Somedays it's just a good cookbook that appeals to me. With plenty of local history and details. No traveling for our family during Covid, regional cookbook is as close as I can get.
Monday, July 27, 2020
State Cookbook Quest: Minnesota
Cooking, Coming of Age Books
So there's this subgenre of the foodie books: Coming into adulthood while learning about food. Younger adults, like 30ish, who are trying to figure life out and find food is the answer.
Well of course it is.
So the books read basically the same:
(Person) is trying to figure out life as an adult because they are (going through a crisis, getting over their childhood, recovering from a difficulty). (Person) goes to (place). Person realize part of the answer to life, the universe and everything is to eat and cook (specific region) cuisine.
This isn't to mock this subgenre, it's just an interesting pattern. With some nice writing and some great recipes, so I'm not complaining. Here are some samples:
1. The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn. If you liked Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Gottlieb, you'll like this one, too. The author has the same type of wit and brutal self-honesty. In this case, Emily is searching for comfort food. One of her chapters has possibly the best character descriptions I've read. It gets the "Show Not Tell" prize for these descriptions. Here's my favorite passage:
"This is the way southerners are. No one simply tells you something directly and leaves it at that. Each conversation is loaded down with other conversations and extraneous information and inconsequential observations and non sequiturs. While discussing a neighbor who has rudely nailed ugly PRIVATE PROPERTY signs on the trees near your house, suddenly someone else will start telling a story about how her husband killed a giant snake in the driveway in the dead of winter "just chopped its ugly head off with the snow shovel."
It's not entirely meaningless, it's circular, a secret code you either learn to decipher or just not worry about too much." (pgs 70 and 71)
Love it.
2. From Scratch by Tembi Locke. Tembi loses her husband, find comfort in his homeland and the food if Sicily. Writing is fine, read it if Sicily calls to you.
3. My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss. Luisa is half German and half American, and goes back to Berlin in her adult life. And cooks and falls in loves. The recipes look lovely.
4. Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah. Mah is Chinese American and lands in France with her husband for his embassy job. He leaves, she stays in France, lonely. So to cope, she visits different regions of France, discovering what type of cuisine that region is known for: Paris and Steak Frites, Provence and Soup au Pistou, Burgandy and Beef Bourguinon, etc. The structure works: one chapter, one new region, one new food. I enjoyed this, especially during our family quarantine for Covid. If I can't go to France then I'll read about it.
5. Growing a Feast by Kurt Timmermeister. Timmermeister doesn't go anywhere; he stays in his farm in Washington state and grows a garden and then cooks a big feast for friends. But the writing is lovely: slow, steady, elegant. He makes making ricotta fascinating. This was another good quarantine read: my mind needed an excuse to slow down, take a deep breath, and think about cheese and tomatoes and baking pasta.
Out of all these books, I'd rank them in this order:
Comfort Food by Nunn and Growing a Feast by Timmermeister (tie)
French Eating by Mah
Then Berlin Kitchen and then From Scratch
6. One last one: the Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. Flinn teaches not-very-good home cooks to cook. The book is fine, especially good for a maybe-novice-or-new cook. I was lucky to grow up in a house where homemade bread, homemade jam, and home cooked meals were the norm, so I absorbed a lot of these skills growing up.
But my number one take away: I do need a chef's knife.
Well of course it is.
So the books read basically the same:
(Person) is trying to figure out life as an adult because they are (going through a crisis, getting over their childhood, recovering from a difficulty). (Person) goes to (place). Person realize part of the answer to life, the universe and everything is to eat and cook (specific region) cuisine.
This isn't to mock this subgenre, it's just an interesting pattern. With some nice writing and some great recipes, so I'm not complaining. Here are some samples:
1. The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn. If you liked Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Gottlieb, you'll like this one, too. The author has the same type of wit and brutal self-honesty. In this case, Emily is searching for comfort food. One of her chapters has possibly the best character descriptions I've read. It gets the "Show Not Tell" prize for these descriptions. Here's my favorite passage:
"This is the way southerners are. No one simply tells you something directly and leaves it at that. Each conversation is loaded down with other conversations and extraneous information and inconsequential observations and non sequiturs. While discussing a neighbor who has rudely nailed ugly PRIVATE PROPERTY signs on the trees near your house, suddenly someone else will start telling a story about how her husband killed a giant snake in the driveway in the dead of winter "just chopped its ugly head off with the snow shovel."
It's not entirely meaningless, it's circular, a secret code you either learn to decipher or just not worry about too much." (pgs 70 and 71)
Love it.
2. From Scratch by Tembi Locke. Tembi loses her husband, find comfort in his homeland and the food if Sicily. Writing is fine, read it if Sicily calls to you.
