Delicious eats and food for thought

I really love the food documentaries on Netflix.  I enjoyed The Chef's Table, I really liked For Grace, and I am sure I will eat up (haha, pun intended) whatever else Netflix recommends in my queue.

I don't actually do a lot of food-related reading, though.  I am not sure why.  Maybe I miss the visuals of the beautiful dishes or the sounds of pots clanging, meat sizzling, knives chopping.

I have never been to any of Marcus Samuelsson's restaurants before, though I have used his recipe for a garam masala pumpkin tart for Thanksgiving over the past few years.  I really like Samuelsson's cooking in theory, though I have not experienced it in practice.  Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, grew up in Sweden, worked in restaurants around Europe and on the sea, and then moved to New York.  His cooking style draws from all of his global experiences and tastes; hence, he has a recipe for garam masala pumpkin pie, melding the tastes of traditional American home-cooking with Indian spices.  I love taking tastes that don't often go together and making them work, making something new and different.  In a dorky and idealistic way, I feel like if people can see how their tastes are not so different and can complement each other to make stronger whole, then maybe it will help people see past their bigger and more philosophical differences, too.

Yes, Chef is Marcus Samuelsson's book about his life.  In many ways, it's pretty typical of what you would expect from a chef.  He didn't like school, he preferred being in the kitchen with his grandmother.  He went to culinary school and worked harder and longer and better than anyone else.  He was lucky enough to get a big break at a well-known restaurant, and from there he was off, with a few bumps and bruises along the way.

But in addition to that, Samuelsson shares some personal insights as well.  For example, he grew up very dark-skinned in a very light-skinned environment.  He faced overt and more subtle racism in the kitchen almost everywhere he went.  A couple of times, he would be offered a job on paper but then show up for work and be told that there was no place for him.  He talks a lot about how few minorities are in the kitchens of high-end restaurants, how few women, too.  And how he is doing his part, working very hard to give people the opportunities that he often did not receive while he was training.  Samuelsson never makes race or racism the dominant part of his narrative, but it clearly had a huge impact on his training and the way he learned to cook, and I think he addresses it really well.  It's also clear just how much it has influenced every aspect of his cooking; he draws from so many different food cultures to create his recipes.

What's also obvious in this book is that being a chef is really hard and a ton of work.  It takes a huge personal toll on people.  Samuelsson missed both his grandmother's and his father's funerals because of work.  He does not spend a lot of time being introspective about this, but it is hard to imagine.  He also has a daughter, and for about the first 15 years of her life, he never made any attempt to contact her or get to know her.  Obviously, Samuelsson had to deal with a lot of personal things and decisions as he grew and matured; while readers don't get a huge amount of insight into these very personal motivations and decisions, it's clear that he still struggles with them.

Samuelsson makes no secret that he enjoyed going out, having fun, meeting people and spending time with women.  He also clearly has a ton of confidence in his skill and his decisions.  He can sometimes sound arrogant, but I think it is just honesty.  And it's hard not to love anyone who serves a meal at the White House and then comes home to Harlem and makes the exact same meal for his teenaged next-door neighbor and all her best friends.  That was just lovely.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and now I really want to visit Samuelsson's restaurant in Harlem the next time I am in New York City!  Here's a link to Red Rooster's website in case you want to see the fusion menu he has on there, too.

Reviewitas - Communist pigs (literally) and hormonal cows

There's not much I can say about Animal Farm that hasn't already been said.  It is one of those books that everyone knows and references.  And probably reads, since it's quite short.  And as I make my way at 2X speed through dozens of audiobooks a year on my agonizingly long commute to work, I figured I should make more of an effort to read the classics.  (Next up:  The Jungle.)

So, Animal Farm.  A world-famous satire about farm animals that break the shackles of the humans that enslaved them, only to fall under the power of the pigs.

I can understand this book's power in the post-WWII era, when communism was a huge threat to western power.  And it was a very powerful read.  I knew exactly how it would end, and even as we hurtled inevitably towards that ending, the book kept my interest the whole way through.  The novel is completely scathing in its view of communism.

