Magical Sushi: A Cookbook of Enchanted Creatures
I discovered my destiny when I found myself elbow-deep in the slobbering maw of a goblin suffering from garbage tummy.
I was terrified that its jagged teeth would snap my antebrachia[1] like a twig, but I had no choice. This goblin needed medicine, and my smaller-than-average arm was the perfect size for delivering a dose of Immodium™ right into its gullet.
As I slid a custom-made pill the size a golf ball under its dripping uvula, I was reminded that, not long ago, I was just like you.
As a student at Buck Owens Middle School in Bakersfield, California I was administered an uninspiring curriculum by teachers who were inhumanely overworked and criminally underpaid. If aliens read our Literature syllabus they would think the only book worth reading was Animal Farm. And Science? After what I’ve experienced I can assert with 100% confidence that Mr. Omerta has no clue what he’s talking about.
Since my escape from the mediocrity of middle school, I have discovered that the world is a perilous place for magical creatures. You read that right: magical creatures. Roll your eyes if you must. Your mainstream education didn’t prepare you for the knowledge I am about to drop. Here’s the truth, mortal: Due to human meddling, rampant pollution and loss of habitat, the earth is experiencing an unprecedented die-off of gnomes, pixies, red caps…every magical being you can think of. While you read those last sentences, an average of three wild Scottish brownies were kidnapped and put to work in hotel housekeeping. I recently watched in horror as the last North American snotling habitat was bulldozed to make way for a Sports Authority. It’s bad out there.
But before I overwhelm you with terrible facts, I’ll start the story at the beginning. And all of my stories begin with my Aunt Marigold, who, before she ushered me in to this world of wonder, completely destroyed my life.
Flamboyant, extravagant and thoroughly deranged, Marigold MacGuffin is the polar opposite of her sister, my mom Gilda. While couture-clad Marigold has access to a seemingly endless supply of money from dubious sources (possibly the result of a shady “arrangement” with a “sultan” that we don’t discuss), Gilda was a registered nurse who was still paying off her student loans at age 38. My dad Dinesh worked for the post office depositing gewgaws on the front porches of every Amazon Prime member in Kern County. Their lives were, like mine, mind-numbingly mundane, which made Marigold’s offer of an all-expenses paid, couple’s trip to San Francisco too good to refuse.
I didn’t try to stop them. Two nights of playing video games with no adults telling me to brush my teeth or tolerate a vegetable? Yes, please! I practically shoved them out the door.
I think about that a lot now.
Mom and Dad were having the time of their lives until the moment they weren’t. They were dazzled by the deYoung Museum, gobsmacked by the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, they were felled by the fugu.
Fugu is a delicious blowfish that is also lethal if improperly sliced. One poke of its intestines and fugu oozes tetrotodoxin, a substance 1200 times deadlier than cyanide. As a surprise, Marigold had arranged with one of her underworld contacts for my parents to try it. “It’s the culinary equivalent of skydiving,” she enthused.
She was right about that, but only if you forgot to pack your parachute. The butter-fingered fugu guy had a slip of the knife, and my parents perished.
This loss left a Gilda-and-Dinesh-sized hole in the world. There are times when I wish they had gone to a dim sum pop-up where the worst that could have happened is a case of explosive diarrhea. That’s not how it played out, though, and I have since learned that great risks can be worth it—even if you don’t always make it out alive.
“I’m out, Digby,” said Marigold, moments after my parents’ funeral concluded.
I peered at her through puffy eyes. “There are strangers in my house. You can’t leave me here alone with them. Can you?” I wasn’t sure what Marigold was capable of.
“Oh, right. Yeah.” She checked her lipstick in a compact, and dabbed a bit of mascara that had run to her cheeks. “Let’s ditch them. You should probably come with me anyway. I’m your legal guardian now.”
“I don’t understand.” What was happening?
“I’ll explain on the way, Curious George.” She shouldered her Birkin bag and made her way toward the door.
“On the way? But my parents just died.”
“I know,” she said, not unsympathetically. “And it was my fault. Since we’re both going to be miserable, you might as well come with me to do some good in the world. Giving back is the best way to deal with sad feelings.”
