Thoughts on Redwall

After reading this book I was torn between staying with my own thoughts for a while to try and decide what I thought of the book and diving into reviews and info about the book on the net.

Lately my curiosity has been killing me, so of course I jumped online.  And I have to say I was surprised that this is considered a young adult book.

Just a warning that the following my contain spoilers, so stop reading if you havent read the book and don’t want to know what happens in it.

The most surprising things about this book don’t happen in the plot.  The characters appear to be laid out with their specific personalities and stereotypical skills of their animal in the wild.

The book has almost no sexual references, just a few shy flirting moments between mice.  Maybe that’s why it is considered  less adult book.  However, the plot has the ‘good guys’ who are stoic, brave, loving and homely animals take part in cases of mass murder with no second thoughts.

The path of the story follows an assault on the Redwall Abbey by an invading horde of rats, and at the same time a small abbot mouse goes on his journey to find his own purpose.

Throughout the two major themes there is a clear sense that the conflicts in the world are all against the environment, there are no characters that go through a crisis of morality or question their own actions.

With the events of recent years it is hard to watch as the animals of the Abbey boil their invaders alive in front of them, while at the same time believe that they are an untrained mass of country raised, loving, simple creatures.

The first week worked!

I actually managed to cook a couple times.  The first one was passable but nothing to write home about.  The second one was a shepherd’s pie that tasted really good and actually looked edible, to me!

The one small problem was that is created a ton of leftovers, more than I was expecting by far.  So I am now thoroughly sick of shepherd’s pie and hope that I never see any again for another year.

New Year, New Plans

A new year makes me think of new things to try and a new chance to start over.  I’ve been talking about trying to learn how to cook for ages now, but I think this is the time to try it.

I’ve noticed lately a couple people talking about cooking everything in a particular cookbook so I decided to try the same thing.  I took a gander through my small assortment of books and picked out one I got as a gift from my sister.   I figure if I can cook something new two nights a week and have lefovers for one or two days after I’ll be golden.  If I get really great maybe I can taken leftovers for lunch at work the next day!

The book I picked out was Rachel Ray’s 365: No Repeats.  The stuff looks great, I know she likes leftovers from watching her show and all the recipes are based around 30 minute prep which sounds perfect for me.  Hell, I spend 15 minutes just nuking a frozen dinner most nights!

One of the other things that spurred me onto this plan was grocery shopping the other day.  I was starting to get really annoyed when I couldn’t find the frozen dinner I usually buy at the store while there was a sale on them.

Sounds like a great time for a change to me.