Chicken Cashew

I need to start eating better. It would help if I knew how to cook. To that end, I purchased a couple of cookbooks. 

My wife and I purchased this many years ago on our honeymoon in Disney World. That was a long time ago and to be honest, we never used it. It sat on our shelf for years, forgotten. It wasn't until the fire in our home that I remember it. 

I purchased a new one off of Amazon and made a pact with my wife to use it once a week. Despite the cover, it is not a kid's book. I swear. This is a great cookbook. It was probably published in 1989 or so. They have listings for "Walt Disney World Shopping Village" restaurants, but no listings for MGM Studios. 

This week I made two different recipes. I'll start with the one that got 5 stars - Chicken Cashew. 

This cookbook is broken down by typical food types but also breaks them down by restaurant and theme park. Chicken Cashew was offered at the Polynesian Village Resort. It's delicate ginger and cashew-flavored chicken breast. 

This is the prettiest picture of 
raw chicken I have ever taken.

The ingredients are simple: Chicken breasts, white wine, butter, ginger, chicken broth, bouillon cubes, cashews, cornstarch, and water. With a dash of pepper and salt.  

The chicken is pan-fried in butter until golden brown. In a different pan, brown the cashews. When nice and golden brown, put both aside. 

Take the bouillon, broth (or chicken stock), wine, and ginger and simmer for 15 minutes. Slowly add water and cornstarch to thicken. 

When everything is done, plate it up.

Now, the cookbook offers no details as to what this chicken is served with, so I had to improvise with veggies and starches. Snow peas would have been amazing as would fresh green beans. I didn't have those so I made broccoli. For a starch, I made Carolina rice. 

I could see this working with noodles of some kind, but not potatoes. 

Anyway, here is what it looks like: 

You'll notice that my plate has an extra ingredient, cauliflower. This is because I am diabetic. I can't handle a lot of rice. The little cup holds about 1.5 to 2 oz. of rice. 

Now, I have teenage children, three of them. I paired this with about 4 cooked cups of rice and a pound of broccoli. Since the recipe states "serves 6", I have enough for a full lunch and enough rice and veggies for a second lunch or a few snacks. 

The family's response to this one was 5 of 5 stars, "definitely make this again". That was a real confidence builder. 

I might as well mention the wine I used. I picked a nice California wine, Dark Horse Sauvignon Blanc. It's not the best wine, but it serves for cooking and is easily obtainable. It is dry with some fruity notes. I've always wanted to say that about a wine. Anyway, it would be fine before dinner or with a rice or pasta dish. Being a dry white, it has a surprisingly refreshing ending. 

Circling back to the cookbook itself, this 33-year-old book is still fairly available at a good price. Apparently, there are a couple of editions, ranging from 1986 to 1990. All of them are basically the same. Click this link for Cooking with Mickey Around Our World at Abebooks.com. 

Just so you are aware, this cookbook dates back to a time when Disney Cast Members would give visitors recipes on request. Typically, they were handwritten on the spot. A few were popular enough to typewritten (on a typewriter) and photocopied. As a result, there are some typos and editing errors in this cookbook. I find it more charming than confusing. 

Book Review - Sanctuary by Lynn Abbey

Title: Sanctuary
Author: Lynn Abbey
Year: 2003
Pages: 480 pages
Print Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Audible Rating: N/A 

Ah, the little disappointments of eBooks and companies reselling products. I had purchased this book with the expectation that it was an Omnibus Edition of The Thieves World collection sold in the 80s. It is not and I was massively confused as I expected to settle in with a tried and true collection of short stores set in the city of Sanctuary. 

Adding to my confusion, this novel is marketed as having three books: Return To The City That Would Not Die!, Return To Thieves' World! and Return To Sanctuary!. All with exclamation points. Structurally, the novel is a single book and it's not really clear if this was ever serialized or three different books. G-- damn Marketroids screwing a good thing up. 

This book, which shares the title of the 1982 Omnibus edition is a newer novel by Lynn Abbey. 

In this story, we follow the adventures of Molin Torchholder as he literally passes the torch to a new generation of characters. This treatment was excellently handled as the new generation of characters are not simply derivative of old characters. They are couched in the term of the old Thieves World characters without actually being those people in a renewed form. They are markedly different even if they aspire to be as famous as the prior generation of anti-heroes. 

You would think that Molin would be a bad character to lead the next generation of scum in the city of Sanctuary. And to an extent that would be correct. However, as a survivor and an archpriest to the deposed and hidden god, Vashanka it made a lot of sense. He survives by pigheaded stubbornness, who else could live this long? 

