Fallout Food Recipes for Real – making a meal for my Fallout RPG Game

I LOVE food and I LOVE games – so when my RPG gaming group decided to do a Christmas Fallout Special (we’re playing the Modiphius D20 Fallout game with some homebrew upgrades)… I knew I needed to make some very special Fallout food!

I know, I know, there’s a Fallout Cookbook. But when I looked over the available online pages, I was a bit disappointed. The recipes were rather… tame. And my gaming group has introduced food ourselves that is now canon and which, of course, won’t appear in someone else’s book. So I decided to DIY it. Some stuff from the game, some stuff from our own table. You can see above how it all looked!

My Fallout Food Menu

Just to be clear, I love to feed people and I love leftovers so there was WAY too much food! But here’s what was on my Fallout Food Menu for our six-person table:

Pre-lunch Snacks:

Before lunch we had the first half of our game, so I offered up a collection of snacks to keep people going.

• Potato Crisps (Fallout New Vegas)
• Cheezy Poofs (Fallout 2)
• Radioactive Gum Drops (Fallout New Vegas)

Starters:

Once the first half of the game was done (leaving us on a suitable cliff-hanger!) we all dived into the starters. And hooo there were a lot of them!

A charcuterie & cheese board of:

Squirrel Bits (Fallout 4)
Blue Bighorn Cheese (Fallout New Vegas)
Headhunter’s Headcheese (Fallout 76)
Potted Meat (Fallout 4)
Mutated Maul-rat Poop (home-game canon)

A spread of:

Pink Food Paste (Fallout 4)
Thick Red Paste (Fallout New Vegas)

Salads:

Dandy Boy Apple salad
Desert Salad (Fallout New Vegas)
Tayto-Mayto Salad (home-game canon)

A basket of

Razorgrain Bread & Crackers (Fallout 76)

Mains:

Blamco Mac and Cheese (ALL Fallout)
Brahmin Stew (home-game canon)
Tayto Mash (home-game canon)
Greasy Prospector Pork n’ Beans (Fallout 3, Fallout new Vegas)

Dessert:

Fancy Lad Snack Cakes (Fallout 4)

Drinks:

Nuka Cola (ALL Fallout EVER)
Irradiated Water (Fallout New Vegas)
Tenpenny Tower Wine (Fallout 3)

What recipes did I use for my Fallout Food Extravaganza?

So, how did I put together this massive Fallout Menu?

I used a combination of “look-a-likes” (i.e. looks like the original, doesn’t taste like) and recreations (i.e. looks like and tastes like). The reason for this? Some of the stuff in the Fallout universe I would NOT want to eat! Looking at you Pink Food Paste and mysterious Thick Red Paste. I also added some supplementary dishes, using canon ingredients in a new way. You know, because scurvy is real and people need veggies.

Classic Fallout Food Recipes Recreated

The recreations section of the Fallout Food Menu were fairly easy (recipes linked). These were rendered pretty faithfully to the original concept of the dish (except, you know, radiation free and tasty).

Blamco Mac and Cheese – of course – comes from EVERY Fallout ever! I love Mac and Cheese from scratch and grew up with it, but it’s not very common where I live now. I made it feel extra Fallout by adding some fried bacon and onions and garlic, to give it a “dirty” look, which was really delicious!

Greasy Prospector Pork n’ Beans is a standard from Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, and pork and beans (and tinned food in general) is a standard trope of the post-apocalyptic genre. Since I’m not a fan of tinned, processed food, I made butter beans in tomato sauce (a dish called Gigantes, in Greece) from scratch and added rustic spiced sausage for the pork element. It was DEEEELICIOUS! I used my own recipe, but this one is similar. Just add chopped Italian/Greek sausage when you’re frying the onions.

The Desert Salad from Fallout New Vegas was made pretty much as pictured in the game. Since it mainly appears to be tomato and leaves, I threw in a few extra vegetables (corn, cucumber and green onion) to give a bit more variety and added a wine vinegar vinaigrette.

