February 2021 Cookbook Reviews

 

Modern Comfort Food by Ina Garten

I really like Ina Garten and I use several of her recipes all the time now, so I was excited to check out her new cookbook. And it didn't disappoint. There were several recipes I wanted try from this one and I liked that the theme of this cookbook was reinventing comfort food. At the beginning of the book she says "I think we can probably all agree that a mixed green salad isn't anyone's idea of comfort food." Not to say all of the recipes are unhealthy, but this is not a diet cookbook. Overall, another solid cookbook from Ina Garten and I'm excited to try some of these new recipes.

This Will Make It Taste Good by Vivian Howard

I really love Vivian Howard so I was excited when I heard she had a new cookbook coming out. This one is very different than her previous cookbook, but still very good. Her previous cookbook, Deep Run Roots was more of an homage to her heritage in Eastern North Carolina and all the local ingredients that she grew up eating with recipes for each ingredient. In This Will Make it Taste Good Howard wrote recipes for the way she actually cooks at home. Each chapter focuses on a cooking "hero" that helps make otherwise bland foods pop with more flavor. The "heroes" include caramalized or "R-rated" onions, "citrus shine" or preserved citrus, etc. Each flavor hero has several recipes that highlight or are helped by that specific hero. I think it's a really unique cookbook and way to cook. And similarly to Deep Run Roots, in this cookbook Howard also has a few personal stories in each chapter that make you feel like she's your friend chatting while you cook together. There are several recipes from this book I'd like to try and would definitely recommend this one. Also, because of COVID if you follow Howard on social media she has done several live cook-alongs where she cooks one of the heroes and recipes from this book, so you can just watch or cook along with her in real time.

February 2021 Reviews

 

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Books & Banter and Evening Edition book clubs)

At the end of WWII Cyril Conroy lucks into some good real estate purchases and soon becomes very wealthy and has a huge real estate portfolio. He sees buying The Dutch House as the ultimate symbol of his status and wealth. But, that house will be his entire family's undoing. The story is told by Cyril's son Danny as he looks back over his life when he's in his 40's. When Danny is 3 his mother leaves the family and they never hear from her again. He has no memories of his mother and his father seemed disinterested in his children, so Danny's whole world was his sister Maeve. Maeve is 7 years older than her brother, so she does remember their mother and takes it upon herself to basically raise Danny. When Danny is 10 his father remarries and introduces Andrea and her two children into the household - that's when things REALLY decline for Danny and Maeve. The majority of the story focuses on Danny and Maeve's relationship and the long-lasting impacts of The Dutch House on their lives.

Without giving anything away when their mother shows back up - wow, is she a piece of work. I think she might have been the worst character in the whole book (and that's saying something). I wasn't sure what to expect with this book I had heard mixed reviews from some of my friends and coworkers - some people loved it and some hated it. I do agree with some of the reviews I read that the whole book felt cold and detached, but I also think if you were either of these kids you would probably be cold and detached as well. I was very glad to see Danny succeed in the career he really wanted in the end - that made me very happy.

Some quotes I really liked:

"Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted." (p. 58-9)

"'Let's talk about this at home.' She had made her decision but had yet to find a way to make it palatable to her children." [which was her entire MO anyway] (p. 320-21)

Red State Christians: understanding the voters who elected Donald Trump by Angela Denker

