We had a super small gathering for Soup and Games night a couple years ago, so I got to pull out some things I can’t pull out as easily these days. For this Throwback Thursday, I bring you a couple recipes you can’t find anywhere else on the internet, including my mom’s famous Pineapple Upside Down Cake!

At a Glance…

Dinner

I kept the salad simple and light since the soup was heavier, and went with a caesar salad from Oh She Glows. If you’re feeling pressed for time, you can make this salad as complicated or simple as you need to. It calls for homemade chickpea croutons, homemade Ceasar dressing, and homemade parmesan cheese. Since Caesar salad is essentially those things with some romaine lettuce, I’d obviously recommend making all those parts! But in a pinch, you could swap out as many of those things as you need to for store bought versions if you can find them near you. I know it’s not super traditional with Caesar salad, but I also like to add some cherry tomatoes and/or red bell pepper, to give it a bit more substance and color.

The chicken noodle soup recipe is from a friend of mine, who kindly gave me permission to share with all of you! Now I’m sure you can find many a delicious vegan chicken noodle soup recipe online, but if you want to know what she and I have been making for years, here it is! When my husband and I first got married, we immediately moved out of the country to do grad school in England. Because we couldn’t get many of the traditional gifts and pack them in suitcases, we instead asked for cash and recipes, and this was one we got and have been enjoying ever since. You’ll notice in the picture that it calls for ‘fry chick’. For those unfamiliar, this was/is a staple for many as a chicken type substitute. It was one of the first, and thus maybe not as good as some of the newer stuff. It comes in a can and if you didn’t grow up with it…it may be an acquired taste lol. My friend also says the recipe usually has 3 chopped celery ribs as well, which must have been a change since I initially typed up her recipe years ago. This soup is such a classic taste, bringing back the nostalgia of childhood and is super easy to make. Enjoy!

My mom’s Pineapple Upside Down Cake is a family favorite! I’m not sure where or how she got her recipe, but she gave me permission to share it and bless all of you, haha. This picture of the recipe is how she originally typed it up and sent it to me, back when I was a novice newlywed. I had many questions, lol. I give you the recipe in its original form, but to clarify, the first six ingredients are the batter. You melt the 1/4C of butter, add it to the pan, then the cup of brown sugar, and 28oz of crushed, drained pineapple. Then you add the batter, bake for an hour and flip. Obviously her version has eggs, which I now just replace with flax eggs or Just Egg and it works well! The biggest thing you have to be careful of is draining the pineapple really well. If you’re not careful, it can leave too much liquid and make it hard for the cake to cook properly, leaving it a gooey mess long after the allotted hour has past. If you avoid this particular pitfall, you will have the most delightful, sugary, buttery, pineapple-y, delicious cake you could ever want and your guests will love you! I speak from years of experience as the daughter enjoying it and the host making it. 😋(also, don’t put sliced pineapple or cherries on top of it. Unnecessary and ruins the purity of the cake!).

Defending Orléans

For our game, we played one of my favorites, Orleans! We were first introduced to this at a convention where some friends taught us. We were intrigued after the one play, but even more so after they told us it’s even better with the cooperative expansion! Who doesn’t love a crunchy cooperative game! There are a lot of welcoming-weight cooperative games out there, so we were thrilled to find something a bit meatier to dig our teeth into. After raving about it to my parents, we were amazed to find it waiting for us when we returned home from the con! Parents who make delicious pineapple cake and get us amazing games? #blessed .

Anyway, we got the cooperative version and haven’t looked back since. I honestly don’t even remember how to play it competitively lol. In the game, you are trying to defend Orleans from its inevitable invasion, timed by the event deck which also does mostly terrible things to you each round. In order to win and stop the invasion, you have to build fortifications around the outer edges of the map, gather resources for the storehouse, and fulfill your own personal goals as well, all before time runs out.

You do this with bag building! I don’t know why, but I like bag building so much more than deck building! (Maybe it’s the lack of shuffling haha). You all simultaneously choose how to use the workers you pull from your bags to do things like get better workers, build those fortifications, travel around the map to gather goods, and more. There are several roles to play with that add to the variability, and make the difficulty level scalable. We have several upgraded bits and workers from Meeple Source and Top Shelf Gamer that really enhance the experience for us. This is such a classic for us, and is never leaving our collection. 💖

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].