But there's a lot that makes sense for the world everywhere, too.  For example, as the story continues, the pigs rewrite history and insist that the other animals must not remember events correctly.  And the animals, confused and overworked, assume that they must have misremembered what happened.  And so history is rewritten.  It seems so easy, and the impact is terrifying.

I am glad I finally read this book.  It was very low on the time commitment scale, and it's so obviously satirical and allegorical that you can easily understand the message Orwell is trying to send.  Recommended if you want to beef up your classics shelf and understand part of the red scare that infected so many people in the 50s and 60s; when viewed through that lens, Orwell seems quite prescient.

 In addition to trying to read more classics on my commute, I am also trying to read more diversely.  Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats fit the bill, and as I had recently heard about her A Tale for the Time Being, I figured I could start with her backlist.

My Year of Meats is about two women.  Jane Takagi-Little is a documentarian on assignment to film a series of shows for a Japanese audience.  The show is called My American Wife and it is supposed to showcase small-town American culture while providing the Japanese with new recipe ideas on how to cook American meat.  Akiko Ueno is one of the Japanese housewives who watches the show.  A victim of domestic violence, Akiko learns more and more about herself as she watches the show and finally gains the confidence she needs to make a decision for herself.

Oh, and there's a lot about dangerous hormones in the American meat industry.  A lot about dangerous meat hormones.

I am glad I read this in audiobook form because the narrator was really fantastic and engaging.  She managed to make a lot of horrible information about birth defects and cancer caused by eating factory-farmed meat easily digestible (pun unintended) and kept me interested in the story and the characters the whole way through.  I really liked spending time with Jane and Akiko and all of the other women that Jane interviewed.  In many ways, this book was a fun journey through middle America in the 1990s, and it's fascinating to see just how much the world has changed in so short a time.  For example, everyone communited via fax, and I don't know many people who do anything like that any more.  Also, all of Jane's recording was done on VHS.

However, I thought there was a pretty jarring disconnect between the story about My American Wife and Jane and Akiko's lives and the very detailed information about growth hormones in American beef.  It's not that I didn't value the information.  I do.  I don't eat beef, but I have read enough about the American factory farm method of making fruit, vegetables and all sorts of poultry and meat to become much more pro-active and informed about the food I purchase.  But I read Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver for that information.  I don't really expect so much of it to come into play in a novel.  It often felt as though Ozeki was using her novel as a vehicle to get across information about the meat industry.  I understand, really - so many people are uninformed about the food systems and it's scary how much of an impact these things can have on your life and your health and you don't even know.  But... it just wasn't what I was looking for in this book.

Still, the writing and the characters were very interesting and the narrator was fantastic, so I'm glad to have discovered Ozeki and look forward to reading more by her.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford, first interested me because I really enjoyed his other book, Among the Thugs, in which he followed racist hooligan English soccer fans around Europe.  Buford has a fantastic way of immersing himself in a situation to understand what it feels like for people who make their lives doing something, but then he's able to step outside the box and share his insights with those of us on the sidelines in a very engaging, thoroughly entertaining way.

Heat has been on my bookshelf for a few years now, but I quite frankly don't know that I'd ever get around to reading it if it wasn't available as an audiobook download.  It's one of those books that sounded so good at the time  (Food!  Kitchens!  Drama!) but was never compelling enough to pull down off the shelf.  But when you get through about an audiobook a week (if not more than that), then it's much easier to commit to reading a book you're unsure about because, well, you have to do something during that commute.  And so I finally read Heat, and I'm quite happy that I read it as an audiobook.

What do tulips have in common with marijuana?