The book has many callbacks to the original series, answering many questions while leaving some unanswered. While I was supremely disappointed that this was not the omnibus edition I was looking for, I found it an excellent read. I believe that this novel could be an excellent launching point if one as never read a Thieves World book before, as the callbacks and setting both come across as epic worldbuilding, invoking age and mystery for the reader.  

If you prefer a physical copies, check out Sanctuary by Lynn Abbey on Abebooks. This link will take you to a search page with different offerings at prices you can afford. 

I will be searching for those original omnibus editions, so stay tuned for more from Sanctuary and Thieves World. 

Adventure Review - 'No Tears Over Spilled Coffee!'

I have to be honest, I don't play e5 much. People cry over it. There should be no crying in D&D. I wouldn't have noticed this adventure except for the hue and cry people put up over it. 

The free adventure is called 'No Tears Over Spilled Coffee!' and is available at D&D Beyond. 

Allow me to throw up the standard stat block before I get into the review. 

Title: No Tears Over Spilled Coffee

Author: Michael Galvis

Year: 2022

Pages: 6 pages
Rating: 2 of 5 stars

The hue and cry over this adventure revolve around the premise of a band of characters working in the Firejolt Cafe, a coffee shop. Let me tell you, every person who offered this criticism is wrong. Flat wrong. 

There is a long history of landing adventures in the wrong role for the rule of funny. Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures come to mind rather easily. If Asprin can have Skeve walking into an Expy McDonalds in search of a trollop and finding trolls waiting tables, then so can you. 

I have to put an ad in here to honor the late author Robert Asprin. His characters, much like the characters in Coming to America, know their version of Mcdonald's is treading dangerously close to some sort of infringement. It is the rule of funny. 

The setting is not where this adventure falls apart. 

The Crew

The character's mission starts with a call from Ellina, the owner of the Firejolt Café. She has lost all of her staff and the party of new hires is her last chance to stay open. Unfortunately for all, Ellina is starting to get sick, so this first day will include some training, then Ellina will absent herself from the rest of the adventure. 

Literally. Like her employees, she never comes back for the rest of the adventure. 

There are a couple of problems with this scenario, beyond being snatched from the headlines, possibly right from your player's typical workday. 

Some of the problems could be reworked to be funny as opposed to problems. For example, it seems the author thinks there are cell phones in this world. "Called..." Yeah, if you accept some sort of anachronistic coffee shop, then you get cell phones. 

But imagine the contrary. Metron the Mercilous is lost, at sea between campaigns. He hires a band of criers to advertise his willingness to cut on people and burn villages.  In response, a crier approaches him with an excellent, turn-key opportunity with Ellian. Metron orders his henchmen to assemble as he reaches out to his assassin and thieving friends, plus a cleric of dubious intentions to seal the deal. He and his warband march off to the Firejolt Café to claim the prize appointments, prepared for the obvious campaign of bloodletting. 

To his surprise, he finds a gang of union members around the Café trying to get him to join. They promise Metron and his boys a minimum of 15 coppers an hour. Metron reaches for his battle-ax as Ellian quickly runs out to separate the gangs before anyone is separated from their heads. 

Yes, the whole premise could be seriously funny. 

Anyway, back to the actual adventure. 

Ellian (and the DM) walk the players through the game mechanics for play. Some characters can gain an advantage by being observant and utilizing the offered materials in the Café. Eventually, the party breaks common tasks down and gets to work. 

The day progresses without offering the players and their characters any option using strategy or tactics or any bit of creativity to succeed. 

Yawn. 

The Challenge

Finally! A challenge presents itself. The party has to work together to deal with a particularly difficult task. Ok. This is fine. 

The party has to come up with a perfect drink for a difficult customer. This is where the whole thing unravels. 

Up to this point, the characters have had an easy time of it. In order to complete this challenge, they must pass 5 successive DC 11 skill rolls. And here in lies the problem. 

Do you know the chances of rolling an 11 or higher on a 1d20? It's 50-50. A coin toss. Players generally know how to measure their chances and this one will ring out as carney style game. 50-50 sounds pretty great. That's easy. 

But 5 in a row... ah... That works out to be a 3% chance. That's exactly like flipping a fair coin 5 times in a row and getting tails each time. 

Worse than 3%

But it's worse than the numbers hint at. As each player attempts to roll an 11 or higher, there will be a crystal clear point where someone's failure will screw the party. 