The thought of a bunch of adults moping around a Blimpie sandwich tray in my kitchen sounded utterly depressing, so I abandoned the mourners and drove with Marigold to Los Angeles International Airport. Some people might look at this as “kidnapping,” or at the very least “truant.” But it was the best thing that could have happened to me, all things considered.
As if I hadn’t been through enough already, Marigold dropped a bombshell. Turns out that she’s not your everyday a jet-setting bon vivant. My Aunt Marigold is also one cog in a vast machinery of highly skilled operatives working to save the earth’s magical creatures from destruction by humans.
“You don’t even know what mud is until you’ve slogged through Burundian swamps to deliver kindling to the last of the Flamethrowing Flickers,” she explained to me while at the ticket counter. “That mud gets everywhere. And the burns! Yikes.”
“If you’re good, I’ll take you to the ice fields of Svalbard to re-hydrate the polar pixies,” she promised as she handed me a boarding pass to Bavaria. “After that we’ll swing through storm-forest to smear fungicide on the sky slingoes.”
“That sounds…amazing, I guess?” I didn’t even have luggage or a passport. Why did the security guards let us through?
“It’s not all fun and woo-woo,” she warned, quickstepping her way to the gate. “Keep up, now. I’ve also been chased by furious mobs—of gnomes. This is no life for the faint-hearted, I can tell you that, Mister Man.”
Three days ago I was studying for a math quiz, now I was hearing words like “sky slingo” for the first time.
“We’re going to fetch a goblin. Make sure you get some food on board, and some shut eye. You’ll need the energy. A grumpy goblin is no joke, Buddy Boy.”
The goblin mentioned earlier, the one I shoved my hand inside, had been terrorizing a Bavarian town called Wankendorf. This particular goblin, a minion of Krampus[2], was permitted to harangue the townspeople during Weihnacthen, a season we would recognize as Christmas. That was his job. In fact, everyone looked forward to December when the boisterous bugger would tromp down from his mountain hovel and swat all the ungezogen[3] with a switch. It’s a Weihnacthen tradition, for Merkel’s sake!
Unfortunately for our yuletide yuckster, his dwelling was located atop a forested ridge that was cleared for a cul-de-sac packed with moderately-priced three-bedroom, two bath homes. The klein beast was homeless. And the denizens of Wankendorf were sick of getting lashed for no good reason in the middle of April while making their daily shopping trips to Aldi.
When Marigold and I found him he was up to his shoulders in a toppled trashcan, furiously feasting on leftover bottles of curry ketchup, spoiled schnitzel and bad brats.
“Don’t make eye contact,” Marigold warned.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured her. Nothing at Buck Owens had prepared me for the sight of a slavering Bavarian Christmas goblin half out of its mind with hunger.
Behind me, I heard the jeers of an advancing mob. My knees seemed to understand the danger they were in, and they trembled.
“The Wankendorfers are coming to kill him,” Marigold said. “We have to hurry.”
“I thought we were here to gather up a goblin and go home,” I hissed. “You never mentioned we’d be rumbling with the cast of Beauty and the Beast.”
“If I’d told you what your life was really going to be like, you would have called Child Protective Services. Now hand me the vial in your pocket.”
The pavement quaked beneath my feet. The taunts and shouts of the mob grew louder. I turned to see a menacing crowd with—no joke—actual pitchforks.
“We’re gonna die here,” I predicted.
Marigold untwisted the cap on the vial.
“You know that thing when there’s an unhinged riot a few yards behind you?” I urged. “That’s happening right now, Marigold. They have weapons.”
Marigold pulled a small needle out of her Birkin bag. She dipped it in the vial.
“Remember the scene in The Simpsons Movie, when the whole town is coming for Homer?” I continued, my lips trembling. “It’s exactly like that. But real.”
She procured a pencil-sized tube from her pocket, and loaded the needle into it.
I could hear the crowd chanting, “sterben, sterben, sterben,” which I am pretty sure means, “Slay the Christmas Goblin, and slaughter its friends.”
Marigold put the tube to her lips.
