Be Ready When the Luck Happens

 

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten

Nonfiction - Memoir

2024

Read by Ina Garten

Finished on December 8, 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 (Excellent)

Publisher's Blurb:

In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

From the opening track of the audiobook, I was immediately hooked on Be Ready When the Luck Happens. Ina Garten narrates her memoir with ease and enthusiasm, drawing me in as though we were sitting on her porch, enjoying a cup of coffee and a homemade treat warm from her oven. Her conversational tone is as inviting as her beautiful cookbooks (of which I own several) and I enjoyed my daily walks, learning more about her early career and relationship with her husband, Jeffrey. As one would expect, Ina's circle of friends and acquaintances are also well-known celebrities and yet I never felt she was dropping names while sharing anecdotes about their interactions. Her memoir is honest and genuine, and has inspired me to dig out her cookbooks for my weekly meal planning. Maybe I'll start with a sweet treat since it is the holiday season!

Highly recommend!

In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite

 

In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite: 150 Recipes & Stories About the Food You Love by Melissa Clark

Nonfiction - Cooking

2010

Finished on January 14, 2024

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

“Melissa Clark’s recipes are as lively and diverse as ever, drawing on influences from Marrakech to Madrid to the Mississippi Delta. She has her finger on the pulse of how and what America likes to eat.”

—Tom Colicchio, author of Craft of Cooking

“A Good Appetite,” Melissa Clark’s weekly feature in the New York Times Dining Section, is about dishes that are easy to cook and that speak to everyone, either stirring a memory or creating one. Now, Clark takes the same freewheeling yet well-informed approach that has won her countless fans and applies it to one hundred and fifty delicious, simply sophisticated recipes.

Clark prefaces each recipe with the story of its creation—the missteps as well as the strokes of genius—to inspire improvisation in her readers. So when discussing her recipe for Crisp Chicken Schnitzel, she offers plenty of tried-and-true tips learned from an Austrian chef; and in My Mother’s Lemon Pot Roast, she gives the same high-quality advice, but culled from her own family’s kitchen.

Memorable chapters reflect the way so many of us like to eat: Things with Cheese (think Baked Camembert with Walnut Crumble and Ginger Marmalade), The Farmers’ Market and Me (Roasted Spiced Cauliflower and Almonds), It Tastes Like Chicken (Garlic and Thyme–Roasted Chicken with Crispy Drippings Croutons), and many more delectable but not overly complicated dishes.

In addition, Clark writes with Laurie Colwin–esque warmth and humor about the relationship that we have with our favorite foods, about the satisfaction of cooking a meal where everyone wants seconds, and about the pleasures of eating. From stories of trips to France with her parents, growing up (where she and her sister were required to sit on unwieldy tuna Nicoise sandwiches to make them more manageable), to bribing a fellow customer for the last piece of dessert at the farmers’ market, Melissa’s stories will delight any reader who starts thinking about what’s for dinner as soon as breakfast is cleared away. This is a cookbook to read, to savor, and most important, to cook delicious, rewarding meals from.

I don't have a huge collection of cookbooks, but the ones that I have appeal to me most because of their glossy pages, full of beautiful photographs for each recipe. Some of my favorites include those written by Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa), Ree Drummond (Pioneer Woman), Trisha Yearwood, Deb Perelman (Smitten Kitchen), and Gina Homolka (Skinnytaste). When I received a copy of Melissa Clark's cookbook, I wasn't sure it would be for me since other than a few black-and-white photos (marking the beginning of a new chapter), it lacks any colorful photographs. I would have to use my imagination, rather than rely on a photograph, to envision the end result of each recipe. So, instead of flipping through to see if I could find something to make for dinner, I decided to start at the beginning and spend a year reading each recipe and accompanying anecdote. What a treat! Not only do I have roughly three dozen recipes marked to sample, but I was thoroughly entertained by Clark's stories. In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite not only has twelve chapters of recipes, but her essays (which run anywhere between one to three pages in length) read like those of Laurie Colwin, Molly Wizenberg, and Ann Hood's foodie memoirs. Now to try out some of those recipes!

Save Me the Plums

Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl

Nonfiction

2019 Random House Audio

Narrated by Ruth Reichl

Finished on December 26, 2022

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Trailblazing food writer and beloved restaurant critic Ruth Reichl took the job (and the risk) of a lifetime when she entered the glamorous, high-stakes world of magazine publishing. Now, for the first time, she chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, during which she spearheaded a revolution in the way we think about food.

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. And yet . . . Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl's leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.

Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams—even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.