For the Blue Bighorn Cheese from Fallout New Vegas I used Stilton cheese (one of my favourites). Any other blue cheese, like Roquefort or Gorgonzola, would work just as well.

The snacks – Potato Crisps (Fallout New Vegas), Cheezy Poofs (Fallout 2) and  Radioactive Gum Drops (Fallout New Vegas) – were exactly what you’d expect. But I got kinda fancy with the packaging (more on that below), and even made a candy box!

Nuka Cola – super easy. This was regular Coca Cola with labels stuck on (labels below).

Irradiated Water – very lazy! I just used water carafes and labelled them.

Tenpenny Tower Wine – again, I found some AMAZING labels online (linked below) for the wine, and just stuck them on the wine bottles. If you don’t like alcohol on your table, stick them to grape juice instead!

Look-a-like Fallout Food

Then came the more “creative” section of the menu. How do you make squirrel bits without squirrel? And what about Pink Food Paste? That’s got a Soylent Green vibe I don’t wanna mess with. Here’s what I came up with that LOOKED like Fallout Food but still tasted good. You could totally customize all this to your own preferences.

Pink Food Paste (Fallout 4) was a pretty easy fix, actually (even though in the Fallout game, it’s supposed to be addictive and cause aggression). Taramasalata is a Greek dip made of cod roe, it’s easily available pre-made from the delicatessen, and it’s generally thought to be delicious. I actually don’t like it much, but everyone else does!

Squirrel Bits (Fallout 4) became a mainstay of our RPG game, so I HAD to incorporate them somehow. In the end, I used Polish cabanossi sausages cut into chunks. Because they’re thin, I felt like they had a good “weight” for squirrels. And because they’re smoked and dried, they have a slightly “shrivelled” quality that makes them feel very Fallout! Any other kind of smoked sausage would work great for this – if it’s fatter, chop it into thin strips to make it feel squirrely!

Potted Meat (Fallout 4) was an easy sub – I used pate! It went really well with the bread, cheese and salad of the starter.

Cram – now that’s a tricky one. It’s a tinned meat that appears in Fallout 3 and all the following Fallouts. The packet (see right) makes it look like delicious smoked/roasted ham, but it’s clearly a parody of Spam. And if you’re not familiar with Spam, it’s a processed, reformed, preserved pork product – and it’s pretty slimy and gross. I had to choke it down as a kid (school meals). I was NOT going to serve this up to my group. In the end, I decided to go by the picture not the description, and found a delicious smoked ham joint.

Headhunter’s Headcheese. In the Fallout game, it’s made of mystery meats. Not on my table. But the idea of “Head Cheese” is something that crops up in Greece and the Balkans – it’s the best cheese, the highest quality. So that’s what we ate – kefalograviera (kefalo – head, graviera – the type of cheese). There is ANOTHER kind of Headcheese which is a Dutch recipe of boiled animal head suspended in gelatine (kind of like the Victorian meat in aspic). This may be what this was based on originally, but it was going to be a LOT more work. So I skipped the boiled brains and stuck with delicious cheese.

Thick Red Paste was introduced in Fallout New Vegas. There’s not much information about what it tastes like, only that it’s confiscated by Caesar’s Legion. By that logic, I reckoned it had to be too good to be true, so I used my standard spicy chutney recipe (I call it Dragon’s Breath Chutney). It’s sweet and sour, spicy and delicious, and went really well with the charcuterie and cheese. Let me know in the comments if you want the recipe – it’s bloody marvellous and goes with everything.

Fancy Lad Snack Cakes (Fallout 4) are basically Twinkies. These do not exist in Europe (sorry, Americans!). So I had to get creative. I already had really good packaging for these (see below) so I felt like I could use a little creative licence with the actual food. They have amazing, melt-in-the-mouth cookies here covered in powdered sugar (kourabiedes) which I used instead (pictured right).

Supplementary Fallout Food

And finally, because I wanted to round out the meal (this ISN’T the apocalypse and we DO have fresh food!), I also introduced some things that used canon ingredients in a new way.