“This is looking more like Halo every second, but I can’t defend myself!” I cried.
FLOOMP.
The goblin emerged from his bin banquet and turned to discover the blowdart lodged in its left buttcheek. It glowered at us and reached for its switch. I suddenly had sympathy for the Wankendorfers.
I put my hands up in surrender. “I was a good boy this year,” I said, hoping to convince the goblin that I wasn’t in need of a swatting.
“Wait for it…” Marigold was in the ready position.
T
he befuddled goblin took a wobbly step toward us.
“Ok, I did jump on my parents’ bed with a plunger thinking I could stick myself to the ceiling, but it only worked for a second, and I never tried it again. Except that one other time…”
“Wait for it…”
The goblin collapsed in a heap.
“Is it dead?” I asked.
The crowd’s shadow was upon us.
“Ho-ho-ho! We nabbed ourselves a Christmas goose!” she crowed. She scurried toward the slumped goblin.
The horde of hundreds (was that a war hammer?) was within striking range.
Marigold pulled two creepy-looking gasmasks out of her Birkin.
“Put this on.” I did so.
“Now pick him up,” Marigold instructed. “Hug him like he’s a toddler.”
I did as I was told, painfully aware that the only thing standing between me and an arsenal of medieval murder tools was a comatose storybook creature.
I could see the whites of their eyes and the glints of their metal weapons.
“SQUEEZE! SQUEEZE AS HARD AS YOU CAN, MR. UNIVERSE!”
I am not what you’d call a “strong” person. I can barely lift the toilet seat. But in that moment I applied enough torque to that goblin’s belly to crush a planet.
The goblin unleashed the most mammoth fart I have ever heard. And the smell? Like opening an abandoned well full of rotting corpses. In a horse barn filled with farts. I nearly swooned, and I was wearing a gasmask.
The chanting crowd was immobilized by the power of this unholy flatulence, either in complete revulsion, sheer reverence for its magnitude, or a combination of both. As a 13 year-old boy, I was wildly impressed.
“Don’t succumb!” Marigold shouted. “Get him into the car!”
We hoisted our cargo, clumsily, to our rented Jetta and dumped it into the backseat like a pile of smelly laundry. We cracked the windows and sped away just in time to avoid being ransacked by a raging crowd, but not in enough time to avoid obtaining a collection of pitchforks, garden hoes, spades—and possibly more than one mace—lodged in the body of the car.
Marigold paid off the incredulous rental car attendant with a massive wad of Euros, and we were on our way out of the country. “Keep the extra for yourself, Fraulein,” she called as we hustled into the airport.
We managed to smuggle the goblin through the airport by putting it in a cargo bin labeled “Beware of Mastiff.” Helpfully, he growled occasionally in his sleep.
“Did you really do that thing with the plunger, Super Mario?” Marigold giggled, right before I zonked out on the plane.
***
“That was messed up,” I said as we finally arrived at the super-secret safehouse maintained by Marigold’s peers.
“That? Psht,” she waved me off. “That was just Wednesday.”
The goblin was still woozy from whatever was in the blowdart. Marigold inspected him thoroughly, checking him for lice (he was riddled with it), looking in his cavernous nostrils (crammed with boogers) and palpating his abdomen (farts aplenty).
“I suspected this might be a problem,” she said. “Goblinomus Gastronoxious,” “Goblin homey gassed obnoxious?” I repeated. “You can say that again.”
“Pay attention, Doogie Howser. Gob-lin-o-mus Gas-tro-nox-shus,” she sounded out. “He’s got what humans call gastritis. In layman’s terms, it’s garbage tummy.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Why was I worried about his health, when just hours before I wanted to off him myself?
“He’s off his diet,” she explained. “No magical creature should be forced to subsist on half-eaten Kinder Eggs[4] and rancid sauerkraut. You’re going to have to give him a pill.” She handed me an Immodium™ capsule big enough for a bison.
“Can’t we mix it into his kibble or something?”
“That’s hilarious, Bob Saget. I’m going to go fill out some paperwork. You take that pill and shove it down his esophagus.”
