FF Friday: Set the Stage, by Karis Walsh

Set the Stage is an adorable fluffy romance between Emilie, an aspiring actress who just got cast at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and Arden, a gardener working at the Ashland park. It's full of very accurate details about theatre (and seems very accurate about OSF in particular, at least as far as the layout of their theatres is concerned) and plants, and has a hilarious running joke about how every business in town attempts to get in on the theatre tourist business by slapping on random Shakespeare references. (Shockingly, no one ever makes a joke about "the Garden of Arden.")

In fact, this novel distinctly resembles a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters. But it has lots of loving details of a setting, cozy togetherness, good food, shared activities, instant attraction, constant sexual awareness/tension between the characters, and a general air of comfort reading. It also has a lot of quirky details and problems that one encounters in real life but rarely in fiction, like the genuinely sweet boss at Emilie's crappy fast-food job, a geocaching date, and the horrible dilemma of what to say to your crush when you go see the play she's in and she's just not very good in the role.

It's a very charming book and I am now seriously considering a visit to the OSF. I was last there in high school and it was very formative. They have a super fun-looking play up this year about Shakespeare's buddies trying to reconstruct Hamlet from memory after his death. (i.e., the First Folio.)

Today I tried the Impossible Burger

If you haven't heard of this, it's a new soy-based burger that supposedly cooks, looks, tastes, and feels exactly like a meat burger. I saw it at Fatburger, which I figured was a good place to try it -I already know I like their regular burgers so I have a good basis for comparison, and it's pretty cheap so if I hated it at least I wasn't out a tragic amount of money.

I asked the guy at the counter if people were liking it. With slight evasiveness, he said, "Yeah, lots of people are ordering it!"

If my experience was typical, I suspect that lots of people will not be ordering it twice.

On the one hand, it was by far the best non-meat burger I've ever had, and I ate almost the entire thing. (I was hungry.) However, it does not look like meat. It looks similar to meat. But it was visibly a veggie burger. I actually don't care much about appearance, but just sayin'. Similarly, the texture isn't quite right. It's close. But it has a noticeably vegetal soft homogeneity, which is different from that of ground meat. Most importantly, it doesn't taste quite like meat. Or rather, it doesn't taste like a Fatburger burger. It has a slight spiciness that I didn't care for, which is probably there to mask the non-meat flavors. If the texture and appearance had been perfect, I might have believed it as a meat burger that was overspiced to make up for the meat not being the best.

In short, disappointing. I would have preferred their real burger. I also would have preferred going home and making myself a salad. I keep hoping for a perfect meat substitute, but in the meantime I'll stick to eating less meat and mostly from identifiably good-practice sources.

Have any of you tried this? What did you think?