Rating: 1/5 Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice, The author’s preferred edition (New York: Bantam, 2004). This book was profoundly disappointing. I finished it simply because I had started it, and I will not be reading the second installment, Magician: Master. To be fair, this was Feist’s first foray into novel...
Original recipes: http://gracessweetlife.com/2010/12/vanilla-coconut-panna-cotta-with-pomegranate-jelly/ combined with http://gracessweetlife.com/2011/03/strawberry-shortcake-trifle/ I didn’t have any pomegranate juice, and I wasn’t in the mood to make an angel food cake, so I combined the two recipes and made the...
Original recipe: http://gracessweetlife.com/2011/05/milk-chocolate-panna-cotta-with-port-cherry-sauce/ This was my first panna cotta. I didn’t have milk chocolate, so I had to use bittersweet with some added sugar (1/3 cup instead of 1/4 cup). Ultimately, it would taste much better with milk chocolate. It still tasted...
Original recipe: http://gracessweetlife.com/2012/01/hazelnut-cookies-with-chocolate-chunks-biscotti-alle-nocciole-e-cioccolato/ These are pretty tasty cookies, but they’re no better than my standby chocolate chip recipe. I do like the hazelnut crunch, though. I measured this recipe by weight instead of volume....
Rating: 3/5 Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Orbit, 1988). This is the first of what Banks calls his “Culture Novels.” These consist of standalone novels set in the same essential milieu. The centre of this setting is the society known as the Culture: advanced humans with highly advanced sentient machines and...
Rating: 2/5 Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (London: Orbit, 1989). Being a gamer myself, I had high hopes for this book. I was a little disappointed. It was pretty good overall, but the specific game aspects were highly romanticized and frustratingly non-specific. I did find his views on randomness in games...
Who doesn’t love ice cream?!! It is hands down my favourite food. I can eat it any time, anywhere, and indefinitely. Here at the Brooks house, they have a 2-gallon ice cream maker, and we have put it through its paces. We have made and consumed about 20 gallons of ice cream over this past month and experimented with a...
Rating: 4/5 The Death Gate Cycle is a series of seven books. I remember starting it years ago and never finishing. I picked it up again in the new year and yesterday finished the last book. The story is fundamentally about fear—about different manifestations of and reactions to it. It was an enjoyable read with some...
Original Recipe: http://gracessweetlife.com/2010/06/cannoli-siciliani-the-ultimate-italian-pastry/ Well, things kinda worked out. The recipe appears to be sound, but not cooking with alcohol meant using grape juice instead. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it. I also didn’t have proper cannoli molds. (I’m...
Original Recipe: http://gracessweetlife.com/2011/05/amaretto-cheesecake-with-almond-crust-and-amaretto-caramel-sauce/ I had a big container of mascarpone cheese and wanted to do more than just mix it in with whipped cream (which is delicious, too, by the way). I did a search and found this recipe for a mascarpone...