Zell
In case you're curious, the number of times this author references that her husband was a Navy SEAL is 4, although it feels like more. The number of times she says she lives in Carmel/NorCal/by Big Sur is.... too many to count (I counted, it's at least 12).
Extremely touching, personal story about one woman's love for her dog. I could never give this less than 5 stars because it is real, heartfelt, and honest, and gave me all the feels.
This book was heart-wrenching, informative, and real. So many of these stories tell of such hardship and grief, but they are honest and important to read. Saslow did a great job at presenting the interviews as spoken without injecting his own voice, and I thought this was a very effective book.
I really enjoyed the international inspirations for this book's recipes, but the starters lost me a little bit. The mains and desserts sound delicious though, and the pictures are beautiful.
Thorough, but focused as much on beer and wine as on hard liquor, which is disappointing. There are so many books already out there for those.
Interesting food options, but the stories felt repetitive and really boring after a while. Ingredients might be hard to find as well.
Really well written. A little hard to follow at times with all the characters and their different stories, but definitely an interesting take. The similar/parallel storylines here really make you think, and the characters are interesting and believable
Sous Vide Made Simple: 60 Everyday Recipes for Perfectly Cooked Meals
Good sous vide basics with information on min and max times, as well as good charts in the back. However, I feel like the recipes are meant to be shortcuts, based on pre-sous vide-d proteins, and they seemed to take almost as long, in many cases, as traditional cooking. This felt like it unnecessarily complicated things.
This book seemed to be set up as a celebration of local restaurants, but the recipes described in the info section were rarely the ones presented, which was disappointing. This could have been a time capsule, preserving the best dishes from the many of these restaurants that are now gone, but the format prohibited this, presenting random dishes to fit the category instead. The pictures were nice, but the recipes were often overcomplicated and too complex/too many ingredients to be achievable by the average home cook.
Fantastic and super interesting stories, for the most part. One or two didn't really resonate with me, but I did really appreciate the idea of the collection.
This was a cool idea for a book, but I would have loved to see a recipe from each restaurant - I was disappointed each time it went on to the next chef without a recipe. And the interviews felt really repetitive after a while. 31 chefs is a lot - I would have loved to see maybe 20 with a couple recipes each.
A lot of these stories felt incomplete or missing context. Some were good but they just lacked impact, which is interesting because the subject matter was often so intense.
This book was beautifully written and such a richly woven tapestry of imagination and fact. The characters were fully fleshed out, the story followed their growth in a really cool way, and this was both heartbreaking and gorgeous. This book deserves a ton of attention, it is on the same level as the works of Yaa Gyasi and Colson Whitehead, if not better.
These were good poems, and some of them resonated with me. Others didn't. I would love more historical and contextual information. But this was solid.
Interestingly organized, beautiful pictures, lacking in a solid pantry section and I think I would have preferred traditional organization. But overall a good cookbook.
I loved the memoir sections of this book. I would read a memoir from Bowien without any recipes involved - his experience was fascinating and the strongest part of this. The recipes were cool to see but maybe not accessible for the average cook. I think this should be 2 books- one with more recipes and less memoir, and one just memoir. I'd probably read both.
A fantastic cultural exploration, but I felt that the ingredients weren't explained well or really attainable for most people. But I loved the pictures and the captions and although this isn't a great cookbook, it is a great photo book.
This book was extremely boring to me - it felt like absolutely nothing happened. The characters weren't that interesting - I thought Axel had an interesting storyline, but not much development. This felt unnecessary and wandering, with not enough historical connection.
Interesting and heartbreaking. New perspectives that I hadn't thought of or learned about before. Definitely worth a read!
Interesting recipes but limited - a lot of the recipes are just small dishes or desserts, and I wish there were more pictures. And/or more information about the restaurant and the authors.
I can't comment on the authenticity of the traditional recipes, but I can comment on the overall quality - this read like a church cookbook (and I guess it is). It seems full of family recipes that shouldn't have left the family. Fried rice with Italian dressing? Underseasoned recipes with just salt and pepper? 5 versions of the same basic pound cake? The history here interested me, but the cooking part was extremely disappointing.
Great combination of familiar and entirely new recipes with abundant pictures and clear instructions. I would have loved to see more information about the cooking habits and lifestyle of the region the recipes originate from.
The stories that I did understand were interesting and unique, but for some reason there were quite a few of these where I read all the way through and I still couldn't tell you the plot.
I appreciated the suggestions in this book, but felt that it sticks super closely to one possible group structure with other possibilities as afterthoughts. But the exercises and interactions feel extremely useful and applicable.