Thumbs up for Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo by Matthew Amster-Burton. Travel/food.
Since I cannot go to Tokyo right now, and furthermore can’t eat most of the food even if I were in Tokyo, this book was a deliciously comforting substitute. The author says flat-out in the introduction that he’s never had a complicated inner life, and I really appreciate that: you know what you’re getting.… >> Read more
Thumbs up for Dumplings for Lili by Melissa Iwai. Children’s.
An absolutely adorable, colorful book about Lili, who is sent from apartment to apartment fetching ingredients to help her neighbor grannies as they make their various types of dumplings. It kept a wiggly four-year-old entertained, made her mom get misty-eyed for a life led in an apartment building full of supportive grannies (well, me too, really), and answered my problem of how to keep my bao from sticking to the steamer (cabbage leaves!).… >> Read more
Thumbs up for A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. Food.
A quick-reading, sweet book with luscious recipes and some not-too-sappy reminiscences of family and life. Already a fan of Orangette, Molly Wizenberg’s blog, I was looking forward to this, and it did not disappoint. Light reading, but very enjoyable.
… >> Read more“For one thing. she’s quite petite; barely over five feet tall. ‘Five feet and three-quarter inches,’ actually, is what she would tell you.
In keeping with the theme of tasty low-budget meals, this is something that I made last night that I think is worth sharing. It’s an adaptation of a sandwich recipe I found in Gourmet some years ago, but like all Gourmet recipes it had too many ingredients and was incredibly fussy. (Mix the tuna salad and the bean salad separately, when they have near-identical ingredients?… >> Read more
For Christmas my boyfriend received a very thoughtful gift from some friends – a book called The Frugal Foodie, by Alanna Kaufman and Alex Small. Of course, I got my grubby little paws on it as soon as I could. Consider this not so much a review, but thoughts inspired by it.
The “Foodie” part of the title is apparent.… >> Read more
Thumbs up for The Ungarnished Truth: A Cooking Contest Memoir by Ellie Mathews. Food.
This winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off ain’t your checkered-apron homemaker type. College-educated, Birkenstock-wearing, grease-phobic, logical and practical – the quintessential Northwesterner, in fact – Ellie Matthews describes herself and her experiences with a kind of refreshing humorlessness, never able to take seriously the fact that she won a prize for throwing some stuff in a pan.… >> Read more