Many Christians (including myself) could NOT believe that Donald Trump won the 2016 election because of the white Evangelical vote. Angela Denker, a Lutheran pastor, decides to explore what led so many Christians to vote for someone like Donald Trump, who seems to be the antithesis of Christianity. Denker visits several "red state" areas to talk to people in those areas about the 2016 election and Trump. What I found most surprising is the variety of reasons people gave for voting for Trump, even when most didn't like him. I think people tend to assume it's one or two main issues, but people had a wide variety of reasons and often still didn't consider themselves "Trump supporters" even if they did vote for him. While I do think Denker did a good job overall, there were a few times where I felt like she just didn't want to like a certain church and only looked for the lacking things instead of being more objective. Overall, it was an interesting book. I was slightly hesitant to read it because this issue has just torn apart the Church and did I really want to read MORE about this. But, I do feel like Denker did a good job and showed all sides of this issue. For me I have too high of personal standards to vote for "the lesser of two evils" and how is a lesser evil going to help the Church? I wish Christians would 1) not see politics as the solution to anything related to the Church and 2) be more willing to do a write-in vote or back other candidates outside the two party system. Overall, I think this book was more written for Christians who didn't vote for Trump, so if that's you then I would recommend this book.

Some quotes I liked:

"I saw in Keet Lewis what I saw in so many Trump-supporting Christinas I interviewed, from the halls of of power in Washington to the hollers of Appalachia: a desire to 'make Trump good,' a sense that they know that all is not right yet desperately want to believe that God has won in Trump, so they make all sorts of leaps. Despite these mental gymnastics regarding Trump, Lewis has a genuine love for Jesus and a desire that America might follow the Bible, at least as he understands it." (p. 36-7)

"The idea of voting for Hillary, he assumes, is unimaginable for any Christian. He identifies the fatal Democratic mistake: misunderstanding and underestimating the Christian antipathy toward Hillary Clinton. More than guns, abortion, gay rights, small government - the Red State Christians I spoke to across the county were unified more in their hatred of Hillary than in any other way." (p. 73)

"'When they said women couldn't be pastors and they had to stay home, I got up and walked out,' [Brad Todd] said, adding, 'If you are conservative socially and not theologically, it is hard to find a church home.'" (p. 149)

"Trump would finally prove that the Evangelical outrage about Clinton was based not on respect for women or for the institution of marriage but instead, as usual in America, on partisan allegiance over any kind of religious morality." (p. 167-8)

"For Evangelical women, the 'pussy' comments weren't enough to overcome decades of right-wing media hatred of Hillary. Trump's comments on the bus were nothing compared with what many Evangelical women had dealt with in the church for generations. As America would find out early in the years of the Trump presidency, Evangelical women had more to deal with when it came to male mistreatment of women than comments on a bus. And ironically, Trump's presidency would usher in a new era of female outspokenness about male aggression and the necessity of women's rights, even in the church." (p. 169)

"What would Jesus do on the US-Mexico border? 'Jesus would say that when it comes to immigration, nobody is illegal in the world. We all have rights.' she said. 'Jesus broke all kinds of rules. He touched the lepers. One came back, and the law said not to come back, but he did, and Jesus blessed him. The law said the Samaritan women should have been stoned. The law said Jesus shouldn't heal on the Sabbath. For Jesus, compassion and love were more important than the law. We are not there to judge [at the border]. God will be the judge. Jesus said to feed the hungry and clothe the stranger. That is it. Who are we to pick who to feed and clothe?'" (p. 278-9)

What My Mother and I Don't Talk About by Michele Filgate, ed.

I thought the premise of this book was really interesting and would be a good, unique read. I found it incredibly depressing and not very interesting overall. I read a lot of hard, darker books, but this one was just full of terrible mothers who abused their children or who weren't there when someone else was abusing their children. There were a handful of stories that I did like including the one by the editor that sparked the idea for the book, but overall awful and not even well-written awful, just mostly awful.

I did really like What My Mother And I Don't Talk About by Michele Filgate, My Mother's (Gate)Keeper by Cathi Hanauer, and Are You Listening? by Andre Aciman.