I'm a huge fan of memoirs, particularly culinary memoirs, so when I heard about Save Me the Plums I quickly added it to my TBR list. I planned to read it a couple of years ago for Nonfiction November, but never got around to it. I put it on this year's list for the same reading challenge, but again, it never made the cut. I finally started listening to the audio early this month, but didn't get in a lot of listening time, and it took me almost a full month to finish the 8-hour audiobook.

I enjoyed parts of Reichl's memoir, but other parts were boring and full of too many unfamiliar names. I was never a subscriber to Gourmet magazine, nor have I ever lived in New York City, but maybe those who are more in tune to the now-defunct publication and the locale would have a greater appreciation for the author's name-dropping, both of restaurants & chefs, as well as staff at Conde Naste. 

The chapters which focus on the eating habits of Ruth's young son, her firsthand experiences during 9/11 (the Gourmet staff prepared meals to feed rescue workers), and her budget-friendly trip to Paris, were worthwhile. There are also several recipes (read, somewhat tediously, line by line in the audiobook) that I'd love to try, so I may take a peek at the print edition someday. I read Tender at the Bone decades ago and while I enjoyed the first half, I didn't love that book either. In 2014 I read her novel Delicious!, but wasn't overly impressed. I think it's safe to say that I've given her books a fair chance, and the end result is that I'm not a true Ruth Reichl fan.

Thank you Libro.fm for the complimentary copy.

More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin

Nonfiction

2021 Harper Perennial (originally published in 1993)

Finished on November 24, 2022

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Following the success of Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin returned to the kitchen to cook up this delightful mix of culinary recipes, advice, and personal anecdotes. With down-to-earth charm and wit, she discussed the many pleasures and problems of cooking at home, including such topics as “Desserts that Quiver,” “The Duck Dilemma,” “Real Food for Tots,” “Turkey Angst,” and “Catering on One Dollar a Head.” As informative as it is entertaining, More Home Cooking is a rare treat for Colwin’s many fans and for anyone who loves to spend time in the kitchen. 

This 2021 edition features a new cover by Olivia McGiff and a foreword by Deb Perelman.

It's been almost exactly twelve years since I read Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin's first nonfiction book about just that, home cooking. I loved that book, as shown by my lengthy review. More Home Cooking was published posthumously; Colwin died in 1992 of an aortic aneurysm. She was 48. 

More Home Cooking is about food, as well as the author's glance back on her family life. I enjoyed her anecdotes, and marked a few recipes for future possibilities, but I didn't love this book as much as I loved Home Cooking. Perhaps having just read two fantastic books (These Precious Days and House Lessons), I set the bar too high, expecting another 5-star read. Or maybe my recent lack of enthusiasm for cooking colored my response to the writing. I was entertained, but this one didn't resonate as much as her previous work. 

On Roast Chicken:

There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down. 

On Shortbread:

After you have been a very good person for a very long time and are thin as a bean, you may decide to fall briefly into sin. You will want something simple and elegant that cannot be made without butter. There is only one thing that will do: shortbread.

On Coffee:

Not a day goes by that we are not given a list of things that are bad for us. These lists, which always mention coffee right away, are usually published in the health column of the daily paper, which we read as we drink our morning coffee.

I have gone without coffee. I did not get the jitters or begin to drool. Nor did I lose my memory or regain lost energy. I simply missed that wonderful taste, that sweet, pungent smell, that warm feeling in my chest.

Turns out that all the recipes I marked are desserts! 

Old-Fashioned Gingerbread (page 66)

Katharine Hepburn's Brownies (page 73)

Classic Shortbread (page 97)

Karen Edward's Version of Buttermilk Cocoa Cake (page 157)

I'll let you know how they turn out and if there are any keepers.

Taste: My Life Through Food

Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

Nonfiction - Memoir

2021 Gallery Books

Finished on January 23, 2022

Rating: 5/5 (Excellent)

Publisher's Blurb:

From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen.

Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the recipes and into the stories behind them.

Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, New York, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.

Written with Stanley's signature wry humor and nostalgia, Taste is a heartwarming read that will be irresistible for anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal.

Nothing like starting the year off with a 5-star read! I rarely get books for my birthday or Christmas, but this year I received a copy of Taste from my mom. Cooking, memoirs and Tucci; she knows me well! I chose this book back on January 1st for my First Book of 2022. However, it wasn't the first book I completed, although I could have easily read it in a couple of days. Instead, I chose to read a chapter or so every few days during lunch, savoring the book, not wanting it to end. 

I've seen several movies starring Stanley Tucci (The Pelican Brief, The Devil Wears Prada, The Lovely Bones and The Terminal), but it wasn't until I watched him play Paul Child in Julie and Julia that I became an adoring fan. More recently, I've watched him in Supernova, Worth and Fortitude, but I have yet to watch La Fortuna or Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. But the one movie I plan to watch this week is Big Night. I love "foodie" movies and have no idea how I missed it! 

