‘A Farmers Guide to Mutations’ Episode #1: Mystic Herb

Greetings and welcome to the first episode of ‘A Farmers Guide to Mutations’. A step-by-step guide complete with pictures to show best ways to obtaining the various corp mutations in Harvest Moon Light of Hope. 

Today, we will be focusing on Celery, but more specifically: Mystic Herb. 

The Mystic Herb is a mutation of celery that only occurs in the summer on grassy terrain, so without further ado, let’s get our hands dirty.

First you wanna make sure you have a bunch of celery seeds and that the season is summer.

You’ll want to plant anywhere from 50 to 100 units of celery on your farm. I will be doing far less for the sake of the guide. Your ultimate end goal here is to grow 20 mystic herbs to sell to Sam so that the seeds become available to purchase.

Once you have your seeds in the ground and have watered them, you’re going to need to sprinkle some celery blend fertilizer to promote mutation growth.

The recipe for celery blend is: 4x compost, 3x celery and 2x sardine per ten unites of compost. I recommend making enough fertilizer to cover your celery field in its entirety for the first two days of growth.

Once applied, you’ll get the little fertilizer packet icon within the bubble.

After the first two days of celery fertilizer, you can change things up and use normal fertilizer to keep the crops healthy, particularly if you happen to get a storm or heat wave, which can lower the health of the crop and potentially kill it.

After a few days, your celery will mature and you will wake up one morning to a field of beautiful, if not gross tasting, celery! And if you fertilized it properly, you’ll see some plants with different colors.

Those light green plants are your mystic herb, and as you step over it, your thought bubble will contain a question mark, signaling that it is a new crop that you have yet to record in your encyclopedia.

Congratulations! You grew a mystic herb. They have a 24% chance of mutating under the right conditions, and you need to sell 20 to Sam in order to unlock their seeds.

MYSTIC HERB Base Crop: Celery Fertilizer: Celery Blend Season: Summer # Sold to Unlock: 20 Mutation Chance: 24%

Harvest Cookbook #7 ~ Chocolate Cookies

Dish: Chocolate Cookies Recipe: U: Oven, Rolling Pin, Sugar I: Chocolate, Butter, Egg, Flour

Greetings! It’s time once again for a dessert edition of the Harvest Cookbook here on A Farmer’s Guide! Tonight, I am tackling the chocolate cookies recipe that originated in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature.

The gang’s all here! Let’s jump in.

Start with your brown sugar and shortening.

Heat your chocolate chips over medium-low heat until silky smooth.

Add your buttermilk and mix away!

Not pictured: Add your egg at this stage as well.

At this point, you want to start adding your dry ingredients.

Add your flour, baking soda, walnuts (or nuts of your choice), salt and vanilla and continue mixing.

Grease your cookie sheet with the cooking spray of your choosing and then drop ‘em.

Bake between 12 and 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

TOK-TOK-TOK DING!

You’ve cooked a new dish! Write up a recipe!

Harvest Cookbook #6 ~ Boiled Egg

Ingredients: Egg Utensil: Pot First Appeared: Harvest Moon Back to Nature

Gotta another egg-ceptional entry in this little series here of mine. A simple one this time, requiring only water, a pot and an egg(or twelve!)

As I was intending on making some pickled eggs, I boiled about 15 eggs for this purpose. But you can do far less. It’s entirely up to you.

Place your eggs in your pot and fill it up. Set the burner to high and bring your eggs to a boil.

Immediately remove the eggs once the water has started to boil and set aside for 15 minutes covered.

After 15 minutes have passed with your eggs off the burner, move them to a bowl of cold water.

(ignore the burn mark on my counter top)

Harvest Cookbook #5 ~ Cake

Dish: Cake Recipe: U: Oven, Whisk, Sugar I: Butter, Egg, Flour

Greetings and welcome to another entry in the Harvest Cookbook. Today I am putting together a simple white cake. It’s just going to be a single layer and won’t resemble the pictured item from the game. It’s not as if the recipe in-game required you to make the frosting and stuff anyway.

What you’ll need: - 1 Cup Sugar - 1/2 Butter (Melted or softened/room temp) - 2 Eggs - 2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract - 1 1/2 Cup All Purpose Flour - 1 3/4 TSP Baking Powder - 1/2 Cup Milk Bake Time: 35-40 minutes@350 degrees

Before starting, set your oven to 350 degrees and allow it to preheat. You can also take this time to grease your cake pan.

First the sugar.

Then mix in your butter. 

Looking good. Use a silicon spatula to push the mixture off the wall.

Next, crack two eggs and lob in there!

Once you have that good and mixed up, add your vanilla.

Now you can add your flour and baking soda.

It’ll probably look like this.

Now is time to add your milk. 

Mix until your batter is smooth and creamy looking.

Place your cake into your oven and allow it to cook for 35 to 40 minutes.

Harvest Cookbook #4 ~ Grilled Fish

Ingredients: Fish Optional Ingredients: Oil, Soy Sauce Utensils: Frying Pan

First Appeared In: Harvest Moon Back to Nature

Got a quickie here today for everyone. A simple little dish both in-game and in real life called Grilled Fish. It’s a simple dish that can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.

I’ll be using tuna steaks for this recipe, so be sure to acquaint yourself with the cooking time for other types of fish.

First thaw out your fish, then dip one side into oil and coat it with your favorite seasonings (I used salt, pepper, onion, garlic and creole). Then repeat for the other side.