The Thinking Beekeeper: a guide to natural beekeeping in top bar hives by Christy Hemenway

I am a failed beekeeper who is trying to keep bees again. When I attended "bee school" several years ago I don't think any other hive styles were taught other than traditional Langstroth hives, which is what we started with. After failing two years in a row to have any hives survive and overwinter, I started thinking about trying again a different way. I like that top bar hives are more natural and don't use foundation or frames. I also feel like it would be easier to harvest smaller (more manageable) amounts of honey and keep the wax to use too. I liked how Hemenway gives several reasons why top bar hives are better for the bees overall. There are also detailed illustrations about how to organize and move the top bars as the bees are filling out their comb. Overall, I think this is a good book about top bar beekeeping and I'm interested to try it out soon.

A quote I liked:

"The presence of the queen's pheromone in the hive is what provides the colony with a sense that all is well - beekeepers call that being queensright." (p. 34) [I had never heard that term before and just love it.]

Consent: a memoir of unwanted attention by Donna Freitas

Donna Freitas is a published author and speaker who specializes in Title IX and consent on college campuses. But, when Freitas was a doctoral student she was harassed and stalked by one of her college professors who was also a Catholic priest. At first Freitas thinks her professor is genuinely interested in her as a student and even as things he does cross line after line she keeps trying to explain it away - until she can't. After a year of fending off his unwanted attention Freitas confides in a friend who convinces her to go to their department head. But things only get worse and the stalking behavior continues. When Freitas goes to her University HR she feels like they will help, but, unknown to Freitas at the time, the University knows a clock starts with her first complaint and their goal is to keep her from escalating things until the statue of limitations is up on her case. So, despite huge piles of evidence nothing is done to the stalker professor other than a forced sabbatical after she first contacts the University HR. Meanwhile, Freitas has PTSD and her career in academia is completely derailed and she ends up not becoming the tenure-track professor she dreamed of when she first started graduate school.

Freitas does a great job of really conveying how terrifying and also shameful the whole stalking event was for her. She really struggled (as many women do) with feeling like she somehow caused this or triggered inappropriate feelings in her stalker. Even with her work on consent and Title IX she still struggles to speak about her ordeal because of shame even when she did nothing wrong. I really feel like this highlights so much in our culture about women and harassment and shame. The real problems are the people like this stalker professor and the University and Catholic Church who shielded him from any repercussions. Well-written and timely book.

Some quotes I liked:

"How in the world does a student give a firm no to a professor? To someone so far her senior? To someone who could determine her future? To someone on whom her future depends? How in the world does a young woman give a decided no to a Catholic priest? For me to give a firm and enthusiastic yes or no is to presume the person I am saying yes or no to is my equal, or at least someone I feel equal to saying yes or no to, as though they are a partner, a friend, someone with whom I am on the same footing. It presumes I am in possession of some power in the situation." (p. 101)

"Someone who is not Catholic, who has never been Catholic, someone standing on the outside of the Catholic tradition, might have a difficult time understanding why it was so hard for me to get around the priest part of my professor's identity. You may already see him for who he is and was, which is a man acting inappropriately with a young woman in his program. But I could not see this, refused to see it. It was a betrayal of everything I'd ever known, and I, like so many Catholics of the pre-scandal era, was overly prone to giving representatives of the Church the benefit of the doubt - completely." (p. 109)

"When [the Catholic abuse scandal] broke, I read about it, read all the articles in the newspaper, about the ways the Catholic Church covered up crimes and abuses committed by its priests for decades, how it evaded public scandal, paid victims for their silence. I felt the same outrage and shock everyone around me felt...[but] It would be several years after the news broke before it even occurred to me that my professor was an abusive priest, and that part of the ensuing cover-up and silencing I endured with my university - a decidedly Catholic university, full of priests and affiliated with high-ranking bishops - involved the same methods for deception and silencing victims employed by the Catholic Church for decades." (p. 231-32)

"At the time, no one knew the Catholic Church had a long-standing plan for responding to exactly the kind of complaint I'd brought to this woman, a standard operating procedure, and it did not involve doing the right thing." (p. 250)

"After that Miami conference [where she ran into her stalker and had a panic attack] I stopped going to meetings in my field. I dropped out of my field altogether and moved on to other things, other subjects of inquiry. A different position entirely. I let go of being the professor I'd always wanted to be. My dream as I'd envisioned it was dead."

