Fried Pink Mushrooms at the Flip-Flop Cafe Quiz

Answer: Sky Juice

Sky Juice is one of the game's more intriguing-sounding drinks, because it kind of lets you imagine for yourself what this might taste like in real-life. The description is vague -- "a tasty sweet-and-sour juice" -- and the little image is vibrant but mysterious -- a glass filled with three color gradients: bluish-purple, reddish-pink, and yellowish-orange. This is fairly fitting with the four types of apple that can be made into, well, apple juice -- though hardly the kind often associated with snack time at kindergarten.

In the game, the only place to find apples is way, way up amongst the clouds as you make a celestial climb into the heavens. Blue Apples, Red Apples, Yellow Apples, Pink Apples -- any one of those will work for a Sky Juice. There are two other varieties of fruit: One tree has weird Black Apples, which won't cook into anything, and another bears the magical-somnolence-inducing Golden Apples, but there are none left by the time you get there.

Answer: Miracle Dinner

Now, the description the game gives is, "A dish that works miracles!" They've got it kind of backward, if you ask me. It would be more accurate to say, "It'll take a miracle for this recipe to work!" The cooking ingredient, a Mystery Box, will often turn into some other random recipe, or most commonly, just a "Mistake." That's the chance you take when you ask a chef to cook up a gift-wrapped box and whatever might be inside.

Time for a little geeky-math trivia: There's a 92% chance that Saffron, the Flipside cook, will turn the Mystery Box into something other than a Miracle Dinner. Want a REAL challenge? Go to Dyllis, the Flopside chef who uses two ingredients, and give her two Mystery Boxes. You might think this is like buying two lottery tickets instead of one (and thus two chances of winning). In actuality, though, it's much harder. See, ordinarily, with Saffron, the game will randomly choose an outcome, with an 8% chance of a Miracle. But with Dyllis, the game must draw the "Miracle" result from BOTH boxes -- so if one Mystery lands on "Miracle" and the other Mystery lands on any other item, the whole recipe fails. In short, you're multiplying the first 8% chance by another 8%, leaving a microscopic 0.64% chance of getting a Miracle Dinner.

Answer: Heavy Meal

The Heavy Meal is one of many recipes that are just there for the novelty rather than serving any useful purpose. I suppose the only other reason to make it is for those completionists who want to fill out every last entry in the game's list of recipes.

The game says that eating this will make you feel "sluggish," and sure enough, this sticky mess lives up to its name -- you'll be afflicted with the "Heavy" curse, rendering you temporarily unable to jump more than a couple inches off the ground. Considering it's literally just Honey Candy drenched in more honey, it's hardly surprising that you'll get no health benefit from the Heavy Meal. Ever been in a restaurant and watched someone drown their french fries in a sea of ketchup? After a point, you start thinking, "Why don't you just order a plate of ketchup and forget the fries!" That's the kind of thing the Heavy Meal's recipe calls to mind -- but maybe that's just me!

Answer: Golden Meal

It's a meal fit for a king -- King Midas, that is. Amusingly, the game indirectly points out just how much of a waste of a perfectly good item this is: If you have a Gold Bar, you can sell it for a hundred coins or more, but if you cook it instead, it'll fetch barely half the price. Talk about the price of gold going down before your eyes! Alternatively, if you decide to eat the Golden Meal, you get exactly one point of health back, further showing how little value it has if cooked.

While the game does suggest that this is quite a decadent treat, calling it "fourteen carats of delicious!", maybe there's also a subtle lesson in extravagant overindulgence? The traditional idiom is that "all that glitters is not gold," but in this case, it's more like "all that's gold is not dinner"!

Answer: Berry Snow Bunny

(Sorry, I couldn't help but write the clue in the style of Elmer's rhotacism.) Don't worry, no wabbits -- uh, rabbits -- were harmed in the making of this clue -- although if you think about this item from a particular perspective, it sounds slightly disturbing, in an amusing way. See, there's a recipe for a "Snow Bunny" AND a "Berry Snow Bunny," with the game saying of the latter, "It's Snow Bunny's girlfriend!" They're both icy treats, shaped like a rabbit, complete with cute little eyes and ears. But to make a Berry Snow Bunny, you have to cook up a pink apple with ... a Snow Bunny.

So let me see if I've got this straight. You can make a food shaped like a cute little animal, give it a girlfriend, and then eat it! Alternatively, you can take Mr. Snow Bunny, cook him up so he turns into his own girlfriend, the pink Mrs. Snow Bunny -- and eat her instead! The psychiatrist will see you now...!

Admittedly, this is just my deliberately "bizarro" (but technically accurate) way of describing it. I think the first time I played the game, it struck me as peculiar -- and then chuckled at the idea. You can imagine that I was more than a little conflicted when I read in the recipe list that as yet another option, if you make both a "regular" Snow Bunny AND a "Berry" one, you can cook them up together into a cake whose name in Japanese translates to -- wait for it -- "Always Together." You know, somehow that doesn't really make me feel much better...!

Answer: Block Meal

Fair warning: There's a good chance that I've earned the dubious distinction of setting a record for the most uses of the word "block" in a single quiz...

I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to say for this entry. I chuckled to myself at one point, "Well, this is ironic. I've got WRITER'S block as I'm trying to come up with something clever for an item called a 'Block Meal,' which is made from a 'Block Block' item!"

