Homemade Life report

This month's book was the delightful A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg.

First impressions:
Most of us wanted to start cooking from this book immediately. Even a newbie who admitted to not having a great relationship with food was inspired by the author's love of food and how excited she was about it. We loved how comfortable this book felt, not so much like an formal bestseller, but a cozy invite into the author's kitchen.

Things we loved:
The back stories for the recipes were appreciated, described by one person as "sidekicks", as was the openness about the inspiration for the recipes and the non-secretive attitude. Folks like the little tips, such as how long things should sit for optimum flavor. Creative use of materials was also appreciated (such as the yummy pickled grapes). And people loved that it really felt like you could cook any of these recipes.

Negatives:
"Not one thing". A few were struck by the lack of plot, but for a book made from blog posts it really did have a nice arc. One person felt it was a bit heavy on desserts, but others felt this was a bonus ;)

Her blog Orangette is very similar to the book, but as one person said, "with far more pictures!" It is well worth checking out, and you can sign up to get it delivered by email.

For food, we had quite the feast this month:

Katie G. - Winning Hearts and Minds or Wedding Cake
Lynn T. - Jimmy's Pink cookies

Katie S. - baguette slices with grilled apricots wrapped in prosciutto and goat cheese and Burg's potato salad

Karen T. - pickled grapes and corncakes with bacon and tomatoes

Heather C. - slow roasted tomato pesto with baguette slices
Karen W. - Bouchons Au Thonhttp

Katie W. - French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon
Madeline – Italian Grotto Eggs

Dawn – Red Cabbage Salad with Lemon and Black Pepper
Julie – Roasted Cauliflower with salsa verde


It was all ever so tasty! There was some talk of trying to get together a group outing to Molly and Brandon's restaurant Delancey, but it would be challenging to get a table for so many of us.

Next month we are reading Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris. Unfortunately we are already out of copies...but if you go to half.com you can get it for as little as 75 cents (plus shipping). Our meeting will be Monday October 10th at the Mountlake Terrace Library from 6:30-8:30.

A Thousand Days in Venice report

This month's book was A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance by Marlena de Blasi. Unfortunately, we had a limited number of copies in the system, so not everyone got a chance to read it in time :( But will still had a good meal and interesting discussion anyways.

For food we had a good variety:

Katie S. - garlic scape pizza

Heather - zucchini olive oil cake

Maria - Anginetti (lemon drop cookies)

Dawn - Porri Gratinati (A Gratin of Leeks)

Shari - walnut pasta

The group was pretty split on the book. Heather adored it and thought it as the most romantic thing ever. Katie got fed up with it quickly. Maria was surprised to find out it wasn’t fiction. But we could all agree that the food descriptions were pretty scrumptious. And that Venice sounded divine.

A movie this book reminded me of was Summertime with Katherine Hepburn. Another story of a mature woman traveling to Venice and getting caught up in the romance of it all…though with not quite as happy results. Georgeous capture of 1950s Venice! Take a look here at the beautiful clothes and café!

Katie brought in a great old cookbook she found called Duncan Hines Adventures in Good Carving and the Art of Carving in the Home, which you can take a peek at here.

Heather shared Dolce Italiano: Desserts from the Babbo Kitchen featuring the recipes of Gina, from Heat! Another funny Heat connection…the author of ATDiV moves to the same town the Buford studied butchery in in Tuscany in the sequel!

Next month’s book is available for checkout at the front desk, or can be found here: A homemade life : stories and recipes from my kitchen table by Molly Wizenberg.

Looking forward to seeing you on Monday September 12^th. Room opens at 6:30pm for setup and food sharing. Discussion starts promptly at 7pm.

Heat report

This week we discussed Bill Buford's Heat : an amateur's adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany. Some folks thought it was just hilarious and delicious and gobbled it up, but others found the writing style to be disjointed and unorganized and couldn't finish it. Overall the group found it entertaining and appetizing.

There was some question as to what happened to Mario's restaurants in the book, and to judge by his website they are all doing just fine!


Karen cooked ricotta cheese ravioli with carmalized onions.


Katie made cappellacci filled with sweet potatoes and parsley served with butter and cream sauce from The Classic Italian Cookbook by Marcella Hazan.


Katie S. made homemade pasta with fennel pollen, orange zest and goat cheese.




Dawn brought bocconcini, coppa, cappielio, olives and fresh Italian bread from Borracchini's Bakery in Seattle.


Heather brought bread and delicious Irish butter and olive and balsamic vinegar.


Julie brought Pasta Peas & Pesto.





Sheri brought Pasta e Fagioli - Mario's recipe from the Food Network.





Tanya brought marinaded vegetables, including mushrooms, white asparagus and artichoke hearts.




For show and tell, Julie shared her new herb scissors.


There was also discussion about clafouti, a French cherry dessert that someone will have to make for next time!

Overall it was a very enjoyable discussion and meal!

Next month we are traveling to a different region of Italy for A Thousand Days in Venice. We are short on copies, so please return yours to the library as soon as you finish!

See you next month!

Interesting Volunteer Opportunity

Deborah sent me a link to this cool project the New York Public Library is doing:

With approximately 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.

To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help. Feeling hungry?

You can volunteer to transcribe these delicious lists! Find out more here.

Little House in the Big Woods report

We had a lovely time talking about the Little House books this week. Most in the group had read the books (and we had a few very devoted fans), but one person never had! Most everyone enjoyed the book immensely, though not very much seemed to happen in the first book. It was remarked upon how surprising it was that nothing bad happened in LHitBW, and some readers really held their breath over this, or were disappointed by the lack of drama. But a real sense of comfort seems to be drawn from the books, so perhaps they are calming in their lack of excitement?