Essentially, as the party rolls, someone has a 50-50 chance of blowing it and that failure will land on a single player and their poor die rolls. Even if the characters have a skill that pushes up their chances to say 12 in twenty, the chances rise to a mere 7%. The check would have to push to 18 in 20 to give a better than 50% chance of success. 

It is one thing where a party snatches victory from the jaws of defeat by careful application of skills and talents. It's something different when you have some to roll less than an 18 which sounds like a challenge until you flip it around and ask them to roll over a 2 on a twenty-sided die. 

Presentation

As you can see, under 18 and over 2 sounds like two different things because of the presentation. This adventure's saving grace is the slick presentation where it sounds like the party can do something together. But the math shows otherwise. 

While the premise could be interesting, the given purpose and tasks offer little or no reward to the players and are actually crocked to ensure the party fails. 

I gave this adventure one star for being free and a second for being creative. It is an excellent learning experience for DM to learn how not to create an adventure. 

New Reviews - Five Books

Last year, I managed more than 52 reviews. Most of them were sci-fi-themed as I reviewed a ton of Helen Mary Hoover's books. Technically, she is a young adult author but also ticks off science fiction and young women coming of age in bleak future tropes. I love them. I hope to finish up the last of her books this year. 

I've got a great start this year, having tackled 5 books in 15 days. Well, 5 novels anyway. I read a few more than that if you include gamebooks or science lectures. Back in 2016, I graduated with my Bachelor's in History. I would typically read a book a week per class. Each 16-week semester I would chew through 45+ books, not counting textbooks or articles, or other reading materials. Two or 3 books a week is a nice slow pace for me. It makes the content easy to digest.  

All but one of these are classics, being over 20 years old, and must-reads for the science-fiction or fantasy buff. The odd man out is Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds as it was published in 2021. 

• Footfall
• Sanctuary  (added Jan 19th, 2022)
• Swords And Deviltry
• Inhibitor Phase
• The Winds of Gath

My intention with this post was to have all 5 reviews done before posting. But that turned out to be more time-consuming than I anticipated. As I post more reviews, I will add more links. Additionally, I would like to rework the top page bar at the top of my blog to break down reviews into categories, so that Traveller Fans don't have to pick through fantasy books and vice versa. 

As a part of the digestion portion of these readings, I also plan to have a post about science fiction weapons that are terrifying. Niven, Pournelle, and Reynolds have stuff in their books that is absolutely insane and somewhat based on reality. 

In addition to all of this, I also have several new sources for books. I have my favorite two or three local bookshops, but those aren't available online. Abebooks is an excellent resource. I will be sharing each of these with you as a part of the review process. 

Book Review - The Winds of Gath by E. C. Tubbs

Title: The Winds of Gath
Author: E. C. Tubbs
Year: 1982
Pages: 192 pages
Print Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Audible Rating: N/A 

The Winds of Gath is a curious story that was suggested to me by SAFCO podcast. This is the first in a series describing Earl Dumarest journey back home to Earth. Being born on Earth, Earl is the only person who knows it is real, everyone else believes it's a myth. 

E. C. Tubbs spends a lot of pages describing the titular planet of Gath, the winds, and the society that Earl must navigate to get home. By way of explanation, Earl was presented as a youthful 30-something, somewhat unaware of the nature of the worlds he navigates. From the text, it is very obvious that the Traveller game has roots here. The older age of the protagonists, the technologies, skills available and the progression Earl follows to the conclusion all harken back to the aesthetics of Traveller. 

What I find interesting is the obvious comparison to the book, The Grapes of Wrath. The hard-luck freedom gained by Earl and Tom Joad in the opening of each book is similar. Their exploration of their immediate situation leads to a journey full of adventure, disappointment, and mediocrity. Both stories end with a brutal fight against the powers that be, Tom beating a deputy and Earl beating a battle-trained prince. Where Tom's story ends, Earl's continues in a series of 32 other books. Welcome to the Dumarest Saga. 

Obviously, where Tom was a Christ analog, Earl is not. All three take the role of teacher at various points, but Earl's situation is wildly different as this is a story of belief as opposed to one of leadership in belief and love.  

I find this story to be very creative and appealing. However, I think that Earl and Tubbs come into their own in future titles, as the point of this story is less the journey and more the miles. 

As always, I suggest that you look for this title in your local book store. However, if it is not available you can check out AbeBooks.com for a copy. Click here to search for The Winds of Gath by E. C. Tubbs. All clicks and purchases provide remuneration to support this site