Finally, I borrowed an audiobook version of a book I already had on my TBR pile!  Hooray for me!  That lucky book was The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan, and I'm really quite glad that I borrowed it.  This is one of those books that I got soon after discovering farmers' markets and reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and while I always knew I wanted to read it eventually, I never wanted to read it RIGHT NOW.  But when you go through an audiobook every week or so, the pickings can get slim fairly quickly.  It's easy to see everything on your quite extensive wish list and say "Meh" to it all.  When that happens, I tend to force myself into reading a book I already own because, well, it's as good a way to choose a book as any!

So I can't say The Botany of Desire was chosen by me for any wonderfully momentous occasion.  But I really enjoyed the whole book, and I am glad now that I've not pruned it from my shelves at all in the last 3.5 years while it sat unread.

The Botany of Desire is a book about evolution and artificial selection.  But instead of assuming that it's humans that do the selecting and the domesticating, Pollan thinks about it from the plant's POV.  All living things have a natural desire to pro-create; therefore, plants must have just as much a stake in their being domesticated as humans do, as it makes it a lot easier for them to thrive if someone is dedicated to taking care of them.  It's an excellent premise (and, no doubt, is part of the reason I picked this book up 3.5 years ago), and Pollan's storytelling is top-notch.  There is just something so great about books that combine science and history and social relevance, particularly when they are written well, and Michael Pollan does it REALLY well.  So does Charles C. Mann.  I assume Carl Zimmer is much the same.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Michael Moss' book Salt Sugar Fat:  How the Food Giants Hooked Us has gotten a LOT of attention in my world since it came out.  Full disclosure:  I work in the processed foods industry and my company gets quite a bit of coverage in this book.

Salt Sugar Fat is about much more than the blurb lets on, but the blurb is pretty good, so I'm going to share it here (a truncated version):

Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century—including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research.

The Delicious Life of Lucy Knisley

Relish:  My Life in the Kitchen is a memoir in comic form about the author's life experiences with food.  I read it over the course of a couple of nights and really enjoyed it - though I highly suggest you read it when you have delicious food in the house and not when you are in the midst of a grocery shopping drought like me.  It's a little depressing to read a book about the joys of cooking and eating well when you yourself are eating Morningstar buffalo wings and whatever you can salvage from a bag of green beans.

But other people plan their grocery shopping better than I do!  And Knisley does spend some of her book defending the joys of fast food restaurants and Ramen soup, so  I didn't feel so bad.

And honestly, Knisley is such a bright and cheerful person who draws such bright and cheerful (and colorful!) pictures and shares such bright and cheerful food stories that it's impossible to feel bad when reading this book.  I'm a big food lover myself, so I can identify with Knisley's inability to separate places she's visited from the food she's eaten while there.  And the way she talks about potluck dinners and having friends over to share a meal -  I absolutely agree with her, it's one of my favorite things in the world to have or attend a dinner party with close friends.

Musings: Fannie's Last Supper

Fannie's Last Supper:  Re-Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook is one of those books in the new-ish "food writing" genre.  It's written by chef Christopher Kimball of America's Test Kitchen about... well, recreating a meal from a Victorian era cookbook.

Except that he doesn't actually re-create a meal based on Fannie Farmer's best-selling American cookbook.  Nope.  He uses her recipes as a base, alters them pretty substantially, and then cooks them for a dinner party.  So while he shares a lot of interesting facts about cooking and its evolution, and about eating and the Victorian era... he doesn't actually deliver on the title of his book.

TSS: The good old days?

I’ve always loved history and often daydream about what it might be like to live in a different era.  People put more effort into their appearance, there was a sense of occasion for almost everything, the food was fresher.  People never claimed to be bored.  Any technological advance was greeted with awe.  It isn’t so much that I wanted to live in the past because I thought people had better manners or because life was grander- I’m not that naïve.  But I feel people these days are so inured to things.  There is no sense of astonishment or wonder.  When technology advances, we greet it with equanimity- we expect it.  But what must it have been like to see a train for the first time?  To first use a phone and talk to a loved one?  How did it feel to hear news of the first successful manned flight?  Or to hear Neil Armstrong talk from the moon?  I just wish sometimes that people today had that amazement factor.

