Trouble Maker

Trouble Maker is a comic by Janet and Alex Evanovich. It falls in line in Barnaby and Hooker mystery series, or at least I am told that it does. It looked like I was a fan of this comic, long before I ever read this comic. Mostly because I have a giant yellow bag that has the title broadly printed across from it.  The truth is, I have never read any of the Janet Evanovich books. I do like mystery books, but it is a little daunting to want to break into a series that is as prolific as any of hers are. It is the trap that if they really are that good, then you have a whole lot of catching up to do, and if they aren't that good and there are that many in the series out there, then perhaps there is something wrong with the reader.  The reason that that I had the giant yellow bag is because it was a souvenir from a trip and it had Dark Horse on the other side, and I am a fan of Dark Horse Comics. 


My husband picked this comic up, because he thought that I would enjoy it, and the art in Trouble Maker is the same artist that did Dr. Horrible. (That is Joelle Jones, in case you were wondering.)  I love Dr. Horrible, so with that mind, it was probable deduction that I would at least like Trouble Maker. At the very least I knew I was going to enjoy the art.


I found that Trouble Maker is fast paced and can easily keep the pages turning, but I lacked some of the back ground to truly care about some of the characters. I had a hard time trying to put all of the pieces together on why the characters where even important to each other. It seemed like they just hung around each other for the quips. Hooker and Barnaby have what felt like a forced connection. One insults the other in a passive aggressive way, throw in a chicken, add a chase seen or two and call it a day. Again, I have never read the series and maybe they are steaming up the pages, or perhaps they are just best friends, but it was never really clear to me what they were getting out of being in each others company. It also seemed that most of the clues just seemed to fall into their lap. I don't know if that is the way it goes down in the series or if it was just thinned out a little bit to be able to be consumed in comic book format.  If any one that has read the series wants to discuss it with me, I am open to opinions. 

Did I hate it? No. Did I love it? No. So what did I think of it? I think it would be a really cute gift for someone who was into the series, and a not so great gift for someone that hasn't a clue. I also think it gave me enough information about the series to be able to nod and smile  and fake small talk  when someone tries to spark a conversation with me about it when I am toting a round my catch everything yellow bag. Does it inspire me to run out and start the series? Not really. If I need a beach read, I might try and figure out where the book one is in the series and give it a spin, but I am not inclined to go out of my way to add it to my collection just yet.  

Channeling the Dead or Orange Crush for 6

My favorite cookbooks are the ones that make me feel things along with feeding me good food. At the moment I feel like I have good momentum with this  challenge having knocked out 5 out of 58 cookbooks. I just have to convince myself that I can't afford to slack off and I can complete this challenge. The moment I think I am ahead, is the moment I fall behind, and start procrastinating. The little voice in my head starts whispering doubts and discouraging me when I start to hesitate.  If I hesitate, it is almost as good as quitting.  Fortunately I am not doing this challenge alone.  My good friends Lizzy is doing this challenge with me and my good friend GAT has just jumped aboard also.  I am pretty sure that all things can be accomplished with a little bit of help. I am really excited to read about the next cookbook from Lizzy and GAT and if you are interested in reading their take in this madness, please check out their blogs at HaveYouReadIt and CookingWhileSloshed.  

The cookbook that I used you are not going to find in a book store. You will not find it for sale anywhere. The cookbook I am talking about is nothing more than a hand composed notebook from Jon's grandmother who has passed on. If you are following along on Library thing to the books that I am covering, it is simply titled Jane's Cookbook.   I have never met my husbands grandmother, she passed on while he was a teenager. However, I do feel like I know her. I know her through the stories that I have heard about her, and the going through stuff in a forgotten attic. I am now getting to know her a different way, by going through one of her cookbooks. In a way it is like channeling the dead, because I now know that she had a deep love for seafood and entertaining, and that is something I don't think I would completely understand until reading the cookbook. There is crab or shrimp in almost everything.  There are few and far between chicken recipes and I think that roast beef was just myth when I go through the cookbook. 

