"Every Grain of Rice" is my favorite cookbook ever. Its emphasis is home cooking so the recipes are pretty practical and it covers more than just Sichuan or Hunan cuisine so there is a lot of variety. The amazing part is that almost all the recipes are delicious. I've made over 120 of the recipes and the percentage of hits vs misses is amazing, probably 90% are things I would make again and a couple dozen have become essential.
The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.
I'm a big fan of Buckaroo Banzai but it seems odd that you credit BB when the linked Wikipedia article is about the original source of "Yoyodyne"
> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.
I assumed OP was probably remembering the 1984 film, and Buckaroo's Yoyodyne doesn't have its own wiki page. That is it. Plus the other uses are interesting even if trivial. Star Trek used the same exact form as the Buckaroo Bonzai film, "Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems," which probably isn't coincidence. I think that's neat, and that everyone should have the opportunity to stroke their chin and ponder this.
Try the Mala Market 0]. They have really good Sichuan products that are hard to find in the US. The quality is really good as they are a low volume business and travel to China to pick specific items. They definitely charge for this, but the quality for some things is well worth it.
I use them for things I can't get locally like rapeseed oil (caiziyou) or where the quality is wildly better like Sichuan peppercorns, Facing Heaven chiles, extra aged Pixian Douban Jiang. They used to be the source for Yibin Yacai, but now you can find that on Amazon and finally one of the local Chinatown grocers started carrying that for about 1/4th the cost.
If you are interested on programming something like a 6800 or 6502, but would like to make a practical device and not just run in simulation, take a look at the STM8. It's a very widely used 8-bit embedded controller and architecturally very like a cleaned up and improved 6800.
The STM8S discovery board for this is $8 and in stock at ST and Digikey.This includes the target system and the ST-Link programmer. There are free commercial tool chains and the open source SDCC toolchain.
> The project itself is terribly run--the maintainers recently pushed out an ABI change which broke everyone's code, but released it as a minor version bump.
I don't think your comment about a breaking abi change on a minor point release is fair. Perhaps you have misunderstood the release number scheme? Every year around the first quarter they have one major release, ie 3.9, 4.0, 4.1, and now 4.2. A minor release would be like 4.2.1. There is no significance to the major digit, ie 4.0 was just the release a year after 3.9 and not otherwise special.
I'm not affiliated with the project, but I think would be unfortunate if someone was turned away using or contributing to the best or only opensource tool chain for a number of processors (eg the paduak family) because someone claimed the project was terribly run.
Most gas stove tops in the US are not great for cooking with a wok anyway as they are underpowered and the flame comes out the edges of the "sealed burner".
I use an Iwatani 35FW tabletop butane burner for wok cooking which works much better than my gas stove. It claims 15,000 Btu vs my stoves 7,000. I suspect both claims are inflated, but the Iwatani will boil a pint of water in 1/4th the time of the stove. The wok is acceptably stable on it and the flame pattern is usable if not ideal. The butane cans are well under $2 and will make several meals per can. It's a bit pricey ($100-ish now) but mine has lasted six years of frequent use.
The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.