Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell. Little, Brown & Company, 2005
I never thought I’d have any interest in this book or movie, but one day it was on TV and I watched it and really liked it. So when I found the book, I figured, well, the book is always better than the movie, I grabbed it. Sadly, my presumption turned out ( Read more... )

After snow for a couple of days, mostly sunny today. Tim rototilled the vegetable garden, and I'm sure he'll be hurting tomorrow. Or in the middle of the night, probably. I dug a bunch of clumps of grass out of the flower garden; the soil is just perfect right now. Tim started some kim chee, and made some beef jerky. I handwashed a bunch of scarves ( Read more... )

Woke up to snow this morning. That was thrilling. It's gone now, though ( Read more... )

Got all three batches of cookies done today. Amazing how long it took! It wouldn't take so long in a kitchen a little larger- not enough counter room to roll dough out, so it has to be done in small amounts at a time. Bleh. Ginger trees and stars, sugar cookies with colored sugar on them in trees, stars, and snowflakes, and tree and wreath shaped ( Read more... )

Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World, by Jeff Gordinier. Tim Duggin Books, 2019Author Gordinier, Esquire food and drink editor, was having a bit of a mid-life crisis. His marriage had just ended, and he was restless and depressed. Then Rene Redzepi, owner of world famous (but I’m not enough of a ( Read more... )

Burn the Place: A Memoir, by Iliana Regan. Midway Books, 2019Iliana Regan is the owner of the Michelin Star restaurant “Elizabeth”, named for her sister who died in a jail holding cell. She was exposed to food a lot as a child- they lived on a farm and grew, foraged, baked, and preserved most of their food, but until the point her mother rebelled ( Read more... )

The Flavor Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook, by Niki Segnit. Bloomsbury, 2010 This is a book about food, and has recipes in it, but it’s not a cookbook as one usually thinks of it. The author set out to classify all the possible flavor elements, describe them, and list the foods that contained them. She lists flavors ( Read more... )

The Gannet’s Gastronomic Miscellany, by Killian Fox. Hachette Book Group, 2018
This is an enjoyable little book about food. It’s trivia that spans the millenniums as well as the world. There is no organization (and no table of contents or index); you can open it anywhere and read a bit anywhere. It’s just little tidbits of info. A great bathroom/ ( Read more... )

Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking, by Linda Civitello. Heartland FoodWays, 2017 Before there baking powder was invented, there were no fluffy cakes, no cookies, no muffins, no biscuits, and no quick breads. Everything had to be leavened with yeast, and since there was no dried yeast available at the grocery ( Read more... )

The Devil’s Feast, by M.J. Carter. Putnam, 2017 In 1842 London, Captain William Avery finds himself inadvertently drawn into a possible murder investigation. At the end of a fantastic meal by celebrity chef Alexis Soyer at the Reform Club in the chef’s own rooms, one man sickens and dies. At first glance it looks like cholera, but a closer look at ( Read more... )