The Grey King.

The Grey King. by: Susan Cooper 1976 Newbery Award winner.

I liked this book, what I could gather of it anyway. I was a bit confused through a lot of it simply because it is number four in a series. I feel like it would have made more sense had I read the first three first. I did like the writing though and I love hearing stories set up in whales, the countryside sounds so beautiful up there. The story is a fantasy story set in modern times (1970’s) with mystical kings, A golden Harp, time travel, children who feel different from the rest of the world making friends, dogs and sheep. It was a fun story that held my attention even when I had no idea what was going on. I might go back and read the rest of the series at some point but not for a while since I have about a hundred more books to go.

Does someone die? Yes.

My Journey through the Newbery award books.

Recently my sister and I were discussing what Newbery Award books we had read had children, which of course led to having to look up what books have won, and while I have read several of them as a child I don’t really remember them all that well, and I hadn’t read nearly as many as I thought I had.I read a lot more of the Newbery Honors books, Probably because there are more of them. In any case I compiled a list of all the Newbery award books and will be marking them off as I go through them. I am not going to try to read all the Honors books because I feel that I would never get through them all. My library has nearly all the award-winning books so I am going to start by borrowing them first, and will listen to, or read them in no particular order. One thing I have noticed about the books I have read is that someone, a prominent character, seems to die in every book, I wonder if that is a criteria or if I have just happened to read those ones. Not sure, but I guess I will find out. There are currently just over a hundred of them and a new one added yearly so it's going to take a while to get through them all. Also some of them are out of print which may make them hard to get, those will probably be last to be read if ever.

3 in one day.

All of these were fairly simple and I had the ingredients on hand so I just made them all for my lunch one day.

Chomptastic Carrots and Dip:
The dip was tasty. It was creamy and had a nice texture to it. The flavor was similar to a sourcream and onion though it doesn’t have onion in it, so I guess it was more like sour cream and garlic. And the carrots were just carrots. The recipe actually calls for baby carrots but I went with carrot sticks because I had whole carrots and they work the same as baby carrots. This was a nice simple recipe that I am willing to make again. The hardest part is waiting for the dip to chill and become flavorful. But its worth it to wait because like most dips it develops more flavor over time.

Tasty Flower Sandwiches:
I did change this up a tiny bit. But only in that I added lettuce to the sandwich and swapped out the Mayonnaise for greek yogurt. I don’t like Mayo so therefore I change it up everytime I make something and Greek yogurt makes a good substitute as it’s creamy and close to the same consistency as mayo. These were a little harder to make then I had anticipated. I mean it's a sandwich. How hard could it be? Not hard at all till you have to cut them. The flower part is not hard to cut but getting the middle out without tearing the bread was a bit difficult, it may have been easier if I’d had a circle, but I didn’t so I used a mini flower cutter I had. It still turned out really cute. I just had to be really careful taking out the middles. As for the taste it was a basic sandwich flavor. I do think these would be really cute for a tea though.

Towering Parfaits:
This is a fairly basic recipe where you just layer pudding, whipped cream and blueberries. They also said you could use yogurt. I happened to have some vanilla cinnamon yogurt I thought would go good with this so that is what I used. I had never had that particular flavor of yogurt before though and I didn’t like it. I have had so many other vanilla yogurts that were good, so I thought this one would be really good but the flavor was weird, and I have no idea why. In any case it kinda made for a disappointing parfait. I also thought it would be better with some granola or graham cracker crumbs, just something to break it up a bit and all the parfaits I have ever had had something like that in them. I would like to make this again and use a better tasting yogurt because they are out there and this would be really good with one.

All in all I would make all three recipes again. They are easy and tasted pretty good. (well minus the weird yogurt but that is easy to amend)

Snow White hot chocolate

I really wanted to like this. It sounded amazing, but in reality it wasn’t all that good. It was WAY too sweet. I feel like it could be pretty amazing though if I used less white chocolate chips, or added way more milk. I actually had to add extra milk to it so I could drink it. All in all if I was to make this again I would certainly alter the ratios. And maybe use a different type of chocolate chips. I think this may need to be made with a more expensive brand like ghirardelli or something. I am not willing to try it though. I don't generally purchase white chocolate chips as I am not that big of a fan of white chocolate so buying them just to make this recipe that may or may not be improved is not worth it to me. so I will just leave it that this will probably be skipped from now on.

Seven Dwarfs soup

This was an amazingly simple recipe to make. I was skeptical that it would be any good because of the simplicity of it. But it was actually really yummy. I always expect soups to contain onion and garlic to give them flavor plus other spices and herbs, but this didn’t call for either and no herbs whatsoever. The only spices it called for was salt and pepper which is why I thought it wouldn’t have much flavor. But it had a lot of flavor to it. I used homemade stock and I never add anything to that either, it's just bones and water cooked overnight in the crockpot, which makes an amazing stock. I guess the celery and carrots in this soup does a lot for the flavor. who knew those two things could make it taste so good. I also liked the pasta they called for, I had never had ditalini pasta before, I think it goes particularly well in soup. Actually it would probably go well with any pasta dish, but hey I really like pasta so I am always willing to try new shapes of pasta for any reason. I will definitely make this one again. It's so easy, the hardest part being chopping the vegetables. And if that is too hard the recipe does have a note that you can make it with frozen mixed veggies to make it even easier to make.

Sunshine Bowl

This is the first recipe in the book, though not the first one I made. I will still blog about it first. This recipe sounded absolutely amazing… well almost. I am not a fan of cantaloupe but that is just a personal distaste. I know a lot of people who love it, as well as many who don't. I think it may be one of those you love it or hate it kind of foods and I am in the I dislike it category on this one, so I decided to replace it with Mango. I absolutely adore mangoes and they are similar in color to Cantaloupe so the color would look right. Yeah I know they taste nothing alike. The picture makes it look a bit more pale than it was in person, it was actually a nice shade of orange, like its a bowl full of sunshine. The Orange was also an issue, and not a “I don’t like it” kind, but the food allergy kind. While an orange won't kill me it does make me terribly miserable so I try to avoid them even though they are an absolutely delicious fruit that I wish I could eat. I grew up eating Oranges and loving them, then one day in my late teens they decided they didn't much like me and now I can’t eat them, which makes me ever so sad. Sometimes I do try to eat just a tiny bite to see if maybe I can eat them now, but so far it’s not gone all that well, so I didn’t even bother to try orange this time. Instead I ended up replacing the orange in this recipe with red grapefruit. I do think the orange would have tasted better but the grapefruit was pretty good as well. Besides those two changes I followed the recipe and it turned out really good. My sister asked me if I changed it so much if it really counted as making the recipe and I concluded that yes it does count because it was still really close and I can’t help the orange thing. Plus they have a note about trying it with different fruits so I did still follow that. And yes I would make it again.

Disney Princess Cookbook

For Christmas I received the Disney Princess cookbook and have been working my way through it. it has 50 recipes in it. I should have been taking notes on everything I have made but I didn't so I will be reporting from memory. I also didn't start taking photos of finished products until after I had made several of the recipes. Right now I am approximately half way through the book and so far the recipes are really good. I'm not doing them in any particular order. I'm just making them as I feel the want to try the recipe or if I have the ingredients on hand. I really want to make them all, but I am running into a few issues with my random food sensitivities, so some of the recipes are going to have to be altered but I am pretty good at coming up with alternatives. mostly I’m having to replace any red meat with poultry and oranges with Grapefruit. So here's to another cookbook. I will make my way through this one, it's going to take a while but I will do it, even the few recipes that don't sound all that appealing.