Tucci is not only a great actor, but he is an excellent writer. His book is so well-written; he's articulate and intelligent and his self-deprecating humor had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. He's obviously famous and yet he presents himself as the guy next door, almost embarrassed by his wealth and fame (and the friends who are of the same ilk). The memoir is a great read and I plan to check out his two cookbooks, as I suspect they are also filled with interesting anecdotes, as well as tantalizing recipes. Tucci includes several recipes in Taste, many of which I'd like to try. He also chronicles a day in his life with his family during lockdown in London during Covid. Did I mention that he's a very funny man? What I didn't know (maybe I'm not the fan girl I thought I was!) is that he suffered from oral cancer, which must be the most cruel act of fate for someone who is so passionate about food.

I'm so pleased to own a copy of Taste, which will reside on my "keeper shelf" with my other favorite nonfiction books. I also have the book on audio, which I plan to listen to later this year during the Nonfiction November reading challenge. I'm certain it will be a hilarious audiobook, as Tucci is the narrator, but I'm curious about the recipes. It might be somewhat tedious to listen to him read each of the ingredients and instructions, but then again, he's a funny guy and it's likely that he will make even those details entertaining.

Delancey

 

Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage by Molly Wizenberg

Nonfiction - Memoir

2014 Simon & Schuster

Finished on December 17, 2021

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In this funny, frank, tender memoir and New York Times bestseller, the author of A Homemade Life and the blog Orangette recounts how opening a restaurant sparked the first crisis of her young marriage.

When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, he was a trained composer with a handful of offbeat interests: espresso machines, wooden boats, violin-building, and ice cream–making. So when Brandon decided to open a pizza restaurant, Molly was supportive—not because she wanted him to do it, but because the idea was so far-fetched that she didn’t think he would. Before she knew it, he’d signed a lease on a space. The restaurant, Delancey, was going to be a reality, and all of Molly’s assumptions about her marriage were about to change.

Together they built Delancey: gutting and renovating the space on a cobbled-together budget, developing a menu, hiring staff, and passing inspections. Delancey became a success, and Molly tried to convince herself that she was happy in their new life until—in the heat and pressure of the restaurant kitchen—she realized that she hadn’t been honest with herself or Brandon.

With evocative photos by Molly and twenty new recipes for the kind of simple, delicious food that chefs eat at home, Delancey is a moving and honest account of two young people learning to give in and let go in order to grow together.

After reading Molly Wizenberg's previous memoir, A Homemade Life (which I loved!), I was eager to continue reading about her life and was thrilled to see that my library had a copy of Delancey, which I promptly checked out. I enjoyed reading about the beginnings of Molly and Brandon's jump into life as restaurant owners, but I wasn't as enthralled as I was when I read A Homemade Life. I marked a few recipes, but not nearly as many as in her first book. Wizenberg's writing is still very engaging (and very honest about their struggles, both financial and emotionally) and she's a good storyteller, but the details of setting up the restaurant became a bit of a slog. Molly was not at all enthusiastic about Brandon's dream to open a restaurant and her negative outlook (which she kept mostly to herself) cast a shadow over the narrative as I continued to read. I'm not sorry that I read Delancey, but it wasn't as strong or as upbeat as A Homemade Life and I don't feel the need to rush out and buy a permanent copy for my shelves. I have her third memoir (The Fixed Stars) on audio and will begin that in 2022.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table

 

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg

Nonfiction 

2009 Simon & Schuster

Finished on November 16, 2021

Rating: 5/5 (Excellent)

Publisher's Blurb:

When Molly Wizenberg's father died of cancer, everyone told her to go easy on herself, to hold off on making any major decisions for a while. But when she tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, she knew it wasn't possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was not in her studies but in the kitchen.

At first, it wasn't clear where this epiphany might lead. Like her long letters home describing the details of every meal and market, Molly's blog Orangette started out merely as a pleasant pastime. But it wasn't long before her writing and recipes developed an international following. Every week, devoted readers logged on to find out what Molly was cooking, eating, reading, and thinking, and it seemed she had finally found her passion. But the story wasn't over: one reader in particular, a curly-haired, food-loving composer from New York, found himself enchanted by the redhead in Seattle, and their email correspondence blossomed into a long-distance romance.

In A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother's pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined. You won't be able to decide whether to curl up and sink into the story or to head straight to the market to fill your basket with ingredients for Cider-Glazed Salmon and Pistachio Cake with Honeyed Apricots.