I have come to love the very distinct hand writing and willingness to try just about anything.  This sense of adventure and loving to cook certainly shines through when my husband is in the kitchen. The only thing that doesn't look like it got passed along to him was a love of seafood, which made this cookbook a little bit difficult to utilize.  I, however have found a recipe that I could try right away and book marked another for a future adventure. (Yes, I will someday write about Chocolate Elephants, but today is not that day.)

The recipe that I tried was titled Orange Crush.  After a busy Saturday of shopping, wedding and out to eat with my husband, all I wanted to do was sit back, have a refreshing libation.   Not thinking about anything but following the recipe, I pulled down a mixing bowl and started to pour the ingredients into a large mixing bowl.  That probably should have been my clue. One: A person should not need to get out a large mixing bowl if they are making drinks for two. Twenty, yes a mixing bowl is needed.  Two: A mixing bowl would be over kill. I discovered rather quickly that the recipe for Orange Crush was really meant for 6 people, and that I had a lovely refreshing drink that I was not going to finish in one sitting. If I did I would be overloaded of vitamin C and probably a bit drunk. 


After pouring my husband and I both a drink that tasted like fresh oranges and had a fair amount of orange liquor in it, I quickly decided to pour the rest into a pitcher for the fridge and have it for breakfast. A person can only drink so much orange juice, even if it does contain liquor. I am also not entirely sure what the difference is between a Screwdriver and an Orange Crush, other than the fact that you float Champagne on the top. I would certainly make this recipe again, but probably not for just Jon and me. 

Fettuccine Alfredo is Just Fancy Buttered Noodles

Dib the Cat

After a long weekend filled with anxiety over the Dib cat and his stay in the Animal Trauma unit, it took me a little bit to get back into the saddle of wanting to cook.  My husband had a great idea that I could distract myself by trying a new recipe while Dib was in the care of professionals to remove the almost 4 feet of string he ate.  I could not concentrate on any of the recipes.  All I could think about was how if the Dib the Cat was with me, he would be royal pain, by trying to eat the corner of the book and walking all over the stack of cookbooks.  He is a constant companion when you least want it, and he is cute so it gets away with it. Thankfully when Dib came back in piece and without the need to go under the knife, my energy and desire to cook reappeared.

To celebrate the return of my spoiled but oh so charming furry friend, I knocked out two cookbooks from The Challenge.  The cookbooks that I used are the following: The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook and Light Cooking Italian.   The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook is about three inches thick while the Light Cooking Italian barely has 94 pages to it. Both of the cookbooks came from my mother and were not ones that she recommended, but I had taken them because I thought how bad could they be, they were cookbooks.

The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook is a really good cookbook. There are lots of recipes in it, and the instructions are easy to follow. I think that what would turn a lot of people off of this cookbook, is that it is built like a dictionary. It will tell you about the ingredient and give you a recipe or two to go with it, but not a picture. Most cookbooks are all about the pictures and often times have one with every recipe or every couple of recipes.  The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook has only a thin grouping of pictures in the center of the book and that is it.  The rest of the book expects the cook to be able to read and follow instructions. I can do that.

Out of The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook I made Fettuccine Alfredo (found on page 326). I have come to the conclusion that Fettuccine Alfredo is the grown up version of buttered noodles and cheese. Any college student or person with limited cooking ability can make buttered noodles. All it is is cooked noodles with butter and Parmesan cheese. Fettuccine Alfredo is just adding cream to that buttered noodle classic and really did not feel like I was cooking anything special at all. Did it taste good? Oh yeah. I love buttered noodles, so adding cream did nothing to distract or add to a taste that I already enjoyed.  It was an easy recipe that had all the earmarks of comfort that I needed after a tense weekend of worry.

