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.

Boss Monster

Boss Monster a Dungeon Building Card Game

Boss Monster plays like a side scrolling video game. There is only one direction to go, and it is forward.  The concept is easy to pick up. You have your Boss Monster and to protect your Boss Monster from the persecution of wanna be heroes. To do this you have to build various dungeons for the pesky heroes to way laid. 

 Not only are you trying to build up your tolerance to the intrepid heroic traveler, you are trying build up a greater cash flow from the ones that have perished in the dungeons. Ever hero that is kill equals at least one coin. Get ten coins and you win. If  five Heroes get to the boss monster and you are dead. As the games go on, the heroes get stronger. 

There are spell cards that sometimes help you against the heroes or help you sabotage someone else's dungeon. If you aren't careful, you can really hurt yourself with the spell cards, because you need to be sure you read the card instructions exact. Spells can be used in the dungeon building phase of the game, which is normally a bonus to help you defeat what ever hero is intrepid enough to enter, and other spells are used in you action sequence and can be played against heroes or other dungeons. There are few spells that can be played when ever you want. Use those spells wisely. 

All of the Bosses in Boss Monster have special abilities that you get to unlock when you achieve five dungeons as protections. Depending on what you Boss you have, is going to help you decide how quickly you want to build your fifth room or if you want to upgrade any current rooms. This is a very strategic part of the game, because if you build your last dungeon too soon, your power up from your boss can be defeated and might not do you as much good as it would if it was played at the beginning of the game.  You have to be sure that you read  every single card carefully so that the hero does not get the upper hand. 

When you go about constructing you great and wonderful dungeon that is a refuge for the greatly understood monsters, you have to think about the vast majority of things that monsters would be interested and what peaks the hero's interest to try enter the dungeon.  Each room is going to have a symbol at the bottom right corner. That symbol, be it book, sword, bag of money or ankh is what brings the heroes to the yard, not milkshakes. I wish there was a milkshake dungeon room. I could see a bunch of succubi sitting around and enjoying a good milkshake and having a laugh.  Moving forward, the heroes are interested in either the recognition of defeating the monster (sword), the vast intellect and knowledge (books) or riches (bag of money) and treasure of religious artifact (ankh). 

There is only one hero that is not after the sword, books or ankh, and  that hero is The Fool. He is a really easy kill and is practically a free gold coin if he stumbles into your dungeon. He goes into the dungeon with the least amount of rooms built. His death helps keep starving monsters feed for one more day.  I am pretty sure The Fool has been served in my dungeon cafeteria a couple of times as a delicious soup.  

All other heroes fall into four categories, Fighter, Thief, Mage and Cleric and are drawn to you by how much riches you have that interest them. If you have a lot of book related rooms in your dungeon, the Mage is going to be really interested in you. If it was my dungeon and a Mage come in to pillage my library, I hope the Mage likes to cook, because I am pretty sure they are all cookbooks and maybe not the mystical knowledge of the unknown that he is looking for. My Monster Boss likes to eat well. It is the perks of being a Monster boss.

 The fighter is drawn to the fighting rooms  to achieve the recognition and glory. The Thief is drawn to the shiny gold in the bags, while the Cleric is trying to restore glory to the church and save the non Monsters from damnation. Each Hero has a name and a little blurb underneath them, and some of them are hilarious and tongue in cheek to other popular genres out there. 

 The pixel art is fun and delightful quick play makes Boss Monster an easy grab and go. There are no small pieces to lose, and the game can run from 15 to 20 minutes with experienced players and about 45 for first timers, because you really need to read every card. This is good game to have in any gaming collection and is a great 2 to 4 player game that is good for a variety of age ranges.    Enjoy!