“You want me to voluntarily put my hand in there?” I eyed his spiky incisors.
“I certainly can’t do it, Tiny Tim,” she scoffed. “My arm’s too big. Chop, chop. You don’t want him waking up.” She breezed out of the room, taking her Birkin with her.
I approached cautiously, fearful that he would spring awake and rip my face off. As I got close I could hear a soft snore, almost a purr. He was kind of appealing in that so-ugly-he’s-cute way. A miniature human, only with a terrible breath, erupting acne, wiry hair and wrinkles that looked like a hundred miles of bad road.
“It’s not his fault,” I said, psyching myself up. “You can do this.”
The purring was a soothing touch. “He’s a grotesque, malformed kitten,” I imagined as I separated his jaws and maneuvered my hand in as confidently as I could.
It was warm in there. And slimy. And prickly. And horrifying.
“Good job, Doc McStuffins,” Marigold whispered upon her return. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I knew you could do it.”
As I wiped the guttural goblin goo from my hands I told Marigold that I could see what she meant about doing good. Despite the jet lag, the post-traumatic stress and my whole life being in ruins, I felt better.
“When you help others you’re helping yourself,” she shrugged.
I gazed at the snoozing goblin like a mother seeing her newborn for the first time. “I’ll call you Twinkle,” I whispered into his cauliflower-shaped ear.
"Now,” Marigold continued, pulling out her phone. “Let’s see if we can get assigned to those feral elves in Reykjavík. They’re ravaging Björk’s backyard.”
“But, wait. Isn’t this supposed to be a cookbook?” you’re asking yourself right now. It is, in a Jamie Oliver-meets-all-of-your nightmares sort of way. Marigold and I had been rescuing magical creatures for a few weeks when I asked her what became of them after we brought them to the safehouse. She responded that she didn’t know, Gordon Liddy, and it was then that I was reminded of a radio program I had once heard back in Bakersfield.
“I’m sick of environmentalists whining about how all the fluffy animals are dying. Boo hew,” the host seethed, with an irritable inflection on the “hew.”
“You know why animals go extinct?” he continued. ’Because we don’t eat them! If everyone ate rhinoburgers, there would be rhino farms in all fifty states. We’d have more rhinos than you could count!”
Was this true? And if it was, could the same cynical logic be applied to the extinction of magical creatures? Should Marigold and I encourage others to feast upon their charmed flesh—perhaps with a side of ranch dressing—in order to preserve them?
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Marigold summoned her resources to help me build a farm in my hometown of Bakersfield, called GilDanesh Acres, all in my parent’s honor. They died in pursuit of culinary nonsense, after all, and I have now dedicated my life to the nonsensical mission of saving magical creatures by presenting them, perfectly prepared, on a plate. Our first inhabitant was Twinkle, and he is thriving, while also providing the ingredients for one of our bestselling bottled goods.
In these pages I promise to introduce you to an array of fantastical beings and their tales of woe and triumph—and to share recipes that put the “serve” in conservation. Behold a small taste of what to expect, with Twinkle’s compliments…
Goblin Slobber Gastrique*
2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, minced
2 cups blackberries
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons goblin slobber**
3 tablespoons vinegar
Melt the butter and add the shallots. Cook for 5 minutes and add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer until fruit is tender. Strain to remove seeds. Serve atop a non-magical protein like duck or beef.
*Our goblin slobber is harvested sustainably from pails we hang around Twinkle’s neck while he feeds. No goblins are harmed in this process. In fact, he finds it hilarious.
**This version uses slobber collected from a Bavarian Christmas goblin, which imparts a pleasing sugar cookie effect. Any goblin slobber will do. Mountain Goblin slobber is a hint piney, Cave Goblin slobber infuses a hint of minerality, etc.
[1] A fancy name for forearm I did not learn in science class.
[2] Krampus is a Christmas demon, and Europeans think he is festive. Goblins are employed to do the tasks that Krampus can’t get to himself, kind of like the Santa’s Helpers whose laps you sit in at the mall.
[3] Naughties.
[4] These chocolate treats are illegal in the United States. Look it up.