Cookbook review: 100 Classic Gluten-Free Comfort Food Recipes

I've always been one to express my love to friends and family with food (among other things). Homemade cookies regularly in the cookie jar. Special treats for special folks on special days. Enjoying food crafts and activities with kids. Festive family occasions focus primarily on food.

Enter a grandchild with food allergies. Gluten issues, in particular. James, my bonus grandson courtesy his dad Patrick marrying my daughter Brianna, can't eat the majority of my long-time specialty goodies and holiday favorites. Figuring out how to express food-love to that kiddo has been a challenge. For the most part, food isn't what James and I share.

That's all about to change, courtesy 100 Classic Gluten-Free Comfort Food Recipes by Donna Washburn and Heather Butt, which I recently received from publisher Robert Rose free for review. The 224-page cookbook takes the mystery out of making savory and sweet dishes without gluten! A lifesaver for this grandma and her gluten-free grandson.

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Greedy Granny from Goliath Games (game review)

Stereotypes of grandmas abound, and there's none more stereotypical than the star of Greedy Granny, the new offering from Goliath Games. Granny of the game is pin-curl coiffed, dons granny glasses, a lace-collared dress, and knee-high socks with pink slippers. She's wrinkled about the mouth and forehead and wears dentures that fly from her mouth when startled. She naps in a recliner, arthritic hands clutching the arms.

She's the stereotypical grandma caricature of comics and cartoons and commercials created by folks who apparently haven't seen a real grandma in several decades. A kind of grandma I can't imagine any child born in the past 30 years has ever seen, as grandmas are nothing like the stereotype. Or like Greedy Granny.

That said, it's silly to get one's grandma briefs in a bunch over the depiction, as Greedy Granny — stereotype or not — was surely innocently crafted for nothing but fun. And fun the game definitely is.

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175 Best Multifunction Electric Pressure Cooker Recipes by Marilyn Haugen (cookbook review)

I have a lot of cookbooks. At last count — which was just before sitting down to write this review — there are 54 cookbooks on my kitchen bookshelf. And that doesn't even include the literally hundreds of cooking magazines I've collected throughout the years.

In addition to learning techniques and tasty treats from all those cookbooks, I've also learned that it's rare to find a cookbook in which every recipe turns out fabulous. 175 Best Multifunction Electric Pressure Cooker Recipes by Marilyn Haugen, which I recently received free for review, just might be one of the rare ones. 

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Retro '90s games your '80s and '90s kids will get a kick out of

Long, long ago, in what now seems an alternate universe, I had three daughters living at home, three daughters attending elementary school. Computers in the classroom were new, our home computer even newer. Games on both were DOS-based. And they. were. awesome. Especially in the pixel-dazzled eyes of my daughters.

At school, my girls and their friends clamored for computer time. Oregon Trail time, in particular. They so enjoyed attempting to survive the oft-deadly challenges of the trail west at school that we purchased the game — on 3.5-inch disk... or perhaps it was a 5.25-inch floppy — to play at home.

My girls (and my husband) spent hours at the screen hunting, scavenging, escaping bears, and crossing rivers as they traversed the seemingly never-ending Oregon Trail. Sometimes successfully, sometimes...

Continue reading the review in Grandma's Back Room...