Reading

One of our little treats is ordering out every other Wednesday for lunch so we can avoid messing up the kitchen on the day the maid service is here. Usually we order from one of our staples in the area like Rodeo Goat, but today we tried The Empanada Cookhouse, which we've been thinking about for a while. (We miss Marini's Empanadas in Houston something fierce).

We got a six-pack of three different kinds: the Pork Tamarindo (sweet and spicy), the Pork Al Pastor, and the Beef Chimichurri. The beef was the weakest of the lot, which surprised me, but I just wasn't feeling the chimichurri, which wasn't the kind I like. I also ate it last and the Tamarindo and the Al Pastor were delicious. There were also some tots with cheese that didn't really survive the car trip and would have done better if we'd re-crisped them in an air fryer or something, and a Nutella sweet empanada for dessert that would have done better if I had warmed it. It was still really good though, and I don't think it needed a crisping, just a warming.

Verdict: it stays on the list, and I want to eat at the restaurant to get the empanadas warm and fresh. Based on my experience at Marini's back in the day, it does make a difference.

Books
Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Social Safety Net, by Jessica Calarco. Calarco traces how America chose as a matter of policy to dump systemic risk on women as part of the Reagan revolution (which the author doesn't exactly identify as that, but it is). When nobody is available to do caretaking, in personal life or as a job, it falls to women, who are usually insufficiently compensated, for systemic reasons.
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh. Really fantastic boarding school mystery with a Deputy Head with secrets as a protagonist. The twists in this one are really excellent. Five stars!
A Trinket for the Taking, by Victoria Laurie. The ideas in this mystery were solid but the execution was lacking. The narrator/protagonist is super cool, beautiful, powerful, immortal, and dumb as a rock in her personal relationships to the point of it having to be magic. Not sorry I finished instead of DNFing, but the second one isn't out and I won't be looking for it.
Tideborn, by Eliza Chan. Second in what I think is a duology set in a southeast Asian inflected post-apocalyptic science fantasy. Taking up from the disaster at the end of the last book, the surviving characters scatter to deal with the fallout and come to some good and some gruesomely awful resolutions. Chan sticks the landing.

Short Stories
For Ever and Ever, by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Paywalled. The third in a series about a mother who commits a crime for her son and is expelled off-planet for him.

Movies & TV
Murderbot, Episode 3. Ends on a real cliffhanger as Murderbot finds out who did the bad thing, sort of.

We ate from: The Empanada Cookhouse

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