindless browsing of reddit's mead forum fortuitously showed me the power of butterfly pea blossoms, which mead makers use to naturally dye their brews a beautiful bright blue. I played around with it for a bit to figure out the best way to incorporate this into a savory sauce. 

The color is strong, but pH sensitive - acid like lemon juice will turn the dye purple. Mixing the tea from the flowers into an opaque white medium helps make the vibrant color more apparent. A cream sauce seemed like a good starting point. I tried making a mushroom cream sauce, but the grey of the mushroom muddied the sky blue of the blossoms to produce a rather unappetizing indigo mess. I concluded I needed an even whiter base sauce.

I decided to go with a roasted garlic sauce. The blossoms themselves have a very mild vegetable flavor, so roasted garlic rounds out the sauce nicely by packing a lot of flavor without changing the color much. I added in a roux to thicken the roasted garlic and cream sauce. The result was very tasty, and, importantly, very blue.

For the falcon part of the sigil, I went with chicken. Because I was prepping and serving nine different courses at my Game of Thrones dinner party, I wanted a way of cooking the chicken that required the least possible oven space and monitoring. I therefore chose to sous-vide the chicken, and quickly browned the chicken in a skillet before serving.

The sauce can easily be adapted for whatever method of cooking chicken you like best, or even alternative protein sources! I had a few vegetarian guests over, and I served the sauce with cloud eggs. Eggs match the avian theme of the Arryn sigil, while clouds are a nod towards the Eyrie's high perch. 

Ingredients

Sweet Cakes Soaked With Honey

Catelyn still remembered the innkeep, a fat woman named Masha Heddle who chewed sourleaf night and day and seemed to have an endless supply of smiles and sweet cakes for the children. The sweet cakes had been soaked with honey, rich and heavy on the tongue, but how Catelyn had dreaded those smiles.

- A Game of Thrones, Catelyn V, George R.R. Martin

My re-read of A Game of Thrones last year added many new recipes ideas to my "to-do" list. This one topped the list, because who doesn't love honey? I poked around various medieval recipe sites to see if "sweet cakes" referred to any sort of dish in particular, but this might have been a George R.R. Martin creation. In the end, I selected this recipe from the Receipt Book of Sarah Longe, a beautifully penned cookbook dated to around 1610, because "sugar cakes" seemed to be about as close to "sweet cakes" as I could get.

Easy Belt and Shoulder Accessories for Daenerys Qarth Dress Costume

Once upon a time, a young woman went to a ball, danced her heart out, and dirtied the bottom of her dress. She took it to a dry cleaner, who did their best, but the beautiful gown was ruined. And thus, I inherited from my sister a gorgeous gold and turquoise dress, which looked surprisingly like a certain outfit worn by Game of Thrones' Daenerys in Qarth.

(I'm the one on the right.)

I'm a big fan of using what you have and supplementing it with things that are cheap, easy and effective. So, I topped off this rescued dress with a $12 wig from Amazon. To complete the look, I crafted two long strings of beads, a cape and these intricate gold belt and shoulder pad pieces. Read below to see how to make your own Khaleesi accessories!

Game of Thrones Venison, Beer & Barley Stew

“The war had not touched the fabled bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang & tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went onto tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley.”

– A Clash of Kings

The venison stew was one of the dishes I was most looking forward to making for my Highgarden-themed Game of Thrones season 6 finale dinner, which was based on the above passage from A Clash of Kings. I haven’t had a good excuse to cook venison before, and incorporating trenchers seemed fun and memorable.

Mead: Musings & Makings

And I vow that you shall always have a place by my hearth, and meat and mead at my table. And I pledge to ask no service of you that might bring you dishonor. I swear it by the Old Gods and the New. Arise.

– Lord’s Oath to a knight, A Song of Ice and Fire

Mead seems to me quintessentially medieval, and so I had hoped to serve it at my Game of Thrones Season 5 finale party. Unfortunately, the recipes I found called for rather longer aging times than I had expected! (Six months! You should skip to the end of this post for the recipe and start brewing now!) So I marked my calendar for January 2016 to ferment some honey for my Season 6 Game of Thrones finale party.

DIY Iron Throne Centerpiece

The songs said it had taken a thousand blades to make it, heated white-hot in the furnace breath of Balerion the Black Dread. The hammering had taken fifty-nine days. The end of it was this hunched black beast made of razor edges and barbs and ribbons of sharp metal; a chair that could kill a man, and had, if the stories could be believed.

- A Game of Thrones, Eddard XI

Valar More-Glue-Plz: All men must DIY!

The songs say it took 59 days and 1000 blades to make the iron throne. I made an iron throne in a weekend with around 100 swords. Mine is, to be fair, quite a bit smaller and rather less judgmental of the ruler’s leadership capability.

The Iron Throne: Myths, Superstitions & Cersei

The songs said it had taken a thousand blades to make it, heated white-hot in the furnace breath of Balerion the Black Dread. The hammering had taken fifty-nine days. The end of it was this hunched black beast made of razor edges and barbs and ribbons of sharp metal; a chair that could kill a man, and had, if the stories could be believed.

- A Game of Thrones, Eddard XI

[Spoilers: to A Dance with Dragons and Season 6 of A Game of Thrones]

My DIY Iron Throne - check out step-by-step photos here.

One aspect of the A Song of Ice and Fire series that I love is the murky borders between myths, magic and superstition. While there is indisputably magic in the ASOIAF world, the magic is interpreted by people in different ways and extra legends and embellishments have been woven in ways that make it unclear what the actual magic is.

Game of Thrones Season 6 Finale Party: A Feast at Highgarden

“The war had not touched the fabled bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang & tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went onto tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley. For the sweet, servants brought down trays of pastries from the castle kitchens, cream swans, spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps & wheels of buttery cheese.”

– A Clash of Kings

This elaborate feast greets Catelyn Stark as she meets with Renly Baratheon on behalf of Robb Stark (The King in the North!) at Bitterbridge. It also served as my source material for my third annual Game of Thrones season finale dinner party.

Sansa's Favorite Lemon Cakes

Later came sweetbreads and pigeon pie and baked apples fragrant with cinnamon and lemon cakes frosted in sugar, but by then Sansa was so stuffed that she could not manage more than two little lemon cakes, as much as she loved them. She was wondering whether she might attempt a third when the king began to shout.
- Sansa III, A Game of Thrones

Lemon cakes pop up regularly in A Song of Ice and Fire - particularly in Sansa's chapters! Despite their prevalence, there aren't any precise details about their usual appearance or ingredients.