3. My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss. Luisa is half German and half American, and goes back to Berlin in her adult life. And cooks and falls in loves. The recipes look lovely.
4. Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah. Mah is Chinese American and lands in France with her husband for his embassy job. He leaves, she stays in France, lonely. So to cope, she visits different regions of France, discovering what type of cuisine that region is known for: Paris and Steak Frites, Provence and Soup au Pistou, Burgandy and Beef Bourguinon, etc. The structure works: one chapter, one new region, one new food. I enjoyed this, especially during our family quarantine for Covid. If I can't go to France then I'll read about it.
5. Growing a Feast by Kurt Timmermeister. Timmermeister doesn't go anywhere; he stays in his farm in Washington state and grows a garden and then cooks a big feast for friends. But the writing is lovely: slow, steady, elegant. He makes making ricotta fascinating. This was another good quarantine read: my mind needed an excuse to slow down, take a deep breath, and think about cheese and tomatoes and baking pasta.
Out of all these books, I'd rank them in this order:
Comfort Food by Nunn and Growing a Feast by Timmermeister (tie)
French Eating by Mah
Then Berlin Kitchen and then From Scratch
6. One last one: the Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. Flinn teaches not-very-good home cooks to cook. The book is fine, especially good for a maybe-novice-or-new cook. I was lucky to grow up in a house where homemade bread, homemade jam, and home cooked meals were the norm, so I absorbed a lot of these skills growing up.
But my number one take away: I do need a chef's knife.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Adulting: How to Become a Grown Up in 468 Easyish Steps by Kelly Williams Brown
The time, in my early twenties, when I was invited (as a plus one) to a country club holiday dinner dance was the greatest sartorial faux pas of my life. I didn't have any experience with country club anything, let along holiday celebrations. It's a pathetic story, but let's just say I wore the wrong thing. Not inappropriate or scandalous or immodest---none of those are my style anyway, but just the wrong thing, maybe involving a khaki skirt. When I arrived, I realized my mistake, but, of course, it was too late. What I was wearing was "fall business casual", when what I should have been wearing was black and bling. Ironically, the correct thing was hanging in my closet and home, I just didn't know this was the time to bring it out.
Black and bling, Baby, that's what you wear to a country club holiday dinner dance. Since that time, decades, ago, my husband and I have been invited to events much like the holiday country club dinner dance, and now I know what to wear. It was simply a matter of someone telling me, or in my case, not wanting to make the same mistake twice.
That's what I'm talking about with this book: it's simply a matter of learning to adult.
There's been a lot of hype about millennials not being able to adult today, or not being able to adult at all. I actually admire the millennials of today, and I wonder, in the blur of social media, if they just need some good old-fashioned advice sometimes, like I certainly did. That's what Kelly Williams Brown does in her book: Adulting, How To Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easyish Steps, which is a guidebook to grown-up skills. Here are some of her chapters: Get Your Mind Right (you are not a special snowflake), Domesticity, Cooking, Get a Job, Money, Maintenance, Love, Friends and Neighbors, etc, full of practical advice like:
Buy toilet paper in bulk.
Get a stepstool.
Make your bed every morning.
Find a tub cleaner that works for you.
Get some baking supplies.
Make a decent steak.
Send a thank you note.
Do not engage with crazy.
Do not skip oil changes.
Wash your hands.
Treat good-personhood as a basic dating qualifier.
(About toxic relatives) If they won't have a conversation with you, disengage.
No one, ever, will set your boundaries for you. So learn to set them yourself.
and the gems of wisdom go on and on . . .
Even though I read this in my 40's these were good reminders. Because of Brown, I bought a clothes steamer.
What I love the most is that there are things here that took me a long time to learn. Here are my two favorites:
Step 306: Be supportive of depressed or heartbroken friends. "It's rarely as fun to be friends with someone when they are clinically depressed as when they are their normal selves. But everyone, everyone, everyone goes though a hard time every now and again. Do not bolt when this happens. Do not interpret their silence of their sadness as a rejection of you. It doesn't matter that it's a pain . . . it's just what you have to do."
Step 412: A miscarriage should be treated as a death. "A miscarriage is one of the deep pains that people carry around with them. It's not as public or obvious as a death, but you should treat it the same way: Your friend is in anguish, and they have lost something very significant . . . "
What I don't like about this book is that there's a lot of swearing, and content about relationships I respectfully disagree with. I wouldn't want my teens to read it, I think it's more for young adults. You can skip around and find what you like, there's a lot of good stuff regardless.
Black and bling, Baby, that's what you wear to a country club holiday dinner dance. Since that time, decades, ago, my husband and I have been invited to events much like the holiday country club dinner dance, and now I know what to wear. It was simply a matter of someone telling me, or in my case, not wanting to make the same mistake twice.
