My wife and I are members at the local food co-op, largely because you never quite know what you’re going to find there. From locally-grown produce, to fair trade baskets from Africa, to Buddha’s Hand citrus fruits from…I don’t remember where. Anyway, walking through there is always an experience. Every so often though, you don’t even have to head there to get a little taste of the unexpected. Case in point, they’re having a “Cheese Madness” event right now, with samples and brackets where their top cheeses face off against one another, until only one is left, voted in as the ultimate cheese. I’m not sure why they chose cheese for their March Madness parody, but it does bring us to today’s word.

rennet, noun – an enzyme used in the making of cheese

Learned from: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Playstation 4, mobile, PC, XBox One)

Developed by ArtPlay

Published by 505 Games, Netease (2019)

Bloodstained is Castlevania in everything but name–even to the point where it was produced by Koji Igurashi, one of the heavy-hitters behind the later Castlevania games. It’s got the atmosphere, the complex maps, the varied combat, but it also includes some subsystems that were absent from most if its inspiration: namely, crafting.

Gather up the right materials, and you can create things you’d expect, like new weapons and armor, but you can also cook food to use for healing and permanent stat boosts. If you’re particularly masochistic, you can try to recreate an increasingly complicated and vague series of recipes for an old lady who can barely remember her own name, let alone the food she used to enjoy. So she’ll say she wants to taste the “portable snack” she used to love, or something “fluffy,” or something as obtuse as a “novel idea.” She rewards you if you get it right, but some of the recipes in Bloodstained are a pain to put together. Some are simple, like using wheat to make dough, to make noodles. But say you want to make a pizza…well, you need that wheat to make the dough, but you also need tomatoes, whatever the toppings are, and milk and rennet to make cheese. But you can’t just have all the base ingredients in your possession; no, that would be too easy. Unless they’ve patched it out, you needed to make every intermediate component by hand, before you could get to the final product. The rewards were usually worth it, but getting there was an uphill battle sometimes.