As our icebreaker, we discussed childhood book memories of food. Favorites included:

Bread and Jam for Francis
Little House books (DJ went so far as to heat potatoes to carry to school in cold weather)
Turkish delight from the Narnia books
The Lunchbox Tree from the Oz books (including sliced tongue, an apple and a ham sandwich)
The Giant Jam Sandwich
Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls - especially the Butterscotch Brownies
Blueberries for Sal

Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of all the delicious food! We had a nice spread though:

Dawn - pickled beets and veg mix (made by Prema)
Leann - Salad
DJ - Meatballs
Katie - roasted chicken, stuffing and gravy and tiny Snickers bars (because that is what her and her sister fantasized bringing to the Wilders if they could time travel back).
Heather - homemade pork and beans
Julie - pork chops marinated in Makers Mark.
Sheri – smoked trout and salmon (both fish she caught herself, too!) and crackers
Karen – homemade ricotta cheesecake and dried apple and honey dip
Katie - Hoecakes (some wheat, some corn) and maple syrup

Folks shared Little House related books:
The Little house cookbook : frontier foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic stories
The Laura Ingalls Wilder country cookbook by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little house in the Ozarks : a Laura Ingalls Wilder sampler : the rediscovered writings

A couple of recent Little House projects came up:

Beyond Little House America's most comprehensive site dedicated to the life, literature, and many homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The Wilder Life: my adventures in the lost world of Little house on the prairie by Wendy McClure

Also recently there have been a huge number of memoirs from actresses in the series:
Prairie tale : a memoir by Melissa Gilbert
The way I see it : a look back at my life on Little house by Melissa Sue Anderson
Confessions of a prairie bitch : how I survived Nellie Oleson and learned to love being hated by Alison Arngrim


And because someone mentioned it, here is a YouTube video of the destruction of Walnut Grove (mixed together with other LHotP intense images)!

Omnivore's Dilemma report

Despite the frequently unappetizing and disheartening nature of this month's book, we were still able to have a delicious potluck along with our thoughtful discussion of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Not everyone finished the book due to the dense writing and gloomy subject matter. One person recommended trying the young reader's edition instead, The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat. Personally, I really enjoyed the audiobook of the original.

Most of us found we ate closest to Pollan's industrial organic model, but were very interested in either raising our own food or supporting local farmer's markets. Some of us avoid certain foods (I don't eat octopus, because it is so smart), but most of us still eat pretty broadly.

A dvd that was recommended was Woody Harrelson's Go Further, where he learns how much pus and blood is in non-organic milk!

For our potluck we decided to eat either corn related items (oh, the irony!) and try out different types of beef sliders, cooked on some Foreman grills.

Dawn – yard raised organic deviled eggs

Denene – mini buns

Katie - oven roasted asparagus with sesame oil




Heather - corn on the cob slathered with butter, salt and pepper, plus Dried Apple Spice Cake with Sherry.



Karen - homemade buns and a delicious corn casserole (containing corn starch, corn meal, creamed corn, canned corn and corn bread mix!)

Julie - Maurice the organic, free range ground beef (with spices added)

Katie – regular ground beef, Rachel's Asparagus, Pea and Basil salad

Everyone brought a variety of burger toppings :)




My favorite discovery of the evening was Katie's cousin's yummy salad recipe:

Rachel’s Asparagus Pea and Basil Salad

• ¼ - 1/3 cup finely chopped shallots (about 1 large)
• 2-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 ½ - 2 pounds asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 (10-ounce) package frozen peas
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Handful of torn basil leaves (about 3/4 cup)

Melt butter over medium heat. Sauté shallots until soft but not brown. Add asparagus and stir until just warmed and tender, not mushy. Season with salt and pepper. Add peas and basil. Stir and cover. Turn off heat. Let cool and serve at room temperature.

Next month we go back to pioneer days and revisit everyone's childhood favorites, The Little House on the Prairie series! Who can forget all that salt pork and biscuits? To make it a easy on the group, everyone is going to read Little House in the Big Woods, but you are welcomed to re-read them all!

Fortune Cookie Chronicles report

This month was especially tasty!

Fortune Cookie Chronicles turned out to be a fascinating book, giving a great history of American style Chinese food, dishes unique to America and where they might have come from, the debate over who created the fortune cookie (the Japanese, as it turns out), and much insight into the struggles people go through to run a Chinese restaurant in order to make a better life for their children.

Inspired by the book, we created variations on American style Chinese food:

Dawn – store bought fortune cookies + Fried Rice

Karen – General Tso’s Chicken

Debbie - deep fried salmon stuffed wonton
Katie - Ginger Garlic Chicken and Beef and Broccoli

Julie – beef and duck on rice

Tanya – humbow and mango coconut jellies.

Heather – sautéed vegetables and sticky rice, iced green tea


For those who want to know more, and see some crazy variations on Chinese food, check out the author’s blog.

We decided on the schedule for the rest of the year, in case you want to get reading early (I know there is a limited number of August and October’s books):

May 9 – Omnivore’s Dilemma

June 13 – Little House in the Big Woods

July 11 - Heat: an amateur's adventures as kitchen slave

August 8 - A Thousand Days in Venice

September 12 - Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

October 10- Five Quarters of the Orange

November 14 – Pie Month – Life of Pi

December 12 - Sweet Revenge

Looking forward to discussing Omnivore’s Dilemma with you next month, and seeing what you decide to cook!