Years ago, when I was first got into blogging, I stumbled upon some non-book related blogs filled with beautiful photographs of home interiors and delicious-looking meals that satisfied my desire to live (and appreciate) a more simple life. Shauna Ahern's blog Gluten-Free Girl was one of the first sites that caught my eye and I looked forward to each new post about her life in Seattle with her husband, who at the time was a chef at a local restaurant. It wasn't just stories about their lives, but the enticing recipes that kept me reading. It was on Shauna's blog that I learned about Molly Wizenberg (who was also living in Seattle) and started following her posts on Orangette. At the time, my husband and I were living in Nebraska and we both yearned to move to the Pacific Northwest, so I lived vicariously through these blogs with each mention of Seattle and the surrounding areas, recognizing specific places we'd been to while visiting my dad and stepmom (who were living on Lake Union on their boat during that time). 

As is the way of early blogs of the late 90s and early 2000s, and much to my disappointment, Gluten-Free Girl and Orangette are both now defunct. However, both women have fairly recent published works, which is exciting for this lover of foodie memoirs. Shauna's collection of essays (Enough) was released in 2019 and Molly's third memoir (The Fixed Stars) was published in 2020. 

I've had Wizenberg's first memoir on my shelf for about a dozen years and finally pulled it from that shelf and read it this month for Nonfiction November. I don't know why I waited so long; I loved everything about it! Each chapter reveals a little bit more about Molly's childhood, time spent in France, and life as a young woman living in Seattle. The anecdotes dovetail neatly with specific recipes, many of which I have marked to someday try. 

Wizenberg's writing is conversational, yet polished, and the pages practically turned themselves. It was easy to read a dozen or so stories each night, telling myself, "just one more." Now that I've finished, I can't wait to get a copy of Delancey, which continues with Molly and Brandon's story. (Delancey is also the name of their restaurant in Seattle.)

Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.

These are some of the recipes that I'd like to sample (listed for future reference):

• Burg's Potato Salad
• Blueberry-Raspberry Pound Cake
• Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger
• Burg's French Toast
• Chocolate Cupcakes with Bittersweet Glaze
• Hoosier Pie
• Fresh Ginger Cake with Caramelized Pears
• Dutch Baby Pancakes with Lemon and Sugar
• Jimmy's Pink Cookies
• Doron's Meatballs with Pine Nuts, Cilantro, and Golden Raisins
• Cider-Glazed Salmon
• French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon
• Butternut Soup with Pear, Cider, and Vanilla Bean
• Caramelized Cauliflower with Salsa Verde
• The Winning Hearts and Mind Cake

A Homemade Life is certain to appeal to readers who loved Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, Ann Hood's Kitchen Yarns, and Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone.

Looking Back - Tender at the Bone

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals. 

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

Nonfiction - Memoir

1999 Broadway Books (first published in 1998)

Read in January 2000

Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world. . . . If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people, and the love of tales well told. Beginning with Reichl's mother, the notorious food-poisoner known as the Queen of Mold, Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters who shaped her world and her tastes, from the gourmand Monsieur du Croix, who served Reichl her first soufflé, to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s. Spiced with Reichl's infectious humor and sprinkled with her favorite recipes, Tender at the Bone is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist's coming-of-age.

My Original Thoughts (2000):

Good, but not great. Entertaining and funny. I enjoyed the first half more than the second. Preferred reading about her childhood. I would like to try some of the recipes, though. 

My Current Thoughts:

This may have been one of my earliest encounters with a "foodie" memoir. I remember laughing out loud at some of Reichl's childhood stories, especially those centered around her mother's cooking skills. The only other book I've read by Reichl is her novel, Delicious, but I have Save Me the Plums in my audio queue and hope to read that later next month.

Dinner with Edward

Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Nonfiction - Memoir
2016 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Finished on November 25, 2019
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

When Isabel meets Edward, both are at a crossroads: he wants to follow his late wife to the grave, and she is ready to give up on love. Thinking she is merely helping Edward’s daughter--who lives far away and has asked her to check in on her nonagenarian dad in New York--Isabel has no idea that the man in the kitchen baking the sublime roast chicken and light-as-air apricot soufflé will end up changing her life.

As Edward and Isabel meet weekly for the glorious dinners that Edward prepares, he shares so much more than his recipes for apple galette or the perfect martini, or even his tips for deboning poultry. Edward is teaching Isabel the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything she does, to deconstruct her own life, cutting it back to the bone and examining the guts, no matter how messy that proves to be.

Dinner with Edward is a book about love and nourishment, and about how dinner with a friend can, in the words of M. F. K. Fisher, "sustain us against the hungers of the world."

It's been over three years since my blogging friend, JoAnn, of Gulfside Musing, reviewed this slim memoir (posted here) after picking it up at an independent bookstore while on vacation in Colorado. She was very thoughtful and sent me the book once she was finished, but it wasn't until a few days ago that I was finally inspired to take it down from the shelf and begin reading. (Thank you, Nonfiction November challenge!) JoAnn read the entire book on her flight home and I was able to read it in just one day, as well. I adore memoirs, particularly those with a culinary focus, and I was quickly drawn into Isabel's delightful stories about her unique friendship with Edward. 

