Featured Blog: The Confounded Cook and Giveaway!!

My next featured blog again is not a book blog, per se, although he does sometimes talk about cookbooks and books.  Greg is a friend of mine from the Barnes and Noble where I work.  He is one of those blogs that has kept me going as well.  Reading his blog, and wanting to keep up with mine and do as much with my blog as he was doing, well, my competitive side needed that to keep going sometimes.  Greg got a new job a while back, and it has slowed down a bit his blogging, and it took him away from the bookstore, and I really miss getting to talk to him on the nights I'd come in after teaching all day, and he'd be there for a half hour more before his shift was over.  Okay, without further ado, read about The Confounded Cook!

Sharing Our Blogoversary (While Cooking With Mortal Instruments)

Could it be three years already, Lisa?  Lisa and I started our little blogs in the same month of the same year and here we are still workin’ it.  We wrote about our passions: in Lisa’s case, it’s fiction mostly of the young-adult variety; in my case, it's life with a food theme….every variety of food.  I started my blog, The Confounded Cook with the intention of documenting my frequently knuckle-headed attempts at becoming a better cook.  Lisa started hers by featuring her favorite books.  Three years later, my blog has turned into more of a personal blog; a roller-coaster of emotional highs and lows down life’s highways and byways that feature cooking, restaurants and food.  My blog has suffered a bit of an identity crisis, but it reflects my ever-chaotic life.  I still love food and blogging though and will never stop, but watch out for my frequent outbursts of ridiculous randomness.  Lisa, however, has remained laser-focused on her books as well as bettering her blog and the results (and number of followers) show it. I couldn’t be happier for her or more in awe of her as a blogger.

Lisa and I share this love of literature and have been out and proud bookworms our entire lives. We worked together at a chain bookstore for several years and it was she who turned me onto young adult literature.  Lisa sometimes winces at my more adventurous palate with food and by the same token, I don’t always share the same taste in books with her.  For instance, as I am a guest on this blog I loathe admitting that I didn’t care for a certain uberpopular young adult series…let’s just say I’m on Team Not-A-Fan.  That said, I totally dug the Hunger Games and Rick Riordian’s Percy Jackson series.  The most recent series that Lisa guided towards was the Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare.  I was enthralled with the adventures of Clary, Jace, Alec, Magnus and Simon. I loved the dialogue and the characters and in this day and age when everyone and their sister is writing paranormal teen fice Mortal Instruments series is utterly refreshing. One of the reasons I reveled in this series was due to it being anchored in present-day Brooklyn and the cool, hipster lifestyle that Clary and Simon lived; complete with some trendy food settings.  For Lisa’s blogoversary, I cooked up a little chicken salad from East Village Ukrainian eatery and coffee shop Veselka; a little joint that pops up in the fourth book in the series The City of Fallen Angels.  The recipe is from the Veselka cookbook and is featured on another fun blog Cooking With Veselka.  Go here to my blog for the recipe…

Happy Blogoversary, Lisa!  Here’s to many, many more!  

Thanks Greg!  And it's okay if you aren't a Twilight fan, yeah, I know that's what you're referring to.  :-)  And if I can get enough entries, I will giveaway a copy of the first book in the Mortal Instruments series, City of Bones.  If I get at least 10 people to enter in the Rafflecopter below, I will choose a winner on August 31st, the last day of my month long 3rd Blogoversary celebration!  So whether you're new to the series and want to get started, or just don't own the first book in the series yet, please sign up below!  One rule, you must live where The Book Depository ships.  Check this page to see if you can enter!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Hazards of Working at a Bookstore Vol. 2.3

It's been awhile since I did one of these, partly because I haven't been working that much, and partly because I've been really busy. So this volume will actually include both nights I worked this week, but only 3 books, as again, with our lack of employees lately, I don't have as much time to wander and find new books.

First is The Friendship Doll by Kirby Lawson. This is a young readers book, and is told kind of from the doll's viewpoint I think. But the premise is that in 1927 there were 59 of these dolls sent from Japan to America as a friendship offering. These are the tales of the girls that they lived with and the friendships they made. The story goes that only 45 are left, and they hope that after reading, maybe someone will help find the 13 others or solve the mystery of what happened to them.

The 2nd book is a teen book called Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier. Again, the cover drew me in when I had to reshelve this book thanks to a lazy customer, but hey, if they hadn't left it sitting somewhere, I might not have seen it, so let's look on the bright side. The story is that this is a family of time travelers. They are prepared as they grow up for this, except our main character Gwyneth, who supposedly was born at the wrong time and missed this gene. But, for some reason, her mother was wrong, and she does time travel. She works with someone named Gideon, where the time traveler gene is passsed through the men in the family. They travel through 18th century London as well as contemporary London.

And finally, this isn't really a book to read, but one that I could use as a single person. I'm always looking for cookbooks for just one or two people so I don't end up with a ton of leftovers. I often get bored of leftovers really quickly. Especially if the recipe isn't really that good. On our new cookbook table we have one called: The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones. This sounds like it has a lot of recipes, even Julia Childs types of recipes, but it helps you to not waste food and save money as a single person. Don't know when I'll buy it, I've promised myself not to buy anymore cookbooks until I actually start cooking out of the ones I have.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

Finally finished all 1074 pages of this huge novel. Really, it's actually about the size of another Stephen King novel, It, my favorite King novel of all time. It's longer than Breaking Dawn, or any of the Harry Potter novels as well. It was good once I got into it, and it isn't that it was hard to read that took me so long, just that it was so hard to hold! As I got halfway through I got to the point where I wanted to be reading it during commercials and not just at the table when I was eating. I even brought it to school one day this past week to read during my lunch break. The story was really good, and I didn't think that the early on hints that it was aliens would actually be what it turned out to be. I kinda thought maybe the "Chef" guy who ran the huge secretly town funded meth lab would be some kind of inventor who created that. And the thing about a Stephen King book is that every time you think, finally a break for the good guys, nope, there's a bad guy/thing there ready to spoil it and close that door. You just keep going and going and the last 400 pages are like htat over and over it seems.

So, I definitely recommend this. It reminds me a bit of one of his other alien books, what is the name of it, um, The Tommyknockers. Just because of the whole alien bit. I liked all the attention to what would happen inside the dome from no fresh air, or water, and the pollution and all that. Anyway, if you like Stephen King, go ahead and jump into this huge tome. It'll be worth it.

Now, a note, at my Weight Watchers meeting yesterday morning, our leader talked about seeing Julie and Julia and how she decided to do something similar and cook all the way through a WW cookbook. I'm thinking of doing something similar. But I will only cook the things I want to eat. If I do it, I'll just go straight through the book and cook what I'd actually eat. So I'll let you know when I get started with that, and maybe blog about that too. Right now I'm at a point where even though I have tons of books that I haven't read, sitting waiting to be picked up, when I go to decided what to read next, I have trouble finding anything I think I want to read for sure. What I've picked to read have all turned out good, it was sometimes just getting started.