Now I wish that I loved the Light Cooking Italian cookbook as much as I loved the New Good Housekeeping Cookbook.  I really wish I could say that, but in all honesty, I do not love Light Cooking Italian at all. In fact I kind of wish it had been loaned to a friend and never returned.  There were not a lot of recipes that sounded remotely appetizing to me. Every page had reminders of how many calories and how much a serving size should be, and in a way felt like it was belittling me and my abilities to eat like a sensible adult. I like Italian food and when I think of Italian food, I think if rich vibrant flavors, good wine and pasta in fabulous shapes. For this being an Italian cookbook there was very little pasta  and it made me sad.  However, Light Cooking Italian was in my cookbook arsenal and I had to pick a recipe. When all else fails, make a dessert is my motto.

I had four choices for a dessert, Minted Pears with Gorgonzola, Polenta Apricot Pudding Cake, Tiramisu or Orange Thyme Granita in Cookie Cups.   For me, there were only two choices, since coffee and pears are not something I enjoy. (You do not want to hear my rant against pears.) Deciding that I didn't really didn't want to attempt anything with Anise in it, because a little anise flavor is good but a lot of it is bad. Or at least bad for me.  Polenta Apricot Pudding Cake won by default (page 86).

Looks just like the picture in the book.

I liked the cake. It was dense. It tasted mostly like Apricots, and since apricots aren't a normal in my house it was  welcome change. It was a middle of the road dessert, but was a wonderful vehicle for Chai Honey that was give to me as a gift. The subtle flavors of the honey worked well with the sweetness of the dried apricots.  Will I make it again? I don't know. It didn't wow me, but it didn't repeal me.   I don't know if that one recipe is enough to make me want to keep this cookbook. This book will probably live a life of neglect on my bookshelf for the rest of its days unless someone wants to borrow it, because I have several other pasta and Italian cookbooks in my library.

Stegosaurus Milk Shakes & Indian Spiced Walnuts

 I am pretty sure this cookbook could not have had a longer title. Favorite Brand Name Best Loved Recipes of All Time doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  I picked this cookbook because I thought it would be one of the harder ones for me to find something to make.  With a name like Favorite Brand Name Best Loved Recipes of All Time, you must think I am a little bit off my rocker. If they are best loved, then my problem would be too many recipes to choose from, right? Not the case for me. Best Loved, is not the part that I fear, it was more of the Brand Name.  When I think of brand names, I think of preservatives and additives and artificial sweeteners.

A little over half a decade ago I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Macular Degeneration in my right eye. It was a scary time for me, and I thought I was going to go blind over night.  After the panic wore off, I sat down and did some research on what I could do to slow down my inevitable doom. The simple answer was diet and exercise.  Diet required me to cut out MSG, artificial sweetener and high fructose corn syrup from my regular eating habits.  It is a lot harder than it sounds, and makes buying name brand anything a question of morals. Do I like my vision over how much I want something mindless to eat? The answer was pretty easy.  I like ability to see the world around me, so mindless food is off limits. Their is a sad truth that a lot of name brand recipes will have one of the three things I shouldn't eat in it.

Now with that said, you are probably wondering why I even own this cookbook.  Before I was diagnosed, my mother had given me this cookbook for Christmas. I kept it because it was a gift and I had the greatest hope that I would use it, and even if I never did, it would still make me think of my mother and how much we both love to talk about what we are cooking and what recipes we are trying.
With all of this said, I decided to be brave and take a crack this book and hope that I don't go blind in one eye.

  I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a bunch of recipes for Lipton or and Nestle and of other name brands that I have heard of but don't eat, but that wasn't all that was encompassed inside.  They  had recipes from the Walnut Marketing Board and Canned Food Information Counsel, plus countless others. I have never even heard of either of those organizations until now. With the power of the Internet, I found out that one of the organizations is still in existence and the other is known for a sexy robot advertisement. You can take a moment to figure out which is which.  I found two recipes that I would simple to make and sounded interesting and didn't take a lot of time and several other that I thumb market to check back later.  There was also a surprising amount of food trivia in the cookbook that I had not counted on, and made each page interesting to read.

The beautiful thing is that it didn't specify a brand, but more of a product. Meaning that I could easily find something that I could eat without my inner monologue going off about how I will never be able to read again, because I went blind off of poor eating choices.