Edward was neither a snob nor an insufferable foodie. He just liked to do things properly. He cared deeply about everything he created--whether it was the furniture in his living room or his writing. He had built and upholstered all of the furniture himself and wrote out his poems and short stories in longhand, patiently rewriting each draft on unlined white paper until he felt it was good enough to be typed by one of his daughters. He treated cooking much the same way, even though he had started doing it late in life, in his seventies. "Paula cooked for fifty-two years, and one day I just told her she'd done enough work, and now it was my turn," he said.

My only quibble is the lack of recipes. However, Edward states:

"It's just cooking, darling," he said, when I asked why he didn't use cookbooks. "I don't ever think of what I'm doing in terms of recipes. I just don't want to bother looking at recipes. To me, that's not cooking - being tied to a piece of paper."

Ah, but I am tied to a piece of paper. I need recipes! I guess I'll have to resort to Googling the various items listed in each menu and see what I can come up with. 

As with many of my favorite culinary memoirs, Dinner with Edward is not just about food, but also about life and the deep friendships and conversations shared over a delicious meal. Sure to appeal to fans of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and Ann Hood's Kitchen Yarns, Isabel Vincent's splendid memoir will not disappoint.

Thank you, JoAnn, for sharing this lovely little book with me. It has found a place next to my favorite memoirs and is one that I will pick up again when I am in need of a comfort read.

Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food

Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food by Ann Hood
Nonfiction - Memoir
2019 W.W. Norton & Company
Finished on March 17, 2019
Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother’s tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother’s special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood’s own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto, taught her children how to make their favorite potatoes, found hope in her daughter’s omelet after a divorce, and fell in love again—with both her husband and his foolproof chicken stock.

Hood tracks her lifelong journey in the kitchen with twenty-seven heartfelt essays, each accompanied by a recipe (or a few). In “Carbonara Quest,” searching for the perfect spaghetti helped her cope with lonely nights as a flight attendant. In the award-winning essay The Golden Silver Palate, she recounts the history of her fail-safe dinner party recipe for Chicken Marbella—and how it did fail her when she was falling in love. Hood’s simple, comforting recipes also include her mother’s famous meatballs, hearty Italian Beef Stew, classic Indiana Fried Chicken, the perfect grilled cheese, and a deliciously summery peach pie.

With Hood’s signature humor and tenderness, Kitchen Yarns spills tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

I loved everything about this highly readable collection of culinary essays by Ann Hood! I have so many Post-It flags marking recipes that I'd like to try that I've decided I need to own a copy of this book. Here's a sample of some of the recipes that have piqued my interested:

• Indiana Fried Chicken
• Glamourous Curried Chicken Salad
• Chicken Salad Veronique
• Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins
• My Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara
• Michael's Whiskey Sours
• French Scrambled Eggs
• Never-Fail Souffle (really more of a strata)
• Sam's Potatoes
• Mary's Peach Pie
• Jill's Tenderloin and Roasted Tomatoes
• Gogo's Swedish Meatballs with Ikea Gravy
• My Roast Chicken
• Michael's Overnight Chicken Stock
• Tortellini en Brodo
• Perfect Grilled Cheese
• Laurie Colwin's Tomato Pie

This list is mainly for my future reference, but it gives you an idea of the broad variety of recipes Hood includes in her memoir. Granted, most of the recipes are not exactly on a clean-eating menu, but we're all allowed to indulge once in awhile, right? Moderation in all things! 

A friend had given me Betty Crocker's Cookbook for my college graduation the year before, and I methodically worked my way through those recipes, ruining more dinners than I can count. Soon I was clipping recipes from the newspaper and buying other cookbooks--Moosewood, Laurel's Kitchen, The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. Over the next few years, I taught myself to cook. Sometimes I reached too far--stuffed pork chops with apple compote, whole wheat pizza that I could have used for a doorstop. But slowly I learned how to make an omelet and scramble eggs, use leftover chicken for curried chicken salad, make stock from the chicken bones.

I remember doing the same with my first cookbook, Sunset: Easy Basics for Good Cooking, which I wrote about here.

A few favorite passages:

I realized as, over the years, I wrote essays about food--Laurie Colwin's Tomato Pie, my father's mac and cheese--that as M.F.K. Fisher said, writing about food is really writing about love. When I write an essay about food, I am really uncovering something deeper in my life--loss, family, confusion, growing up, growing away from what I knew, returning, grief, joy, and, yes, love.

and

I have read that Virginia Woolf's earliest memory is of a close-up view of the pattern of flowers on her mother's dress on a train trip to St. Ives. The Scottish poet Edwin Muir's first memory was of his gold-and-scarlet baptism suit. American historian Henry Adams remembered the yellow of a kitchen bathed in sunlight. Tolstoy's first memory is of being swaddled and crying out for freedom. Me, I remember fried chicken.