And as I’ve become more and more into cooking and food, I really just want to go back in time a bit to see what it was like to eat.  I’ve been reading the book Fannie’s Last Supper (review coming soon), which is about a modern chef who tries to recreate a 12-course Victorian dinner from a cookbook written in 1896.  Glorious! I thought.  Now I can see what real cooking is like.

Review: Cooking for Kings - The Life of Antonin Careme

Cover via Amazon

I really enjoyed Ian Kelly's biography of Beau Brummell when I read it in 2006 and so when I saw Cooking for Kings:  The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef soon after reading Brummell, I snatched it up.  And then let it languish on my shelf for over three years before finally picking it up to read.  But every book has its day and I've finally met the French culinary genius!
This is a fairly short biography- only 225 pages, and several of those pages are full of illustrations.  There is an extensive list of recipes at the back of the book, all of which Careme detailed in his many cookbooks.


The biography portion of the book is actually quite scant on details of Careme's life.  No one knows exactly when he was born, why he chose to marry who he married, why his daughter felt such animosity towards him or what his private thoughts on his many illustrious employers are.  All we know is that Careme started in the slums, rose through patisserie shops during the French Revolution, became a general chef who commanded the attention of such august personages as Bonaparte, the Prince Regent, Talleyrand, the Russian Tsar and the Rothschilds.  He invented the chef's hat.  And souffle.  He also was one of the first chefs to write his recipes down and share them with people- and to make a great deal of money by doing so.  Sounds like he must have had a pretty fascinating life, right?  But he is mum on his relationships with employers and mum on a great deal of subjects besides his own recipes.  So... what we get in the biography is a list of menus, some interesting anecdotal information on his employers and a lot of food commentary.  While I personally love looking at historic menus and reading detailed food descriptions, I wish that there was more information about Careme himself.

CSN Review: Magefesa Cookware Set

Some weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd be reviewing a set of cookware that I received from CSN.com.  Well, now is the time!  I will be reviewing the Magefesa Classic Danubio Cookware set and the Le Creuset 9" and 5" baking dishes.


As soon as I put the order in for the Le Creuset dishes, I regretted getting them in a light blue (Carribbean) rather than the Dijon yellow one that would complement the dark blue of my pots better.  But oh, well!  Those Le Creusets last forever, so I guess I can get them in whatever color I want :-)

I had a few future classmates over to my parents' house for an authentic Indian dinner last weekend.  My mom and I used the opportunity to test out the new Danubio set.  It's a non-stick set (take note if you have serious worries about that!), and it is very easy to hold and maneuver.  The handles stick out quite a ways from the main dish, but they still get pretty hot when you're cooking.  But they are easy to grip and thus make it a lot easier to flip the dish or turn it around.  The dish also heats up very quickly.  I was caught off guard by that and somewhat burned my soybeans and spinach!  But it all came out well in the end.  The only slight complaint I have about this set is that the blue on the handles does not match perfectly with the blue of the dishes.  The handles are a lighter blue than the dish itself.

This set (a frying pan, a saucepan, a casserole pot and a stew pot) is just the right size for me to take with me to school in a month.  I think for the most part, it will be enough for me to cook what I need for my brother and I.  I am taking an extra few dishes, but that's just to be on the safe side.  Overall, I think the Danubio set would be great for someone working in a small kitchen with a limited amount of time.


As for the Le Creuset baking dishes- well, I just got those because I heart Le Creuset and want everything they make.  The 5" dish is very small.  I think we'll probably use it for dips and such more than for any real baking or cooking of any sort.  The 9" one, though, is a great size for making enchiladas or lasagna or anything else that I would want to make for just a couple of people.  I also do like the light blue, even if I would have preferred the yellow.

All in all, a great set of cookery to take with me to school!  Highly recommend them both, if you're in the market.

CSN Review Coming Soon

You may have seen the links around blogosphere recently for CSN Stores product reviews.  Here is me, jumping on that bandwagon!

