The Secret Ingredient of Wishes

The Secret Ingredient of Wishes by Susan Bishop Crispell was a book I thought I was going to love. It popped up on goodreads as a recommendation, and was compared to Sarah Addison Allen.

The Secret Ingredient of Wishes features  pie, wishes, and starting over in a small town.  It also takes place in North Carolina.  It seemed like it would have a lot going for it. The comparisons to Sarah Addison Allen had me really excited to read it.  I jumped on the waiting list at the library, and eagerly waited for my copy.

It was incredibly disappointing.

I’ve loved all of Sarah Addison Allen’s books except Lost Lake (that one wasn’t horrible, just definitely nowhere near as wonderful as her other books).  I think the comparison to her writing had me starting this book with higher expectations than I would have had otherwise.  Honestly, that probably colored my opinion some.  I think I was expecting something like Garden Spells (I highly recommend reading it now if you haven’t read it yet)  Even without the comparison I still think I would have been disappointed.

The names of the characters drove me a little crazy.  The older, wiser, magic pie baking female character is named Catch.  There’s never any explanation as to whether that’s a nickname, some old family name, or just weird for the sake of being weird.  The hunky love interest next door is named Ashe, which doesn’t seem to fit at all.  For some reason, the two names sound a lot alike in my head, and it kind of drove me insane.  The other name issue I had was that, with the exception of Catch and Ashe, pretty much everyone went by some abbreviation of their name most of the time; Ray for Rachel, Ev for Everley, Mae or Maeby for Mary Beth.  It just seemed overdone.  I know, that’s a relatively small issue, but it adds up over the course of an entire book.

The dialogue wasn’t great.  The conversations just seemed a little stilted.  Catch had an annoying habit of saying things like “Miss-I-Got-All-Dolled-Up-and-Now-Everyone-Else-Looks-Like-Crap,”. There was something like that from her constantly.  It got old, and seemed like a lazy way to get a bunch of dialogue out of the way at once.

I had hoped the pies would at least be interesting, but even the baking parts of the book were disappointing.  There wasn’t much detail about the pie making, and there wasn’t anything particularly interesting about the pies.

Overall, it was an incredibly disappointing read.

So what about you?  Have you read The Secret Ingredient of Wishes?  What did you think of it?  Do you go into a book with high expectations if the author is compared to an author you really enjoy?

Pampered Chef Garlic Press Review

***I’ve decided to start reviewing some products that I really like and think others might like too, and the ones that I wish someone had warned me away from.  Please note that I am not any kind of affiliate for these products.  Any links provided are just for your convenience.  ***

I ended up with my Pampered Chef garlic press about two years ago and it quickly became one of my favorite kitchen tools.  We love, love, love garlic, so any tool that makes cooking with garlic easier is a definite win.  The garlic press is priced at $16.50 on the Pampered Chef website, which is usually more than I want to pay for a tool that only does one job, but with as much garlic as we consume it gets a lot of use. 

The garlic press is dishwasher safe, which is a huge plus.  Hubby and I aren’t fans of hand washing dishes when we’re going to be running the dishwasher anyway.  I never did figure out whether or not the tool (it looks like the My Little Pony brushes) that came with it to scoop the skin out is dishwasher safe, so I don’t use it.  It’s a pain to clean and I don’t want to put it in the dishwasher without knowing for sure that it’s okay to.  I usually have to chop vegetables as well when I’m using garlic, so I just use the flat side of the knife blade to scrape the garlic off of the press and the point to scoop out the skin.   It may not be ideal, but it works for me.

I know some people argue that a garlic press isn’t a kitchen tool you need, and they’re right – you can peel and chop your garlic.  But, I do think it makes cooking faster and easier for me.  I do a lot of dinners in the slow cooker, and it makes the morning slow cooker prep before work go a little faster, and I don’t have to worry about my hands smelling like garlic all day long.  So, even in a small kitchen, I feel like the garlic press earns its keep and its drawer space. 

Simple Solution Review

***I’ve decided to start reviewing some products that I really like and think others might like too, and the ones that I wish someone had warned me away from.  Please note that I am not any kind of affiliate for these products.  Any links provided are just for your convenience. ***

This one was recommended by one of my pet transport friends, and it has become one of my favorite cleaning products. 

I love pets; we have five, we occasionally foster, and I sometimes do rescue transports.  The only bad side to all of that are the occasional pet messes.  For the most part I’ve been really lucky with the transport pets; they’re almost always very well behaved and very rarely make any kind of mess in the car. But accidents happen. 

When I was transporting this adorable little puppy his little bladder just couldn’t hold it until the next stop.  Unfortunately it soaked through the blanket I had on the seat. 

I cleaned the car seat as soon as I got home with a mixture of Lysol and water.  I thought everything was fine until the next afternoon when I got in the car and caught a faint whiff of urine.  I cleaned it again with Lysol, and again thought everything was fine.  The next few days were cooler and I didn’t smell anything.  Then we had a warmer day and the smell was definitely back. 

The next time around I tried straight vinegar.  I thought surely that since I was now driving the vinegar-mobile the urine smell would be gone.  Wrong.  The next warm afternoon yielded a urine smell with some vinegar undertones. That’s not a good smell!  Not good at all.

At that point I decided to check with some of my fellow transporters thinking that surely someone would have found something that works.  The two most popular solutions were cleaning the car with a carpet cleaner and Simple Solution.

Renting a carpet cleaner is time consuming and gets to be a little expensive, so I decided to try Simple Solution first.  I can’t remember how much the bottle cost, but I remember it being fairly comparable to (maybe a little cheaper than?) Nature’s Miracle (which I think is useless). 

The instructions were to spray the Simple Solution, let it sit, and then blot it up.  It didn’t even call for hard scrubbing!  Once again, the urine smell seemed to be gone, though by this time I was nervous.  The next warm afternoon came – and no urine smell.  Not even the faintest little whiff!

The Simple Solution worked!  It has been months, and we’ve had some really hot days, but the smell never came back.  We’ve started using Simple Solution for any pet related cleaning and it works great.  I’ve told several friends about it, and they’ve all said it works great for all of their pet messes as well. 

The spray has a very light, pleasant scent.  It reminds me of clean laundry, which is one of the things I like about it.  It doesn’t have that sickly sweet air freshener scent, though there’s definitely a scent.  The scent isn’t strong, it doesn’t linger, and it definitely works.