I love Hood's writing and conversational tone, which brought a tear to my eye as often as it made me laugh out loud. Her final essay about Laurie Colwin's Tomato Pie had my eyes brimming with tears and I hugged the book to my chest as I read the final page. Kitchen Yarns is as delightful as Laurie Colwin's culinary memoir, Home Cooking, which I wrote about here and they both belong on my keeper shelf for future readings.

My Life in France

My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
Nonfiction
2006 Anchor Books
Finished on July 22, 2018
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

The bestselling story of Julia's years in France--and the basis for Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams--in her own words.

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this best-selling memoir, she was not always a master chef. 

Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the U.S. Information Service, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia's unforgettable story--struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took the Childs across the globe--unfolds with the spirit so key to Julia's success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of America's most endearing personalities of the last fifty years.

I've had this book on my shelf for several years (probably since I first saw the movie Julie & Julia) and finally got around to reading it for the Nonfiction November challenge. I don't know if it's because I recently watched the movie for the second time or if Child's abrupt writing style (with a lack of segues between anecdotes) spoiled the read, but I didn't become fully engaged in the book until the details about writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared. At that point, I was hooked and very interested!

Life at La Peetch:

After moving around the world for so long, I was able to work in most places, but nowhere was I more productive than in our little kitchen at La Peetch. From mid-December 1966 through mid-June 1967, Paul and I holed ourselves up there, far from the noise and distraction of the U.S.A.  Bumping up the rutted driveway, we were struck, once again, by what Paul termed "the Reverse Hornet-Sting" of the place--the shockingly fresh and inspirational jolt we got from our lovely hideaway. It was the cool, early-morning layers of fog in the valleys; Esterel's volcanic mountains jutting up out of the glittering sea; the warming Provencal sun and bright-blue sky; the odor of earth and cow dung and burning grapevine prunings; the colorful violets and irises and mimosas; the olives blackening; the sound of little owls talking back and forth; the sea-bottom taste of Belon oysters; the noisy fun of the marketplace; the deeply quiet, sparkling nights with a crescent moon hanging overhead like a lamp. What a place! The very opposite of a hornet's sting, indeed.

I plan to read the other two books I own about Julia (As Always, Julia edited by Joan Reardon and Dearie by Bob Spitz), but My Life in France is not one I'll read again.

Keeping the Feast

Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini
Nonfiction - Memoir
2010 Riverhead Books
Finished on July 28, 2016
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met as foreign correspondents in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But not even a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred away from their Italian paradise when John was shot and nearly killed on the job. The period of physical and mental suffering that followed marked the abrupt end of what they'd known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.

They followed their instincts and returned to the place they loved, Italy, and there they found a lifeline of sorts. As John struggled to regain his health and Paula reexamined her assumptions about illness and recovery, it was food and its rituals--the daily shopping, preparing, sharing, and memory of food--that kept them moving forward. Food became a symbol of the family's innate desire to survive, to accept, and to celebrate what fell its way.

Keeping the Feast is an inspiring story of what happens when tragedy strikes a previously happy marriage and a couple must fight to find its bearings. It is a testament to the extraordinary sustaining powers of food and love, to the healing that can come from the simple rituals of life, even during life's biggest challenges, and to the stubborn belief that there is always an afterward, always hope.

My dear friend Meredith sent me this book waaaay back in 2010. I was so excited to read it, but as we all know, reading is driven by moods and for whatever reason, this book didn't call out to me as quickly as I thought it would. It languished in the bookcase until I finally decided the time was right. It was summertime and I was eager for some armchair travel, so I dove in and was quickly transported to Italy.

We moved into a small apartment near the Tiber on one of those golden October days so perfect that you could never imagine willingly leaving the city again. Every morning I would walk down our narrow street toward the hubbub of Campo dei Fiori, where the flower sellers, the fruit vendors, the vegetable sellers, the fishmongers, the mushroom lady, the bread shop, the lamb and chicken lady, the pork butcher, the notions man, the meat vans, the olive and herbs vendors, the newspaper kiosk, the housewares stand, and the roving garlic salesmen from Bangladesh were always open for business no matter how early I awakened.

