Book Review: A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg

I just finished a charming book - A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg.   I was introduced to Wizenberg's writing through Bon Appétit where she is a regular contributor, but she is also the author of the blog, Orangette.

The book is a story of her life told through her love of food and cooking.  It is in the same format as her blog – favorite recipes paired with personal reflections, but with a much tighter narrative.  Without straining for connections, Wizenberg describes how food has been woven into her personal experiences: the death of her father, her decision to bypass a career in academia, young romances, and her marriage.  Some of these reflections are clearly difficult and you almost sense a great need on her part to tell the story.

Wizenberg draws you in and makes you feel a part of the story.  However, some of the chapters are a bit too short and don’t provide much substance or deepen our understanding of the author.  I left those sections not entirely satisfied with the happily ever after tone. 

I found most of the memoir to be relatable to the under-40 crowd and I’m intrigued by most of the 50 recipes.  As it turns out, my mother is reading it now, too, and thinks it is entertaining.  Overall, the book is a pleasant, quick read that would be a nice treat over a weekend.

Book Review: Talking with My Mouth Full

 In Talking with My Mouth Full, Bonny Wolf, food commentator for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday,  writes about regional and family food traditions.  She includes stories about birthday cakes and dinner parties, Jell-O and meatloaf, crabcakes and Bundt cakes. Each chapter has recipes used by the author and her family and friends.

Her stories are not just about what people eat, but why they eat: for comfort and companionship; to nurture; to mark the seasons and to celebrate important events; and to connect with family and friends and with ancestors.

While she doesn’t really break any new ground, her light-hearted essays make her kitchen experiences come alive for the reader. You feel her enthusiasm for kugel, wild rice, popovers, and pickled antipasto. She is well-traveled, but isn’t a food snob and still appreciates simple, traditional, regional cuisine.  I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of Mid-Atlantic traditions and the public markets in Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland.  I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to experience them first-hand.  The only essay in which I felt a bit of defensiveness toward was the chapter on Texas cuisine, but it didn’t lessen my overall enjoyment of the book.

Wolf provides some helpful instructional pieces, as well, on how to recover from dinner parties gone astray and how to roast chicken.  It was easy to relate to these common issues, and she makes them seem very manageable.

I recommend you check out the book.  I think you will find both her writing and recipes refreshingly accessible.

Book Review: How to Pick a Peach

I grew up eating fruits and vegetables from our family gardens or from a local farmer's market. Frankly, it spoiled me.  My palate knows what a vegetable should taste like and knows how good freshly picked fruit can be.  Because of that lucky experience, I've never really been satisfied with produce from the grocery store. Russ Parson's How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor From Farm to Table helps me understand why.

Parsons, food editor for the LA Times, explains the reasoning behind buying produce locally and in-season.  He details the conflict between growing produce for sturdiness in shipping instead of flavor, and it is clear what we are missing in the grocery stores.  Within commercial agriculture the author writes, "there are significant rewards for growing more fruit, but there are precious few for growing better fruit."  Farmers who have the talent to grow flavorful produce and put in the effort to keep them that way, are almost forced to go outside the normal supply chain, usually farmers' markets to sell directly to the consumer.

The book doesn't include every single fruit or vegetable, but it hits on good number of them.  Organized by season, the book includes an interesting short history on each item and describes various farming trends.  I was intrigued that several examples of marketplace success of imported fruit altered how our domestic farmers grew some types of produce, especially tomatoes and apples.  There is still hope for folks who can't buy directly from the farmer.

Parsons helps arm his readers with some basic information about how to choose produce, how to store them once they are home, and then shares suggestions on basic preparation. I appreciated understanding the science behind how certain growing,  storing, and cooking methods contribute to the flavor and texture of my food.

If you start with good ingredients you can finish with great tasting food.  This book was fun to read and will serve me well as a useful reference.  I'm ready to hit the farmers' markets and pick-your-own farms, but I'm also willing to start telling grocery produce managers what I want to see.  I hope you'll join me.

Book Review: United States of Arugula

Have you read this? 

Never before has a civilization had so much access to so great a variety of foodstuffs. David Kamp knows how we came to be here. In The United States of Arugula: How We Became A Gourmet Nation, Kamp examines how we went from a nation of Jell-O salads and Shake N’Bake to the gourmet-loving country we are today.

The United States of Arugula chronicles America's biggest and most influential culinary personalities and describes the dramatically changes to the landscape of American food. The stars of the story are food pioneers Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Julia Child, or as he refers to them, “the Big Three”. Kamp supplies an engaging account of their careers and explains how they shaped much of what we know of cooking today. Each paved the way for those who followed - Child as the early TV pioneer who made French-style cooking accessible to housewives across the country; Beard as the author of several best-selling cookbooks, some still considered definitive; and Claiborne as the first food critic for the New York Times and also a cookbook author - all redefining our views of gastronomy over the years.

Kamp continues the attention on the personalities that dominate the culinary world with several pages on Alice Waters and her focus on fresh and seasonal cuisine that created a shift from technique to ingredients. The revolution she started with her menus at the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant also induced a perceptual geographic shift from the East to the West Coast, and contributed to organic produce and free-range chickens entering our collective conversations. We also learn how Whole Foods, Zabar's, Dean & DeLuca, and Williams Sonoma got started and find out that Peet’s Coffee in the Bay Area led to Starbucks across the country. Chefs Jeremiah Tower, Thomas Keller, and Wolfgang Puck make cameo appearances.

I most enjoyed the book when Kamp makes parallels between culinary trends and the consumerism that has evolved since World War II. He shows how the prevailing French influence was not accidental, as it came about with the influx of kitchen workers from France after the war and continues today to what kitchenware we purchase. Leveraging the writings of others who recognized aspects of the same phenomenon, the author accurately shows how food has become a status symbol on our culture for the good life to which we aspire.

In the book's final section, the advent of the Food Network is seen as a touchstone for this pervasive thinking, as a new set of celebrity chefs - Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Rachael Ray among them - instruct us on what we should be doing to maximize our enjoyment of cooking in the kitchen.

This is certainly a fun read for any foodie, and author David Kamp, a writer who contributes to Vanity Fair and GQ, does an entertaining job of providing both a historical perspective and a current look at the culinary industry.