Bad recipe; great book

Recipe Trials and Tribulations
Tofu with Crab Sauce by norecipes
 

Marc of norecipes.com made this sound gorgeous:
                      a warm cube of silky smooth tofu enveloped by a velvety crab sauce
It was yucky.

I love tofu, I love crab, and I love a dashi-based sauce. But this was just bland and fishy-tasting. My dashi was a little strong--I'll dial back the shark flakes next time. But it wasn't all that bad--I'll use the rest of it tomorrow. So I don't know why the tofu was such a disappointment.

Birding Without Borders
by Noah Strycker

Great story of a birder's big year--really big year. his goal was to break the world record of 4300 species in a single year and not break the bank doing it. Enlisting the help of hundreds of local experts, enthusiasts and outdoors nutcases, he hopped around a lot of countries and saw a bucketload of birds. Just reading his species list at the end is enough to make your mouth water. Wow.

The writing is perfect. Not too long, not a simple "did this, went there, saw that" record. He picked out a lot of amusing, scary or exciting episodes and told them in amusing, scary and exciting detail. And a few spaces for personal reflection--why am I doing this? Where am I going after this? How will I ever stop?

And this quote,
So what does a list measure, if not expertise or talent? Some argue that a list is only a metric of the depth of one's pockets and the free time to empty them. Those critics have a point, but I think a list is grander than that: besides reflecting how many places a person has traveled, it measures the desire to see those places and those birds firsthand. A list, in other words, is a personal account of dreams and memories. It conveys poetry and passion and inspiration.

This book, too, is a lot more than birding. He touches a little--just a little--on human problems in the countries he visits. But not so much you get distracted from the journey. He doesn't appear to be the sort of person who gets too hung up on problems, once they're conquered. I think somewhere in the book he gives advice--if a problem can be made to go away with $20, do it.

Of course a book like this has to touch on ecological issues. Toward the end he travels to see a rare oil in, of all places, a palm oil plantation. Little did I know,
Palm oil, squeezed from nuts produced on squat trees, is used in half of all supermarket products -- including lipstick, soap, chocolate, instant noodles, bread, detergent, and ice cream-- and labeled under a host of names, such as vegetable oil, vegetable fat, glyceryl, and Elaeis guineensis (the plant's scientific name). ... The stuff is ubiquitous -- it's even an ingredient in biofuels -- but nearly invisible.
yet,
Oil palm plantations, widely regarded as one of the world's worse environmental scourges...

So that adds another obscure and difficult to detect item to my list of stuff to avoid. Blast it all!