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Review: Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor
Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor by Peter Reinhart My rating: 3 of 5 stars Reinhart brings his expertise to the topic of whole grain breads. He’s been a champion of these healthier breads for a while, but here he bring his latest knowledge to bear to create tastier whole wheat and…
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Review: Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day
Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart My rating: 4 of 5 stars In a short time I’ve read 2 Reinhart bread books (and am working on another). It’s interesting to see his bread techniques evolve. Although, he’s careful to say that the techniques in this book aren’t necessarily better than what he…
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Review: Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza
Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m not an incredible baker, I’m an average baker. When I bake breads – my family is often happy with the taste, but my wife always says – “All that work and we could have…
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Review: Grilled Cheese Kitchen: Bread + Cheese + Everything in Between (Grilled Cheese Cookbooks, Sandwich Recipes, Creative Recipe Books, Gifts for Cooks)
Grilled Cheese Kitchen: Bread + Cheese + Everything in Between by Heidi Gibson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I didn’t know there could be so many kinds of Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, although as a coworker remarked – “Technically, most of those are melts, not grilled cheese.” Fair enough, but I still loved the various…
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Review: Bread Illustrated: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Bakery-Quality Results at Home
Bread Illustrated: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Bakery-Quality Results at Home by America’s Test Kitchen My rating: 4 of 5 stars Even though I started this book nearly a year ago, I haven’t made any of the recipes yet. This is mostly because I didn’t get a stand mixer until late last year. That said,…
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Baking Bread for the First Time
I’d never made bread before (not counting pizza dough), but I recently got a dutch oven on sale on Woot.com and was looking for some things to make in the device. Then I came across this recipe for No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread. It seemed really simple, so I figured it’d be a great activity to…
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Breaded Steak Success
Breaded steak was probably my favorite Cuban food growing up. More than pork shoulder sandwiches and other things my mother made. I often helped her prepare it at home, but never got a chance to cook it as a kid. I’ve tried it a few times since growing up, but it’s hard to get the…
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My Reading Life in 2023
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 – pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those – maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free…
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Review: American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza
American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza by Peter Reinhart My rating: 4 of 5 stars As a cookbook this one is fascinating. It will not be a huge surprise to those who have read Reinhart’s other bread books, but the first half of the book is entirely prose. Reinhart takes us on a…
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Going to Walt Disney World in 2023
It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog…
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Review: Fantasy Magazine, Issue #89, March 2023
Fantasy Magazine, Issue #89, March 2023 by Arley Sorg My rating: 4 of 5 stars Relatively quick read this month. Here are the reviews per story: Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing. (Mari Ness): I recognized the author’s name, but I couldn’t remember where I recognized it from. Then…
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2022 in Video Games and 2022 Video Game of the Year
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the…
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Review: Witches Abroad
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading the book Our third outing with the Witches and the second one that includes Magrat Garlick. This one is part parody of the travelogue and part parody of Fairy Tales and Fairy Godmothers. It also introduces the Discworld…
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Programming Projects: March 2021
I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere. Python Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate…
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Looking back at a Year of COVID-19
It seems that it’s time to look back at a year of COVID-19. Scalzi did it. Ars Technica did it. I’m not usually a huge bandwagon jumper, but I thought, “why not?” This has been a huge, disruptive event. It might be therapeutic to write about it. It was 11 March (I believe) when the…