Razorgrain exists in Fallout 76, but I’ve never seen Razorgrain Bread. Still, it makes sense, right? And with all those delicious cheeses and meats, we needed a bread basket. I used a seeded bread to give it that rustic, post-apocalyptic feel.

Dandy Boy Apples crop up in Fallout a lot. Fom context, they’re basically candy apples. But we had plenty of sugar on the table already. I took some liberties here, and made a second salad instead. And so the Dandy Boy Apple Salad was born. I used sour apple, walnuts nuts, grated carrot, baby leaves, steamed beetroot and a balsamic vinegar dressing, but you could easily change this up. The beets gave it a real “candy pink” colour I liked a lot (and they go really well with apple and green onion).

One of the most iconic animals in Fallout is the two-headed cows, the Brahmin. And I’ve found recipes for Brahmin steaks, burgers, noodle soup and more! But steaks and burgers are a bit tricky to do for a table – something like stew is a lot easier. Plus you can make it ahead (because, you know, I planned to spend the morning playing Fallout!). So voila – Brahmin Stew! I essentially made a beef stew that’s typical here in Greece called Stifado, with little pearl onions, red wine, and a TONNE of flavour. It disappeared. Here’s a pretty good recipe similar to what I made. It’s even better if you make it a few days early.

And finally, Tayto Mash and Tayto Mato Salad.

These are original recipes from our home brew games. We’re playing Fallout in New York, and the local farm grows nothing but tomatoes and potatoes. So what do they make? Potatoes and tomatoes!

For the Tayto Mash, I wanted something more exciting than just mashed potato with tomato juice. That sounded preeeeeeetty boring as a recipe. So I made a creamy mashed potato and spiced it up with red pesto. It was too delicious for words. No need for a recipe for this – just mix red pesto with a classic mashed potato to your taste. It’s that orange dish at the back of the picture on the right.

For the Tayto Mato Salad, I recreated a recipe from my youth – Italian potato salad. I learned a lot of my cooking skills from two Italian grandmothers in Southern Italy and this was an absolutely standard dish – boiled potatoes, tomatoes, very thinly sliced onions and a strong vinaigrette with very good olive oil. Again, you don’t need a recipe for this – just combine the ingredients to your taste and enjoy. You can see that in the picture to the right!

Printable Fallout Food Labels

Here are the Printable Fallout Food Labels I either found online, or made myself.

• The amazing Tenpenny Tower Wine Label made by the artist moltonel7. Ready to print out and stick onto your wine.
• The same artist also made this amazing  Radioactive Gummies box! I made this one just from printer paper, so it was a bit delicate. Use card stock for the best result here.
• This blog has the Fallout Pork and Beans Printable Label, and a good Nuka Cola label. It has some other Printable fallout food labels I didn’t like as much.

• I used this Blamco Mac and Cheese label. Since you don’t serve it in a box (at least, I didn’t!) I just needed a flat panel instead. I stuck it on a chopstick to stabilize.
• This was the Printable Cram label I used, although I only used one image panel (for the same reason as above!)
• Here is the Fancy Lad Snack Cakes Printable Label I used. Like with the gummies, if you want to turn it into a box, make sure you use card stock! My cookies already came in a box from the baker, so I just stuck the printed version over the box with sellotape.
• The Spring Valley Potato chips were a bit of an issue. In the end, I created this label (right) myself, printed two out, and stuck them to either side of the chips bag.

For the other Fallout Food labels I used card stock and wrote the names on (including prices in caps!). If I’d had more time, I’d have printed out pictures of all the food in the game and stuck them on too, but I was sadly too busy with the World Anvil day job! Tooth picks or chop sticks were great mounts for those, with just a piece of sticky tape. For the Pork and Beans, which I served directly out of the stock pot, I printed off a huge label and stuck it directly onto the pan, as if it was a giant tin.

So, would I make another Fallout Food meal? YES! Our gaming group loved it. Me too.

 

Would you like me to do another fantasy food post? Want details for any of these recipes? Let me know in the comments!