Bowls!: Recipes and Inspirations for Healthful One-Dish Meals by Molly Watson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

BOWLS! They’re both a new phenomenon and one of the oldest ways to eat food. My younger brother recently suggested eating at one of those food-court style places that are really trendy right now and nearly all ten of the restaurants there had at lest one dish that was a bowl-based dish. The first 2/3s of this book are great for the cooks like my wife and mom who just need a suggestion and can use that to come up with wonderful food. The last third was for me, who needs recipes of an entire dish which I can then make small modifications to.

Vegetables on Fire: 50 Vegetable-Centered Meals from the Grill by Brooke Lewy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think the recipes in this book allow your veggies to be first-class citizens on the grill. Plus they provide some pretty awesome items for your vegetarian friends to eat instead of the usual mushrooms or tofu burgers. The dishes I’ve made have been pretty good and I hope to try many more of them.

First up is tldr. This something I’ve wanted ever since I started with Linux 16 years ago! Basically it gives you the examples part of a man page. For both of these I’m going to use a screenshot because copy/pasting it into the blog doesn’t do it justice.

This is just the first page of man dnf:

the output of man dnf

And this is tldr dnf:

Project Fire: Cutting-Edge Techniques and Sizzling Recipes from the Caveman Porterhouse to Salt Slab Brownie S’Mores by Steven Raichlen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Last summer I made the grilled breakfast quesadillas and just that item is worth the cost of this book. Also, grilled bacon turned out to be pretty awesome and way less messy than in a pan. That said, a good chunk of this book is going to have to wait for next summer, for while I BBQ and Smoke in the winter, grilling is a lot harder because it tends to involve opening the lid a lot more or even not using the lid at all. That said, Raichlen does have a few smoke-roasting recipes here, in other words, indirect grilling. I have less experience with Raichlen recipes than Meathead recipes, but the few times I made his recipes last year I was pretty happy. One I’m looking forward to trying is a hot and fast version of pulled pork. I love my low and slow 12 hour pulled pork sandwiches, but if the faster way can work some of the time, that’s a much faster route to some extremely delicious food.

Cook’s Country Magazine 2018 by America’s Test Kitchen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As per usual with these reviews - I’ve already made a couple recipes from this bundle of 2018 Cook’s Country issues. It was, of course, great! In 2018 Cook’s Country continued the tradition of recipes from around the USA with fun stories about the food origins along with the special sections at the end: 5 Ways to make a dish, Cooking for Two, Master Class, One-Pan meal, and slow cooker recipe. It continues to be a great resource for cooking although if you get America’s Test Kitchen’s various cookbooks you’ll inevitably end up with some duplicated recipes. Right now the recipe I’m most looking forward to trying is Amish Friendship Bread.

Strange Dogs by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review will contain spoilers for The Expanse book series, but not this book.

When we last left the universe of The Expanse, the good guys appeared to have won, except for the ship the rebels had sent into one of the gates. It was implied (or maybe outright stated, I can’t remember) that they were working on tech related to the protomolecule to use as a weapon for the rebels. Or maybe they were pretending to do so because there’s no honor among thieves.

All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It’s very interesting to be reading this (well, listening as an audiobook) at the same time as The Calculating Stars as both of them tackle women’s issues, the Baby Boomer Era America, and space travel. But whereas I’m really enjoying The Calculating Stars, I really did not like this book.

Skipped Parts by Tim Sandlin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Supposedly (according to the cover on the version I selected on Goodreads) this was made into a movie. I found this so incredulous that I looked it up on IMDB. Apparently it was made in 2000 and is rated R so MAYBE there’s hope it actually comes close to this book. There are parts of this story that hinge on the main characters (especially the kids) saying “fuck you” to someone and there’s some very young kids fooling around. But Sandlin also wrote the screenplay so maybe it’s as close to the book as he wanted.

Riley Parra Season One by Geonn Cannon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It seems every year I’ve been reading a book about a detective working in our world, if our world was an urban fantasy. The last two I’ve read Dead Witch Walking and Neon Noir: A Delilah Street Paranormal Investigator Anthology were in an alternate Earth where it was known that there were supernatural beings. This book is more like Buffy in that a couple folks know that the supernatural - Angels and Demons in this case - are real. Otherwise it’s more or less a normal world. Although, unlike Buffy, God’s side actually has something to do rather than sit by as demons just run things.

Churrasco: Grilling the Brazilian Way by Evandro Caregnato

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book starts off with a biography of the author, one of the founders of the Texas de Brazil restaurant chain. It then gives a brief history of where Churrasco came from in Brazil. After a primer on the tools and cuts of beef they get to the recipes. Interestingly, there are a decent amount of non-grilling recipes in here.