In less than a half hour I accomplished a tasty nutty snack that used up some of my over flowing stock of cumin, and required no shopping at all, and a milk shake named after an extinct reptile that would be offended if you tried to milk it.  The Indian Spiced Walnuts turned out well, and the taste tests on my husbands and my friends proved favorable. This is definitely something that I would try again and may even attempt to make in multiples for possible food related gifts.

 The Stegosaurus Milk Shakes were simple to make, but I quickly discovered that my blender has a limit to the capacity to which it can hold and that four servings of anything is stretching its limits.  I have no idea why they called it s Stegosaurus Milk Shake.  It tasted good, and looked like a normal milkshake. It is clear to me that some one has a sense of humor somewhere, or at least a good marketing plan that involved how they should throw a dinosaur in with a milkshake so that all the cool kids will want to drink it, because kids love dinosaurs and milkshakes.  Or perhaps Peach Milk Shaker sounded too boring, and that Stegosaurus Milkshake was much more interesting. I guess it doesn't really matter why they called it Stegosaurus Milk Shake, because it was enough to get me to try it, so what ever was the reason it worked.

Over all for this being cookbook 4 out of 58 in the cookbook challenge, and with it supposed to be one of the harder to talk myself into using cookbooks, it really wasn't bad, and there were some recipes that I would be willing to go back and try out. I can only hope that the rest of the cookbooks surprise me pleasantly as this one did.

Hyperbole and a Half

This book was a gift from my brother in law. I was confused by the many different colored pages, and all the pictures and I have come the conclusion that I have a flawed concept of art.  I didn't immediately gravitate to Hyperbole and  Half by Allie Brosh, because I was being judgmental about artistic quality. It could be because the art style is similar to a lot of popular memes out there, and I am really tired of memes and I didn't want to read a book full of them. I didn't want to read something that would be vapid and self gratuitous.  I can be a real jerk sometimes, and I did the one thing that a person should never do and that is judge a book by the cover.

Thankfully I got over myself, and cracked open the book. Hyperbole and a Half is not a book full of memes. It is a charming book full cleverly drawn antidotes.  They aren't your usual stories of everything is fine and nothing every really happens. Some of the stories talk about serious mental health subjects in a self deprecating manner that any one who has ever been touched by depression or anxiety can easy relate to and understand.  Not all of the antidotes have to do with depression or anxiety, but there is a mix of stories from childhood and current adventures and the confusing nature of dogs, which brings a well rounded depth to this book.  I found myself crossed between laughing and crying in more than one section of the book.

"Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is

nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins." -Allie Brosh

The confusing many different colored pages made sense once I started reading the book. Each section of colors is a different antidote and that little bit of genius made this book really easy to find my place if I had to put the book down and resume reading it later.   I wish more collections where set up this way, but then the odd bits of scrap paper and wayward receipts and movie stubs wouldn't be utilized as bookmarks as much.  The confusing art and style isn't confusing when you actually sit down and read the book, the style is perfect.  This book was the perfect gift that I didn't know that I wanted until I had it.  I have never been so happy to be wrong about something.

Knob of Butter Confuses Me

Soup is a pretty common occurrence in my home. Every work day my husband gets a thermos along with a sandwich to take to work for his lunch. Soup and sandwich is one of those classic combinations that most can agree are a match made in heaven. It also make my husband a prime target for soup experiments. 

With soup being in high demand in my home it was only natural that my soup cookbook, Soup: Superb Ways With a Classic Dish got used pretty early on in this challenge. Since I am not the person that would be eating the soup everyday for I week, I narrowed  it down to three and let Jon do the picking.

Choice 1- Fresh Pea Soup St. Germain
Choice 2- Squash, Bacon and Swiss Cheese
Choice 3- Cock-a-leeki

All three soups had merit and where devoid of fish paste unlike a large majority of the recipes. The one I was secretly hoping he would pick was the Squash, Bacon and Swiss. I love squash and only vegans and vegetarians dislike bacon. Swiss I was willing to take one for the team for. As much as I like all cheeses, there is something about the nutty flavor of Swiss that makes me wrinkle my nose.  Alas the soup he picked was the pea soup.