When I first saw the reviews for CSN products probably about a year ago on blogosphere, I fell in love with their bookshelves.  The shelves that so many people received last year and reviewed were all so pretty and seemed like such a great way to display books.  But... really, I don't have room for bookshelves.  And then I considered getting a new bed.  But...really, I don't need a new bed.  For a very short moment, I considered exercise equipment.  But...really, I don't want exercise equipment.

What I do have room, need and desire for is a new set of cookware for when I move to Ann Arbor, MI in a few months and start cooking meals on a small stove.  So... stay tuned in some weeks for my review of a very pretty blue cookware set.  As some of you may know, I do love a good time in the kitchen, and so I'm quite excited to have a very pretty set of pots to take with me to school!

Cookbook Reviewitas

Some of you may know that one of my favorite pastimes besides reading is cooking.  I have gotten a few cookbooks over the past several weeks, and I've been testing them by using one or two recipes from each.  Which brings me to a dilemma- when you review a cookbook, how many recipes must you try before you can write a good review?  Do you have to try any?  Or all?  I usually try a couple and then base most of my review on the set-up of the book- the ease with which I can find important information.  So... hopefully that works for you, too!  These are pretty short reviews, so I'm calling them reviewitas.

As a huge fan of the local farmers' market, I was so excited to get Fast, Fresh & Green!  Unfortunately, as most vegetables aren't in season right now, I haven't been able to do much with this book quite yet.  However, I am all set to use it through this summer and fall!  In flipping through this book, I feel like it's well set-up.  Almost all the dishes in here are sides.  At least, I think they are as the book is not set up with "Appetizers/Mains/Sides" etc., the way that many traditional books are set up.  Rather, it's set up by the way you cook the vegetables (sauteeing, braising, stir frying, etc).  I like this book for emotional reasons.  So many people are anti-vegetable.  As I grew up in a household that was vegetarian probably 70% of the week, I find this fact very difficult to stomach (pun intended).  And I can't help but think that people are anti-vegetable because they don't know how to cook them properly.  So... here is a book that makes it so simple and has a lot of fantastic ideas on how to make vegetables a major part of your diet and enjoy them, too!  There's way more to do than just steam them, I assure you.

I received a copy of Creating Empty Bottle Moments to review, and it's very different than I expected.  Not in a bad way at all.  There aren't that many recipes in this book.  Rather, Clive Berkman shares with readers some "empty bottle moments"- occasions he participated in with friends and family and others and how special they were.  And then he shares with us the recipes he used for those occasions.  As there aren't too many recipes in here, I certainly wouldn't use this as your go-to cookbook, if you were to only purchase one.  But it's a nice coffee table book and I used his very simple phyllo brie recipe and it was a hit!  The only thing I disliked somewhat about this book was the index.  It was indexed by course, so I couldn't look up an ingredient (i.e., "chicken") and find all recipes relating to that ingredient, which I found annoying.

This last book, Wine Cocktails, I haven't made any recipes from mostly because I am lazy, mixology-wise.  But I love the idea of this book.  I think wine intimidates many people, and so I like that this book gives you inventive and creative ways of including wine in a cocktail party.  I am a huge fan of wine, though I never really analyze it in any way.  I just like to have wine with friends, often over a meal.  I love drinking wine outdoors in the summer.  I like the culture that surrounds wine.  I just think it's fun, and I'm thrilled that now I have a book that will let me experiment more with it.

Review: Keeping the Feast

Title:  Keeping the Feast

Author:  Paula Butturini

To be published by Riverhead Books in February 2010.

This review is based on an advanced reader's copy.  I received this book for free to review.

Summary:

Paula Butturini grew up in a very Italian family, where everyone came together at the end of the day to share a good meal and stories.  She held tight to this tradition through moves across the US and Europe, through a marriage and early divorce, through the shattering knowledge that her mother suffered from severe depression.

