February 2010

  • Christiane Jory, "The 99 Cent Only Stores Cookbook"

    By erika on 2/25/10 3:54pm
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    Everyone, I trust, is familiar with "dollar stores" (or "99 cent stores").  Frankly, I love them.  I have been shopping at the dollar stores here in Washington since their arrival about fifteen years ago. 

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  • Debbie Puente, "Your Shirt Is Not An Oven Mitt"

    By erika on 2/23/10 6:19pm
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    Every so often I run across someone who sheepishly confesses that they don't have the slightest clue what to do in the kitchen.  I have to sheepishly confess that I was once one of those people, myself.  In the future, I will simply point them in the direction of Debbie Puente's wonderful and authoritative Your Shirt Is Not An Oven Mitt.

    The topic of "cookbooks for beginners" is fraught with peril.  You have two extremes: the first assumes that you need information not only on cheddar and bleu cheese, but on strange exotic cheeses with French names.  The other extreme is embarrassingly insulting, and tends to make awkward use of slang like "yo dawg" and "to the extreme" which comes off about as convincing as when your dad does it.


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  • Jacqui Malouf, "Booty Food"

    By erika on 2/22/10 4:11pm
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    The recipes and advice given in this cookbook are almost universally ridiculously expensive, involved, labor intensive, anxiety inducing, and almost certainly prone to failure.  Just like dating itself!  [rimshot]

    Booty Food is a Cosmopolitan Magazine level look at the art and stagecraft of cooking.  It goes well beyond cooking and the predictable topic of aphrodisiac foods, and edges into the territory of advice about how to prep your home for a date (clean it up) how to do a tequila body shot (lasciviously) and so forth.  


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  • Vegan Cooking: Recipes for Beginners

    By sarajean on 2/15/10 5:12pm
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    I purchased Eva Batt’s Vegan Cooking: Recipes for Beginners when I was in college and bent on becoming a vegan. After months of trying, I finally realized that I simply wasn’t cut out to be a vegan (though I could do vegetarian easily enough)—but that a few vegan recipes and meals a week were certainly delicious and easy enough to prepare.

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