Now I have three new recipes under my belt! Last week I made brown and wild rice pilaf. The dinner was really tasty, and I loved the chewy texture of the wild rice combined with the softer consistency of the mushrooms and shredded carrot. The hardest part of making the dinner was finding plain raw wild rice. I guess that there's not much of a demand for wild rice outside of canned soup and prepared dinners, but I finally found tiny four once boxes of it in between the piles of other rice varieties. Either way, I enjoyed the pilaf and so did Matthew!
I also made almond-cherry candies last week. I already have a big bag of dried cherries in my pantry, so the only things I had to buy were almonds and a block of white chocolate. As I found out, white chocolate melts very quickly! I had to constantly stir it with the Crisco to make sure it wouldn't bubble. I also discovered that even though caramels can becomes really smooth while on the stove, the mixture hardens within a minute after removing it from heat. It was pretty difficult drizzling the melted caramel on top of the candies, but I managed with some hot water. They turned out to be really good though, and I ended up making a second batch to give to our families the morning of the Super Bowl.
Then, on Monday, I made this dinner called Crunchy Cabbage, which is really just shredded cabbage and carrots cooked with green onions, beef bouillon, and pepper that is mixed near the end with butter, mustard, and chopped pecans. The whole dinner took about twenty minutes to make (including prep time), and for being so simple it had a great taste! I actually think that it would be a good vegetable side-dish for holidays or parties and could completely replace regular coleslaw. I'm not much of a coleslaw fan; I find it pretty boring, and while this recipe used a bag of coleslaw mix for the cabbage and carrot, it had a completely different taste. Plus, this meal was pretty healthy, with only 9 grams of fat, 98% daily vitamin A and 31% daily vitamin C. Definitely making this again!
Cooking: 11/75 completed
I am also pleased to say that I have finished Endymion! It was a bit different than the previous two novels with having fewer main characters, but they were well-developed and incredibly likable. Even the man who was trying to capture Aenea, Father Captain de Soya, is a sympathetic character that I can't help but enjoy. At first, I was taken aback with what happened to mankind after the fall of the Hegemony. The Church is just as bad, if not worse, than the TechnoCore, and its levels of corruption are slowly revealed as Aenea, Raul, and Bettick travel along the River Tethys. As they make their way across different planets, Simmons does a fantastic job at making each planet unique in its terrain and obstacles. Some of my favorite scenes in the novel include Raul and Aenea's swimming in a zero-g pool on the Consul's ship, Raul's brave and nearly fatal task of rigging explosives on the docks at Mare Infinitus, and the ending of the novel with the fight, the Shrike, and where Aenea, Raul, and Bettick conclude their river journey. I'm also happy that Simmons made this novel not as tightly-knit to the previous two, but he brought along enough to keep me happy. This novel had a lot more physical action, but the scenes with the Pax figures and Raul's Schrödinger's cat box provide some balance. Endymion is another great addition to the Hyperion series, and I cannot wait to see what happens to the new heroes in the last novel!
Rating for Endymion: 9.5/10
Books Read: 3/75
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