I want to like pea soup. I really do, but there is something about it that makes me shudder. I don't know if it is because canned pea soup looks like baby poop, or there is just something about a million peas smashed together that makes me not regret hiding them behind my knees when I was seven to avoid eating them. Texture is everything to me. It was my hope that fresh pea soup would be akin to angels singing in harmony to my taste buds. 

I gathered my ingredients and flipped to page 54 to start the recipe. Thankfully it was a short list and consisted mostly of peas, water, and shallots and a knob of butter. I have no idea what a knob of butter is. I am positive that it is not the size of a door knob in butter that goes in the soup. I took a wild guess and decided that they probably just meant that you whack a chunk off and call it a day.  Or at least that is what I did.  I used some of my Amish butter, and set the peas a simmer. I can only hope that the fine quality lovingly churned butter from the Amish will grant some sort of blessing on the peas and not make it look like baby poop when I am done. 

After everything is cooked, you toss it all in a food processor and blend the smithereens out of it while adding cream to taste.  It comes out a lot like a puree. A bright neon green puree that is reminiscent of a color I use in painting miniatures of mutant zombie blood.  I taste it. It still tastes like peas, but mashed and slightly salty and onion like at the same time.  

There is where following the recipe ends. This is where I should be ending this story. Pea soup was made and successfully executed with minimal destruction of the kitchen and only one incident where the food processor was a jerk and dumped butter pea broth all over the counter because it wasn't locked on properly despite checking it twice. Success right?   Well, the soup was for my husband and I had to make sure he like it. 

Zombie blood = Fresh Pea Soup!

Jon strolled into the kitchen and dipped a finger into the soup and tasted it. The pea soup needed ham according to him. Then he proceeded to dice and dump a fist size amount of ham in the soup. He tasted it again and declared it is perfect and that I should be willing to experiment with the recipe a little bit, because that is half the fun in cooking.  I am tired. I have zombie blood colored pea soup with chunks of pink ham swimming around in it that makes me think of flesh in a container in front of me. Worst of all I have tried it and I still don't like pea soup and no amount of ham magic is going to make me change my mind.  Fresh peas or canned peas it doesn't seem to matter when it comes to soup, it isn't going to be my favorite. I may try this soup again, because Jon liked it and it was easy to make for his lunch. I am hoping that the next time  it will be without the fight with the food processor and maybe with a whole door knob of butter, because everything tastes better with more butter, right?

FYI- 3 out 58 cookbooks have been achieved!

Fine On The Side

 Bradley's Complete Gas Grill Cookbook looks scarier than in really is. I thought that this hard back book from 1982 was going to have dated and possibly some recipes that were going to make my husband cringe and me question my sanity, especially since the cover shows a family that is grilling way more food then the four of them were going to consume. I am trying to intermingle the scary cookbooks with the not so scary cookbooks, so I don't have a month and the end where I am writing about nothing but jello molds.   

It took me a while to figure out where we had acquired this cookbook, since it isn't in usual fair to purchase cookbooks prior to when I was born. After much soul searching and brain racking I figured it out, and figured out why I have this book that I have never cracked open until yesterday. My grandmother gave this cookbook to my husband for Christmas along with instruments of grilling destruction years ago. The cookbook when with the other cookbooks and the grill tools went to hang out with the grill for future use. 

The book survived the great and terrible purge of books, because it came from my grandmother. I don't talk to my grandmother all that often, mostly because the older I have gotten, the more we clash. I use to be much closer to my grandparents and it was really nice to be around them and to chat with them, but now it is just awkward.  I am not doing anything of interest for them and I am past the age of asking for advice and I have grown out of cute grand daughter stage a long time ago and married a boy who doesn't tuck in his shirt and has long hair.  We are people that hold different interests in life and we don't have a lot of common ground anymore. It is sad, but true. When there is something that can link us together even for a moment I hold on it, which is why I held onto this cookbook. 