Don’t place your fish into the pan until after it’s nice and hot.

Now for tuna in particular, you can have it done in two ways: You can cook it on each side for 6 minutes each and end up with steaks with a pork chop like consistency, which is good but wasn’t what I was looking for the first time I prepared this.

This is what a well done tuna steak will look like. Cooked 6 minutes on each side. The meat will be tough and dry and will look exactly like a pork chop inside. 

I asked a friend about the proper way to cook them so that there is some pink left inside and she told me the best way to do it is to make sure the pan is very hot first, then drop the steaks in and cook for a minute or so on each side. 

Plate it up, garnish it with some green onions and a bit of soy sauce and enjoy!

Bonus picture of the first time I prepared it with a side of Knorr mushroom rice:

Harvest Cookbook #3 ~ Scrambled Eggs

Dish: Scrambled Eggs Recipe: U: Frying Pan I: Egg, Oil

The utensils you will need today is a bowl large enough to mix at least four eggs into, your whisk, a heat resistant silicone spatula and of course, a frying pan.

Ingredients: 4 eggs, 1/4 cup milk, butter, salt, pepper

Put the burner on medium low heat and let the butter melt and coat the pan.

Then get crackin!

Mix the eggs up enough that the whites and the yolks are combined.

Then add the milk and seasonings.

Don’t begin moving things around right away! Allow the eggs to sit for a minute or so until they start to stick to the bottom of the pan.

Slowly begin to push the eggs away from the edges of the pan. Do this all away around repeatedly until there is no moisture left.

The recipe I followed said not to break up the curds, so I didn’t. I turned the heat off and continued pushing the eggs around a bit until the shininess was all gone.

And voila! Fluffy, delicious scrambled eggs.

See you next time!

Harvest Cookbook ~ #2: Rice Omelet

First appeared in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature

Ingredients: Egg, Milk, Oil, Rice, Vegetables(Optional) Utensils: Whisk, Frying Pan, Knife(Optional, if vegetables are added), Salt(Optional)

First you wanna bring a cup of water to a boil, then add a cup of rice to it and remove from heat and cover. Fluff with fork after five minutes and set aside. 

Note: Depending on your preferences, try to use maybe a quarter cup of rice per omelet. Any more and you risk overstuffing the thing.

This time I used three eggs as opposed to the double egg omelet from this morning. This will make for a much grander meal.

I have once again added cheese for extra flavor. Also, I had the brilliant idea of using 3/4s cup of rice. Now some may like that, but for me it overpowered everything.

Good luck trying to flip this in a bigger frying pan. I’m using a small 6-inch pan, which is easy to just cover with a large plate and flip it that way.

Tok-Tok-Tok DING!

And voila! You cooked a Rice Omelet!

Harvest Cookbook ~ #1: Omelet

Greetings and welcome to the first in what I hope to be an ongoing series of blog entries dedicated to cooking up the hundreds of recipes found throughout the Harvest Moon series.

I’m gonna start small and cheap by doing the simpler recipes like omelets and rice based, then from time to time dip into the bigger, more advanced stuff that you’d win a cooking contest with.

So without further ado, let’s get cooking!

First decide which ingredients you want to use. 

My omelet will include: - Onion - Green Pepper - Cheddar Cheese - Butter (or oil) - Salt

Then your almighty utensils!

- Knife - Whisk - Frying Pan

Put the stove top on medium heat and put your butter or your oil in the pan and let it coat the bottom and sides.

Now I used two eggs this time, but looking back now I should have three. It’s really your call but I don’t recommend using more than 3 unless you have a large pan.

The butter’s melted! Time to dump the eggs.

As the egg cook, use your silicon spatula(if you have one) and move it around the edges of the egg to make sure it’s not sticking.

Now I allowed the cheese to melt a little before I flipped second half of the omelet over, but some people prefer to flip it right away. It’s your call really.

I am not the best when it comes to flipping these over so I kinda struggled a bit with it. Eventually, I did flip it onto a plate, then back into the frying pan so that the other side could cook a bit more.

TOK-TOK-TOK DING!

The omelet has been in the series since recipes were introduced in Harvest Moon 64, but it didn’t become something you could actually make until Back to Nature. And while I am leaning more towards the Animal Parade cookbook for all of these recipes, I am looking at Back to Nature’s much better cooking system for extra ingredients and such.

For example, you could add additional ingredients beyond what the base recipe called for in order to increase its overall score and its affect on your stamina. The green peppers is +4, onion and cheese all added +6 each to the score. The use of salt is +3, the knife is +2 and the whisk is +3.

Well that does it for the first entry of hopefully many more. 

Happy cooking!

Harvest Moon: Skytree Village Impressions

Hiya, betcha didn’t expect this huh? Thanks to CeeCee and the kindly folks at Natsume, I was given an early advanced copy of Harvest Moon Skytree Village to review. Thanks, everyone!!

In Harvest Moon Skytree Village, it is up to us to once again save the Harvest Goddess and restore the petrified land to its former glory. How are we going to do it this time? Why, we are going to restore the seven Skytrees that are dotted around the valley.

CeeCee

HAPPY 20TH, HARVEST MOON

When you forget to pick up eggs for a week.

The Four Seasons

Anissa - 2 Heart Event

Would anyone be interested in a free-form forum RPG inspired by games like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory?

Meet your new protags.

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