That's what I'm talking about with this book: it's simply a matter of learning to adult.
There's been a lot of hype about millennials not being able to adult today, or not being able to adult at all. I actually admire the millennials of today, and I wonder, in the blur of social media, if they just need some good old-fashioned advice sometimes, like I certainly did. That's what Kelly Williams Brown does in her book: Adulting, How To Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easyish Steps, which is a guidebook to grown-up skills. Here are some of her chapters: Get Your Mind Right (you are not a special snowflake), Domesticity, Cooking, Get a Job, Money, Maintenance, Love, Friends and Neighbors, etc, full of practical advice like:
Buy toilet paper in bulk.
Get a stepstool.
Make your bed every morning.
Find a tub cleaner that works for you.
Get some baking supplies.
Make a decent steak.
Send a thank you note.
Do not engage with crazy.
Do not skip oil changes.
Wash your hands.
Treat good-personhood as a basic dating qualifier.
(About toxic relatives) If they won't have a conversation with you, disengage.
No one, ever, will set your boundaries for you. So learn to set them yourself.
and the gems of wisdom go on and on . . .
Even though I read this in my 40's these were good reminders. Because of Brown, I bought a clothes steamer.
What I love the most is that there are things here that took me a long time to learn. Here are my two favorites:
Step 306: Be supportive of depressed or heartbroken friends. "It's rarely as fun to be friends with someone when they are clinically depressed as when they are their normal selves. But everyone, everyone, everyone goes though a hard time every now and again. Do not bolt when this happens. Do not interpret their silence of their sadness as a rejection of you. It doesn't matter that it's a pain . . . it's just what you have to do."
Step 412: A miscarriage should be treated as a death. "A miscarriage is one of the deep pains that people carry around with them. It's not as public or obvious as a death, but you should treat it the same way: Your friend is in anguish, and they have lost something very significant . . . "
What I don't like about this book is that there's a lot of swearing, and content about relationships I respectfully disagree with. I wouldn't want my teens to read it, I think it's more for young adults. You can skip around and find what you like, there's a lot of good stuff regardless.
German Parenting
Remember that Sting song "Englishman in New York"? Where the singer is British, experiencing New York culture and quirks?
I feel like that when I read American-mom-goes-to-another-country-and-learns-that-parenting-is-cultural-too, the insider/outsider perspective. This is the case with Acthung Baby:An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske about German parenting.
Sara is a methodical writer, and I learned about more than parenting as she delves into issues that systems that affect parents everywhere: in this case, how to navigate the country's health care system, playground system, and education system.
At first what's foreign becomes familiar and then even starts to make more sense than the way it's done in the States. And like all parenting books of this genre on my list, I read it when I was parenting young kids, and then again with older kids, and it was good for me to think about my parenting style and what could be improved.
If you are on a parenting-in-another-country binge, this is a good one to have on your list. If you'd like more, read on.
I feel like that when I read American-mom-goes-to-another-country-and-learns-that-parenting-is-cultural-too, the insider/outsider perspective. This is the case with Acthung Baby:An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske about German parenting.
Sara is a methodical writer, and I learned about more than parenting as she delves into issues that systems that affect parents everywhere: in this case, how to navigate the country's health care system, playground system, and education system.
At first what's foreign becomes familiar and then even starts to make more sense than the way it's done in the States. And like all parenting books of this genre on my list, I read it when I was parenting young kids, and then again with older kids, and it was good for me to think about my parenting style and what could be improved.
If you are on a parenting-in-another-country binge, this is a good one to have on your list. If you'd like more, read on.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Swedish Living
Here are two books about Swedish culture that I think are great:
1. There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda McGurk. This Swedish born and raised women immigrated to the US, then took her kids back to Sweden as a parent. The premise is that kids should play outside. A lot. In clothes that keep them warm. But it's the journey that's charming, and McGurk's insider/outsider perspective on Swedish culture and Swedish parenting culture.
2. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family by Margareta Magnusson. Margareta is Swedish, and she has lived a lovely long and interesting life. Her book, part cleaning-out-your-house-before-you-die, and part memoir is just plain charming. Her premise is that as we all near the end of our lives, cleaning out our houses and stuff is a gift to our families. Her message is lovely.
I was grieving a miscarriage when I read this book, and grieving all the "stuff" that remained from the baby that wasn't coming: the bins of clothes, waiting, the high chair that I'd saved, the maternity clothes I wouldn't wear, the crib, you know . . . the stuff. And there was something healing for me about reading this memoir of a woman who was making her peace with the end of her life. It was a loss she was accepting, blessings she had experienced and was grateful for, and a passage she was preparing herself to make. And part of all that was getting rid of the stuff. I got the message, and I highly recommend this charming, gentle, love-your-life book.