The recipe that I chose was the Mushrooms On Skewer on page 110 in The Fine on the Side section of the book.   Basically it calls for mushrooms, butter and dried rosemary leaves with some pepper and chives. There was only one way that I could mess this recipe up, is if I stabbed myself with a kabob stick and bled all over the place. I had a little bit of fear that I would die because of a kabob stick puncturing a vein and my part vampire red head abilities would flair up causing me incredible bits of agony and a slow and terrible death like I had been staked in the heart, because after all a mini stake is still a stake and heart and hand start with the same letter, so there was a slim possibility of death. With this in mind I  added was a little bit of garlic powder, because I am convinced that everything is better with garlic and if I am going to die by being skewered by a stake, then might as well add garlic to that burn. I fortunately did not stab myself and die by skewer and have lived to cook another day.   

I made four skewers of the mushrooms and then decided that I would really like some bacon with my mushrooms and the rest of the skewers got wrapped in bacon, because who doesn't want more bacon in their life and grilled bacon and mushrooms sounds like an awesome pizza selection to me.  Mostly because I am a grilling champion and because I had a glass of wine in me to keep me from fussing with the mushrooms every five seconds like I normally would,  everything turned out well. The tasted good, but didn't knock my socks off the way that balsamic vinaigrette mushrooms do. The smoke and the rosemary was a good combo that was pleasing to the taste buds. 

Will I use this recipe again? Probably not, but I am willing to try other recipes out of this long forgotten cookbook.  There were actually quite of few off beat recipes that sounded good and look relatively simple to make. There were also a few other recipes that might require me to learn how to butcher a pig if I ever want to get the exact right cut of meat.  At this point I am going to forgo the butchering and stick to the simple.  I now have completed 2 cookbooks out of 57 for those that are keeping score on this cooking challenge.   

Sharpening My Spoon!

July 1st is the day that the cooking challenge began. I was sharpening my spoon in anticipation. day was yesterday. I have been salivating all week for this challenge to start and when if finally does, all I want to do is not be in the kitchen That could has something to do with it being  in the mid 90's  in Fahrenheit coupled with a humidity that makes a person feel like they are wearing wool underpants in a  desert.  Not the ideal weather to be preheating the oven. 

I did not want a little bit of weather to stop me from accomplishing crossing at least one cook book off of my list. (Here reminder of all the cookbooks in this challenge.) I felt like if I started out avoiding the kitchen, then I would be setting the standard at avoidance. Then I would be disappointed in myself at the end of the year for not doing what I said I would be doing. The guilt would make me miserable and more miserable than having a little bit of perspiration roll down my forehead.  Iggins decided to  hang out in the kitchen hoping for miracle chicken to fall from the sky  and keep me company as I embraced  the heat and cracked open  Taste Of Home's Complete Guide to Baking. 

I have never used this cookbook, and I honestly was not sure what was in it. Years ago my mother and I both subscribed to the Taste of Home magazine and we would talk recipes and gather ideas. After a while, I realized that I had a million magazines that I wasn't really using and some of the recipes began to feel like variations of things I had seen before. I canceled my subscription and continued to chat with my mother about idea's she was finding and the probability of using them.  I was going through a big baking phase and because of this my mother bought me The Taste of Home's Complete Guide to Baking. 

I did not look all the way through this book. I opened the book at random and went from there.  The first recipe that I found that I did not have to buy any ingredients for was on  page 76 under Bars & Brownies. It was the Chewy Peanut Butter Bars that was submitted by a Mrs. Sanford Wickahm, in Holbrook Nebraska. When ever I look at a Taste of Home book, all it makes me want to do is make my own family cookbook.  I gathered my ingredients and poured myself a large glass of apple juice to try and quench my parched throat from the oven that I set to preheat. Iggins seems oblivious to my heat and shows me his belly, hoping it would inspire me to give him canned cat food.  