Well anyway, back to the recipe at hand. Both items have the same effect -- they give temporary invincibility -- the only difference being that a Block Block's duration is determined by how well you used the Action Command, whereas a Block Meal guarantees you'll automatically get the maximum length of time. All considered, I suppose it's unlikely that these items were meant to resemble a translucent sugar-cube, but it's still a fair description of what they look like. As for the naming, I'm similarly unsure: Were the writers just stumped on the word "Block," or were they being subtly clever with the repetition? At first glance, the names struck me as uninspired, but then I thought about it sort of like this: "Okay, a Block Meal is made from an item called a "Block Block." And what is a block sometimes called? -- a square. And what is something multiplied by itself? A square. So if a number times itself is a square, then a 'block' times itself can be called 'squared' too -- and the recipe you're making is square-shaped."

If you want to be really picky about it, I suppose you could say that I should have focused on the fact that the item is technically a CUBE -- hence why I said "sugar cube." I thought about playing that angle, extending the discussion into something about how "'squared' means 'doubled' and 'cubed' means 'tripled,'" but it got too convoluted -- even for me.

Answer: Inky Soup

I don't know ... of all the recipes listed in the game, this one -- Inky Soup -- just sounds unappealing on so many levels. Heck, even the game's description can't bring itself to refer to the dish as more than a "murky mess." The ingredient it's made from doesn't fare much better: "a squiddy sauce." The only way to get it is by jumping into the ocean and beating up some of the Blooper monsters until one of them drops the item, then run it back to the Flipside chef and have her whip up a big soup bowl of ... cephalopod ink.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not passing judgment. As odd as it (still) sounds, I'm well aware that in some parts of the world, squid ink really is quite popular -- including in Japan, which is probably why the game has multiple ink-involved recipes, including a pasta dish. If some people like the taste and even consider it a delicacy, that's great. I just personally don't have any desire whatsoever to try it for myself -- I think my taste buds and I will let this particular flavor adventure set sail without us. If I HAD to sample it, I think I'd just try it as a flavor additive. But drinking ink as a soup ... no, I'd rather just take my chances with the ink in one of my pens.

(By the way, there's no connection to the Pac-Man ghost of the same name...)

Answer: Megaton Dinner

The Megaton Dinner is definitely one of the quirkier recipes, because it's not even edible. If you've ever played "Mario Bros." (the arcade game) or "Super Mario Bros. 2" -- or a few others -- then you've seen this dish's base ingredient, a POW Block ("POW" is short for "Power"). When you strike it or throw it (depending on the game), you cause a big quake, damaging or even knocking out every enemy in sight. So, as a forceful attack item, it's kind of amusing to see it reimagined as being usable for cooking with -- but that's what you get, a POW Block with some sort of sauce drizzled on it.

Admittedly, since it is not an edible item -- the idea of considering it as such is just a bit of whimsy -- it may seem rather pointless to bother cooking with it. But as with the Block Block versus a Block Meal, this too has the same premise: Instead of having to try to get the timing just right with your controller, the improved version just automatically gives you the maximum impact.

Actually, as I think about it, I guess you CAN consume a Megaton Dinner. I'm not suggesting you can try to chomp down on it, but remember: Usually we say "consume" as in "to eat," but it can also mean "to use up." The only question I still have is, if this is a "dinner," what's for breakfast and lunch? Probably best not to think about it too much!

Answer: Dayzee Syrup

"Dayzee Syrup" is just such a bizarre idea. Way back in "Yoshi's Island," we first met the weird Dayzee, a species of perpetually cute, cheery-looking flower creatures that sang a potent, sleep-inducing lullaby. Far and away the most common member of the species is the Crazee Dayzee, which in this case is the enemy that drops the Dayzee Tear -- which is what cooks into the syrup.

I guess the idea they were going for was to suddenly associate something sad, like tears, with an unexpected foe -- the perpetually smiling flower-monster. Well, I admit it does cleverly juxtapose the creature's expected joyful nature with the unexpected element of tears. And it's such a silly-sounding proposition, especially the way the game doesn't just say "Dayzee Tear" but calls it a "sad, sad liquid." Similarly amusing is the way the Tear is depicted -- if we go interpret the game's visual depiction literally, then the implication is that Dayzees don't just shed tears, but they carry them around in conveniently labeled bottles! I think it's just a tad cruel to suggest the idea of taking an (apparently sad) flower's tears and making them into a potent, tasty syrup -- but that's kind of the whole thing the game is poking fun at. Well, drink up, I guess -- cheers! (But not too cheery!)

Answer: Dangerous Delight

The Dangerous Delight -- you know, this is another of those recipes that you'd never have any reason to cook up other than to check it off the in-game list of completed recipes. A handful of enemies drop Poison Mushrooms, and needless to say, they're highly toxic. Needless to say, this is really just a self-imposed penalty item, if you choose to eat it. Saffron, the chef, evidently makes the dish quite tasty, but she can't cook the toxins out, and she even seems aware ... that doesn't seem very responsible to me. You know those real-life chefs who are specially trained to prepare pufferfish in such a way as to get all the deadly toxins out before serving it? If I were Saffron, I'd think I'd want to try to avoid knowingly poisoning the customer...!

Actually, it's kind of interesting, because unlike the Poison Mushroom, a Dangerous Delight won't actually give you the "poisoned" status. So what DOES it do, then? Well, let's take a step back and consider one of the game's more prominent species of monsters -- the Cursyas. These are ugly creatures that, depending on which kind you touch, will get you one of several possible ailments -- or "Curses," as the game calls them. You can get "cursed" (move very slow), "tech-cursed" (can't use special moves), "reverse-cursed" (controls are inverted), "heavy-cursed" (can barely jump) and "back-cursed" (ejected from the level).

So why mention that? Because if you decide to chow down on the Dangerous Delight, you'll get not one but every single curse in the game all at the same time -- well, save for the "back-curse." Sounds fun, doesn't it?! It makes me think of cartoon character Snidely Whiplash's catchphrase, "Curses -- foiled again!"