When Butturini met John Tagliabue- a reporter for the New York Times- in Rome, she was grateful to have finally found someone who seemed to truly understand her, someone with whom she could start her life.  They lived together reporting the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and going through a great many troubles because of it.

Butturini was beaten and bruised by riot police only a few weeks before her wedding.  And only a short time after they were married, Tagliabue was shot and nearly killed by a bullet through his body.  While he recovered, slowly, from the bodily injuries, he was much slower to recover from the emotional toll.  Butturini soon realized that, just as her mother had, her husband too was suffering from severe and acute depression.  After yet another blow hits their family, Paula and John returned to Italy in an attempt to heal their scars, depending on their happy memories of meals and walks and blossoming love in Rome to get them through their trauma.

GUEST REVIEW: Local Flavors

This review is written by my good friend Beth Rooney, who has a food photography blog here. You can find her photos anywhere from Saveur magazine to the New York Times- remember her name! You'll see it often in future years ;-) Here's a recipe link she made from this book reviewed below. And, without further ado, here's Beth!

Title: Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets
Author: Deborah Madison
Publisher: Broadway Books
# of Pages: 408
Rating 9/10

From Publishers Weekly
Madison (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) celebrates the seasonality of produce from farmers' markets across the country in this sophisticated cookbook. Sharing a few meat recipes, Madison has organized this collection by category (Corn and Beans, Stone Fruits, etc.) and included recipes mostly using vegetables and fruits. Not just another how-to for arranging tomatoes on a plate, the book presents such year-round recipes as Cabbage and Potato Gratin with Sage, or Corn and Squash Simmered in Coconut Milk with Thai Basil, alongside tributes to highlighted markets. Vegetarians will welcome main courses such as Braised Root Vegetables with Black Lentils and Red Wine Sauce or Asparagus and Wild Mushroom Bread Pudding. Recipes do demand close reading: one calls for a can of coconut milk but uses only part. However, shoppers learn how to use sunchokes (Sunchoke Bisque with Hazelnut Oil), Concord grapes (Concord Grape Tart) and even hickory nuts (Hickory Nut Torte with Espresso Cream). Madison's custom preparations suit farmer's market boutique style: she cuts each type [of squash] in the way that best preserves its form: lengthwise for the zucchini, crosswise for pattypans and round squash. Chefs will love the Herbs and Alliums chapter introducing Marjoram Pesto with Capers and Olives and Herb Dumplings for Soups and Ragouts. Also strong are composed salads, such as Avocado and Grapefruit Salad with Pomegranates and Pistachios, the eggs and cheese chapter and extensive fruits and desserts, such as Blood Orange Jelly and Greg's Huckleberry Pie. This is a book cooks will reach for to enliven repertoires.

Deborah Madison is one of my favorite cookbook authors, she is funny, emphasizes vegetables over meat and dairy, and advocates for sustainable growing practices. I got this book out from the library when I was doing research for a photography project and I’m going to be buying it soon. There are so many delicious recipes in this book! I have already made two of the dishes and I have only had the book for a few days. I tried the Winter squash braised in Pear or Apple Cider and the Peach Shortcake with Ginger Biscuits (I have made this twice already. So. Good.)
This book has recipes that range from simple and quick to complicated and involved. The beautiful thing is, no matter which end of the spectrum the recipes fall on, they will always impress. This book further confirms the idea that fresh ingredients make all the difference in the world when cooking.
I love the way the book is organized by season because when the farmers’ markets begin in the spring I sometimes walk away disappointed that all the farmers have are some herbs and a few greens. This book made me realize this is a blessing not a curse, it allows you to slowly ramp up your cooking, in anticipation of the flood of produce in August and September when everything is caught up and all the herbs, veggies are all piled high in beautiful abundance at the markets, or in your own garden. Local Flavors also has interesting sidebars, farmer profiles, and seasonal menus. The only negatives I can see with this book is the somewhat heavy handed and slightly preachy introduction and that some recipes leave out a step or two. This can be remedied by: skipping the introduction if you find it to be too much and by looking up any questions you have online.
These recipes will take the guesswork out of what to do with the fresh produce you come home with from the market or receive in you CSA box. But be sure to read the recipes completely before starting, you might miss something the first time through. After you’ve tried the recipes a couple times, it is easy to substitute one veggie for another. These are not fussy recipes with precise measurements and this makes this book realistic. The photos in this book are quite good as well.
I sincerely hope you will buy or borrow this book soon. I know the peak market season will be passing shortly, but you can still cook seasonally in the winter. I think it is always wise to borrow cookbooks from the library or from a friend (if you can get them to let go of it for a few days) before buying because not everyone likes the same style of cooking. And it can be terribly disappointing to buy a recipe book and dream about all the delicious food you will make only to find you really hate French style cooking and now have a 400 page hard cover book that would do better as a door stop than a cookbook. So hit up the library and get this book! Then, go buy it.

Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Title: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

Publisher: Harper Perennial

# of Pages: 350

Favorite Line: Thus began the plan for my half-century Birthday Garden: Higgledy-piggledy, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself.

Rating: 9/10

From School Library Journal
This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods.

I could start by saying something dramatic like, "This book changed my life." I don't think it did, but it certainly cemented some vague and loose-ended beliefs that I have. Barbara Kingsolver and her family decide to spend a year living only on local produce. This seems a simple notion, really- after all, didn't humans spend most of history eating locally produced food? But we don't any more. I am a hug fan of bananas; apparently, these are not native to the extreme temperatures of Chicago and as such should be reconsidered as a yummy addition to my morning meal :-)

Well, good thing I have a trip to India planned this summer. The bananas there are both local and delicious.

That's the point of this book. How often do people today stop to think about the food they are eating? How many people even know when a particular type of food is in season? I certainly don't, for the most part. I bought chives at the farmers' market the other day and probably caused the farmer some heartache when I remarked that I didn't know chives had flowers. They do. Did you know that?

Kingsolver, her husband and her daughter wrote the book and it is chockful of disturbing facts about how much fuel it takes to bring a banana to Chicago, and how many pesticides are in our grain, and how almost all the diverse and fabulous native plant varieties of the United States are slowly going extinct (that's right- extinct) because large farming corporations control our seed supplies.

Kingsolver is pretty left-wing and she clearly has serious issues with the World Bank and other organizations, but her points are valid. It is more than a little frightening to be bludgeoned over the head with the statistic that most food in the United States travels about 1,500 miles to get to your plate. That means fruit in this country has more passport stamps than I ever will.

The book's writing is very dense- in general, I feel that memoirs are fast reads, but this is almost more a treatise and a plea than a memoir. It is jammed with recipes and short essays and lots of information on the mating rituals of turkeys. In my opinion, all three authors can be a bit sanctimonious and overzealous in their writing. Barbara Kingsolver spends about ten pages ogling over asparagus. Her husband seems to have visited every possible organic food website on the Internet and urges us to do so as well. And Camille... well, her parts of the story just seemed a bit stiff and forced to me.

But really, the family clearly has a passion for what they do. I do not own an Appalachian farm where I make my own cheese, can my tomatoes or try to induce turkeys to mate, but after reading this book, I have visions of myself with a victory garden-esque vegetable patch growing in my parents' backyard. There are decisions we make in life, and the passive ones are often just as important and impactful as the active ones. I have recently made a very active and terrifying decision about my future career path. That will undoubtedly change the course of my life going forward. But decisions purchasing food, cooking it and eating it- those are generally decisions people make without much thought, and that behavior has gotten us into a ridiculous situation. Just because you don't think much about what you're doing doesn't mean it's not making an impact in a profound way.

This is one of those books that makes you consider those decisions. It might not change your life, but I guarantee that it will make you pause, and to really think, next time you're in the grocery store. And considering how huge the local food scene has gotten recently... it's possible that Kingsolver has helped kickstart a very important movement.