With a total of nine ingredients, I managed to change or alter three of them. A third of the ingredients I mucked about with.  It called for crunchy peanut butter and all I had was creamy peanut butter. I am sure that the lacks of chunks will not be missed. The only butter I have in the house is Amish butter that I traveled to Lancaster to purchase, and I frankly did not want to use it bars. I wanted to savor the creamy goodness of Amish butter that I utilized margarine in this recipe. I think that most people use margarine and butter loosely and don't always understand what the difference between the two are. Lastly it didn't specify on the corn syrup. I had  light and dark corn syrup in the cabinet and decided that the dark would work. I have only used corn syrup for two recipes, Special Christmas Cookies and Pecan Pie. Corn Syrup is one of those things that if I understood better, I would probably use more often, but because I don't, I don't employ it all that often.  It is odd to think that corn syrup is on of those things that seriously had me debating on if I should even do this recipe.  Girding my loans and wiping the sweat off my brow I plunged forward and learned very quickly that warm weather makes corn syrup really runny. 

The bars did not take long to make, and while they did not turn out like the picture they did for the most part turned out. I needed people to experiment upon, so I did what I do every time I need to pawn off sweets. I took it to work. To work it went, and surprisingly it went over well.  They were not really chewy but they were good. They tasted a bit like Magic Cookie Bars crossed with Pecan Bars.  I don't know if I will every try this recipe again. It didn't knock my socks off, but it wasn't bad.  The one thing that I did appreciate about the book is that it made me appreciate my mother and made me move a little beyond my comfort zone with working with Corn Syrup. 

How they are supposed to look.

How mine actually turned out.

A Fat Goblin

When last we left our heroes in Descent: Journeys in the Dark they had just finished rescuing some of the crop bundles in the village. It was now time to rescue the kidnapped villager and let the humble farmer in rough sewn clothing get back to farming.  Grisban the Thirsty despite his deep need to quench his throat trudged along with the rest of the crew and even passed a healing potion to Asherian, which brought her back to full health and in a mood to dance. The combined adrenaline of a successful battle and the sweet after affects of a healing potion put her in an optimistic mood.  

 Leoric of the Book and Avric Albright were not thrilled that Asherian wanted to dance, mostly because she had no rhythm.  The only dance she was good at was in battle with her ability to stun adjacent enemies. Grisban mostly muttered how he could be enjoying a good pint, but no, they had to go rescue some ungrateful farmers learned brother.

When our heroes reached the dwelling that belongs to Sprig, The Fat Goblin it had been decided that Asherian was going to take the lead and Leoric and Avric would chill and recoup some stamina before going in to the cobweb infested foyer. Grisban was cool with this, because it gave him time to catch his breath. His little dwarf legs were not meant to keep up with those that liked to walk faster. 

It was a good thing that Asherian was all healed up, because there was a passel of spiders waiting for them.  There was one boss giant spider and four regular giant spiders that skittered and hissed in the dark.  With the might of Avric Albright the heroes were able to deprive the spiders of a last meal before they met their death. 

The spiders were hardy and took a lot of might for the heroes to over come, but it was nothing compared to the Etins that were waiting in the next room. Leoric got picked up and thrown to the other side of the dungeon and was pretty much useless when that happened. I am pretty sure that if I hit the back of the wall, I might not be so swift to jump up. The goblin horde that was hiding in the lair were attacking and while they were not doing much damage it was still a challenge to get around them.

Sprig was holding the farmers brother over his shoulder and was trying to make a quick exit to the door.  With a stoke of luck and a  couple of lucky dice rolls Asherain was able to completely knock the  farmers brother out off of Sprig's meaty goblin shoulder and onto the hard cold ground. Swearing and uttering threats, the heroes watch Sprig with more speed than they thought possible escape out of the cave and into the bright daylight. Deciding that it was far wiser to return the wayward villager to the safety of the village  than trying to defeat the Etins, they headed to town.  

I am excited to play the next round on Descent:Journeys in the Dark. Despite there being a million little pieces to set up for the game, each time you play you move forward in the story and add experience to the characters. The heroes were able to level up some of their weapons in town and now are ready for the next leg of their adventure, even if there might be dragons.