Morning after morning for an entire year, I walked to the Campo before most people were up. Noisy, honking, shouting Rome is almost quiet at that hour, and what began as a simple routine soon took on the trappings of ritual. I woke up early, dressed, walked out the door and over to the Campo. I would buy a shiny, plump purple-black eggplant. Or a handful of slender green beans, or fresh and young you could eat them raw. I brought three golden pear, or a heavy bunch of fat, green grapes. I bought a few slices of Milanese salami, a bit of veal. I bought a thin slab of creamy gorgonzola, to spread on crusty, still-warm bread. I bought milk, yogurt, butter, and eggs, and finally the newspapers. Then I would head home, stopping in the tiny church of Santa Brigida, which lay halfway between the Campo and our apartment. The first few months, I would rest my bundles on the cold marble floor, kneel for a moment at the back of the church under the gaze of a painted Madonna, and try not to cry. Months later, I would still kneel for a moment in the same spot, but when I felt the tears coming, I'd make a fist and pound once or twice on the pew in front of me. It made a fitting, hollow sound in the almost empty church. Then I would collect my bundles and continue my short walk home.

I needed both parts of the ritual, the buying of the food and the stopping in the church. We all must eat, and there is nothing more normal than buying the food that keeps us alive. When I performed the ritual of buying our daily bread, the world seemed more normal. Pounding a pew a few minutes later brought home how far from normal I still felt.

Buttarini's memoir isn't just about food and living in Italy. It's about a terrible act of violence. I found myself nodding in agreement.

Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent passerby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don't happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn't been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family's life savings. Shocks like these hammer the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.

But she does write some mouth-watering passages about food that had me reaching for my Post-It notes and longing to move to Italy!

John and I quickly fell into a routine of meeting Joseph on the terrace that overlooked the lake to eat our meals together. We started around eight, with thick slices of crusty country bread, with butter and jams from the garden's fruit trees, perhaps a bit of cheese or yogurt with honey from the hives that stood below the house, and mugs of strong, milky tea. After working in the garden or doing other small chores, we met again for "elevenses," milky coffee and a couple of simple, store-bought cookies, so we could keep our hunger at bay till the main midday meal about one p.m. I happily took on the cooking: a simple pasta or risotto to start; then a bit of sauteed veal or chicken and a vegetable from the garden; a green salad tossed with olive oil, lemon, and sugar--as Joseph liked it--then fruit, followed by the inevitable siesta.

Final Thoughts:

I love a good foodie memoir, but about halfway into this book, I began to lose interest. Hating to give up on a book that so many of my friends raved about, I pushed on, hoping to finish with at least a 3-star rating. I enjoyed the descriptions of the food and meals shared with family and friends, but Keeping the Feast is such a bleak story. The author was beaten, her husband shot, her mother suffered from depression and then her husband dealt with the same, and on and on it goes. I decided to take a break for about a month, but after that I didn't have any desire to finish the book. So much for a 3-star rating.

Home Cooking

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
Nonfiction - Culinary Essays/Memoir
1988 Perennial (HarperCollins)
Finished on 1/24/10
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)






Publisher's Blurb

Share the unsurpassed pleasures of discovering, cooking, and eating good, simple food with this beloved book. Equal parts cookbook and memoir, Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking combines her insightful, good-humored writing style with her lifelong passion for wonderful cuisine in essays such as "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir," and "Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea." Home Cooking is truly a feast for body and soul.

I love everything about cooking: Perusing the glossy pages of culinary magazines; browsing through gorgeous cookbooks with their tantalizing recipes and mouthwatering photographs; following food blogs such as Dine & Dish, Gluten-Free Girl, Orangette, and Tasty Kitchen; fantasizing about remodeling our ancient kitchen; experimenting with new ingredients or with recipes I'd previously considered too intimidating to try; and, of course, preparing my favorite dishes for my family and friends. Over the years, I've also found a passion for culinary writing (fiction & nonfiction). The School of Essential Ingredients, In Defense of Food, Julie & Julia, and The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry were among my favorites in recent years. And now, thanks to Nan and Marcia, I've discovered another great book about cooking. Beginning with the cheerful cover art, I fell in love with Laurie Colwin's collection of essays! My book is overflowing with sticky notes, many of which will remain until I've had a chance to sample the tempting recipes; many will remain forever, marking a favorite passage, such as this, from the Foreword:

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. People who like to cook like to talk about food. Plain old cooks (as opposed to the geniuses in fancy restaurants) tend to be friendly. After all, without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

Isn't this the truth! My husband and I belong to a progressive dinner party group and it's always great fun to see what everyone has prepared for their contribution to the evening's menu. It's not just about getting together and sharing a good meal and fine wine, but discovering new favorites such as bison steaks or pistachio-encrusted sea bass.