French Parenting Books
Since I discovered Mireille Guiliano and her French Women book series, I've been inspired by the way French women see food, life, etc. No surprise that I enjoyed parenting books about the French way of parenting. Here are some I recommend:
1. Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Druckerman. Pamela Druckerman is an American who has a baby in France, and absorbs French parenting culture. The book is good, it's a fun read. I like Druckerman's writing.
2. French Kids Eat Everything: How our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snaking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon. I read this when my kids were younger, and it helped me develop some good mommy food management skills.
3. French Twist: An American Mom's Experiment in Parisian Parenting by Catherine Crawford. I think the subject matter is interesting and that Crawford's observations are insightful. I just didn't jive with her writing, so this is last on the list. But it might work for someone else, so if the topic interests you, try this one.
I don't agree with everything that's stereotypically "French parenting"but there are some things I definitely agree with---exposing kids to new foods, taking a more relaxed approach/letting kids grow in independence, etc. So when I had young kids, this was a fun reading binge to figure out what was important to me and what wasn't. Bonne chance!
1. Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Druckerman. Pamela Druckerman is an American who has a baby in France, and absorbs French parenting culture. The book is good, it's a fun read. I like Druckerman's writing.
2. French Kids Eat Everything: How our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snaking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon. I read this when my kids were younger, and it helped me develop some good mommy food management skills.
3. French Twist: An American Mom's Experiment in Parisian Parenting by Catherine Crawford. I think the subject matter is interesting and that Crawford's observations are insightful. I just didn't jive with her writing, so this is last on the list. But it might work for someone else, so if the topic interests you, try this one.
I don't agree with everything that's stereotypically "French parenting"but there are some things I definitely agree with---exposing kids to new foods, taking a more relaxed approach/letting kids grow in independence, etc. So when I had young kids, this was a fun reading binge to figure out what was important to me and what wasn't. Bonne chance!
It takes Quarantine to Get Me Back to my Blog: Danish Living Books
I knew it had been a while since I blogged. How is a year and five months "a while"?
Mom time, that's how.
And "I'm going to get back to blogging" is on my list of things to do during the quarantine. I even have a pile of books, ready to go.
So I'm going to start with Danish Living books. This was out of my parenting in other countries binge, that developed into hygge research. And these are the books that I cozy up to about every Thanksgiving, when the weather gets chilly.
1. The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking, is just a nice little guide to hygge, the Danish concept of coziness/familiarity/being snuggly to cope with the cold. Although it's not dismally dark where I live in the winter, I still like a little hygge in the winter, and this where I go.
2. The Hygge Life by Gislason and Eddy. More hygge, love the recipes. Slow down and be cozy.
3. How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life by Johansen. More cozy, more recipes, just more.
4. The Year of Living Danishly by Russell. This is another book I read just about every winter. Russell is an American who moves to Denmark and learns to cope, by embracing Danish culture. This is a charming little book and I like Russell's voice. Maybe I read this in the winter to remind myself I live closer to the equator than Denmark and really, although I hate February, it's really not that bad where I live. There's a little adult content, I wouldn't hand this book to my 10-year-old.
5. The Danish Way of Parenting by Alexander. I skim through this one, I think Russell (see above) has a better voice, but still, there's insight to Danish parenting culture in this book.
Mom time, that's how.
And "I'm going to get back to blogging" is on my list of things to do during the quarantine. I even have a pile of books, ready to go.
So I'm going to start with Danish Living books. This was out of my parenting in other countries binge, that developed into hygge research. And these are the books that I cozy up to about every Thanksgiving, when the weather gets chilly.
1. The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking, is just a nice little guide to hygge, the Danish concept of coziness/familiarity/being snuggly to cope with the cold. Although it's not dismally dark where I live in the winter, I still like a little hygge in the winter, and this where I go.
2. The Hygge Life by Gislason and Eddy. More hygge, love the recipes. Slow down and be cozy.
3. How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life by Johansen. More cozy, more recipes, just more.
4. The Year of Living Danishly by Russell. This is another book I read just about every winter. Russell is an American who moves to Denmark and learns to cope, by embracing Danish culture. This is a charming little book and I like Russell's voice. Maybe I read this in the winter to remind myself I live closer to the equator than Denmark and really, although I hate February, it's really not that bad where I live. There's a little adult content, I wouldn't hand this book to my 10-year-old.
5. The Danish Way of Parenting by Alexander. I skim through this one, I think Russell (see above) has a better voice, but still, there's insight to Danish parenting culture in this book.
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