I don't consider myself a very craftsy person. I don't like to sew and never really learned how to knit or crochet. I've completed one cross-stitch project in my lifetime (years ago, before my eyesight was ever an issue) and while I'd love to learn to quilt, I know I don't have the time or patience to start in on something like that right now. Maybe when I'm not working. However, I do consider my passion for cooking a form of creativity. I can remember the first time I actually read a recipe and was able to visualize the process, how the ingredients would blend together and whether it would turn out to be something delicious or simply edible. As I became more experienced in the kitchen, I found myself substituting ingredients and seasonings with an instinctive knowledge of what might improve the recipe.

Home Cooking is a blend of anecdotes and recipes, sprinkled with Colwin's wry humor. I savored each and every essay and as the final pages drew near, I knew I wanted to buy a copy of More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. I also know I'd like to read her novels, which I hear are very good, too.

On eating alone:

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

As long as I have something to read, I don't usually mind eating alone. However, I can't say that I've ever eaten anything quite as strange as Colwin describes. I usually opt for the quick and easy: mashed avocado and mayo on toast or fried eggs and toast or if I'm in the mood for pasta, I'll fix a batch of Chicken Parmesan.

On frying chicken:

...You have now made perfect fried chicken.

And you have suffered. There are many disagreeable things about frying chicken. No matter how careful you are, flour gets all over everything and oil splatters far beyond the stove. It is impossible to fry chicken without burning yourself at least once. For about twenty-four hours your house smells like fried chicken. This is nice only during dinner and then begins to pall. Waking up to the smell of cooking fat is not wonderful.

Furthermore, frying chicken is just about the most boring thing you can do. You can't read while you do it. Music is drowned out by constant sizzling. Finally, as you fry you are consumed with the realization that fried food is terrible for you, even if you serve it only four times a year.

But the rewards are many, and when you appear with your platter your family and friends greet you with cries of happiness. Soon your table is full of ecstatic eaters, including, if you are lucky, some delirious Europeans—the British are especially impressed by fried chicken. As the cook you get to take the pieces you like best. As for me, I snag the backs, those most neglected and delectable bits, and I do it without a trace of remorse. After all, I did the cooking.

Not only have you mastered a true American folk tradition, but you know that next time will be even better.

Like Colwin, I initially lacked confidence when it came to baking bread:

It took me a long time to get around to baking a loaf of bread, and when I finally did, I stayed home all day to do it. It seemed such a mysterious and intimidating process. What was "kneading" and how did you do it? What happened if the bread didn't rise? If it rose too much? Suppose it got in the way of a draft? The recipes I read assumed a familiarity I did not possess, but I figured it couldn't be all that difficult since people had been baking bread since man began. But to put me at ease, I called in a more experienced friend to help me.

On grilling:

Everywhere in America people are lighting their grills. They begin in spring, on the first balmy evening. I happen to live across the street from a theological seminary whose students come from all over. I know it is spring not by the first robin but by the first barbecue across the street on the seminary lawn. That first whiff of lighter fluid and smoke is my herald, and led one of my friends to ask: "What is it about Episcopalians, do you think? Is it in their genes to barbecue?"

On experimentation:

Of course there is a motto here: always try everything even if it turns out to be a dud. We learn by doing. If you never stuff a chicken with pate, you will never know that it is an unwise thing to do, and if you never buy zucchini flowers you will never know that you are missing one of the glories of life.

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen is a charming collection of essays (and quaint illustrations by Anna Shapiro) that would appeal to any lover of food and domesticity. Colwin's voice is like that of a close friend, full of warmth and humor, chatting about topics ranging from Feeding the Fussy and Kitchen Horrors to Friday Night Supper and Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir. What a shame this talented author is no longer with us. She died unexpectedly of heart failure in 1992 at the age of 48.

See what other bloggers have to say about Home Cooking:

As I began reading Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin, I could feel an ache in my heart. This is a particular form of ache, one that happens only when I read an author for the first time, an author whose work I love and to whom I feel a deep affinity, and this author is dead. I want Laurie Colwin to be alive. I want to email her or call her up and tell her that I think we could be friends. I also want to tell her that things have changed since 1988, and so many thoughts she had about food have now become the norm, popular, even fashionable. (Nan of Letters From a Hill Farm)

With so many new books waiting patiently to be read, it's easy to forget the great reading pleasures of an author read and enjoyed many years ago. My first introduction to Laurie Colwin was her book Home Cooking. A couple of years ago, I read and posted my thoughts on Happy All the Time, which I repeat here. If you're at all enamoured of what I call "interior" books--books rich with descriptions of rooms, dishes, and pleasant vignettes--I urge you to pick up one of Ms. Colwin's reading escapes. (Marcia of Owl's Feathers)

Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen is an absolutely delightful food memoir. She's funny, she's sarcastic, she knows what she likes and she's not afraid to eat it. I don't even know that I so much plan to cook any of her recipes - the writing here is what appealed to me. (Tara of Books and Cooks)