The Bird Way: a new look at how birds talk, work, play, parent and think by Jennifer Ackerman

Birds are fascinating animals and I love watching them on my bird feeders and seeing all the different kinds around my house. In The Bird Way Jennifer Ackerman explores 5 areas of bird life and how they uniquely function - talk, work, play, love, and parent. Each section has a few chapters that highlight something unique about birds in that aspect of their lives. For a long time people assumed because bird brains were so small that they couldn't be very smart, but recent research begs to differ. Birds are highly intelligent (some species more than others) and are some of the very few species that play. I do wish there had been some pictures included in the book, although there were SO MANY birds mentioned it would have been hard to include them all. My two (small) complaints were that the book was more scientific than I anticipated so it was not as easy of a read and a lot of the research focus covered in the book was in Australia and as someone in the US I would have liked to see more examples of birds I'm familiar with. But, overall it was a very interesting and unique book that really highlights a lot of the ways birds are unique and intelligent.

Some quotes I liked:

"In fact, one study showed that more than seventy species of vertebrates eavesdrop on alarm calls: Birds eavesdrop on other birds, mammals on other mammals, mammals on birds, and birds on mammals. In North America, chipmunks and red squirrels grasp the meaning of bird aerial alarm calls. In turn, chickadees understand the alarm squeaks of red squirrels and will take cover in response. Three species of lizards even attend to bird alarm calls." (p. 53)

"Vultures are nature's sanitary workers. Because they feed in groups and eat rapidly - each bird downing more than two pounds of meat a minute - they can rapidly consume whole carcasses. Their guts are acidic enough to destroy the agents of disease, such as cholera and anthrax, so there's little risk of spreading contamination from an infected carcass." (p. 93)

"Like raptors elsewhere in the world, fire hawks, as they're called collectively - black kites, brown falcons, and whistling kites - hunt in the vicinity of bushfires. But witnesses have observed these birds doing something radically different: flying into active fires, picking up smoldering sticks, and then dropping them in unburned brush or grass, spreading the flames to new areas, presumably to flush out prey." (p. 115)

"'That's the other big thing we discovered,' says Jones. 'These birds recognize individuals. They live in a little territory and they never leave it, so they know every human that lives around the place. They see kids growing up , and they remember them. These birds are very, very smart. They're watching us and interpreting our behavior.' The magpies live on average for twenty years and can remember up to thirty human faces for about that long, says Jones, 'so if you anger a magpie once, you're going to get attacked again and again.'" (p. 255)

"...when it's time to raise their young, [greater anis] coalesce into tight-knit groups of two to four unrelated, socially monogamous pairs, plus a couple of nonbreeding helpers. Together each group builds a shared nest in which all the females collectively lay their eggs more of less synchronously. They all share parenting care, raising the mixed clutch of young until they fledge. The groups are extraordinarily stable, say Riehl, often staying together a decade or more." (p. 302)

"Ornithologist Christopher Heckscher discovered that veeries nesting in Delaware cut short their breeding season in years with the most numerous and intense hurricanes. Months in advance, they anticipate the storms and adjust their migratory schedules for crossing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea on their migration to South America to avoid the worst of the hurricanes. They also lay more eggs earlier in the season. How these birds know in May what will happen in August is a deep mystery...In their ability to predict the tropical storm season to come, the timing of nesting veeries is at least as good as - maybe a little bit better than - the predictions by weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." (p. 322)

"A 2019 study found that over the past twenty-five years, populations of birds that depend on insects fell by 13 percent across Europe and by almost 30 percent in Denmark. That same year scientists delivered the shocking news that one in four birds in the US and Canada have disappeared since 1970 - nearly three billion birds...They're gone from all habitats, seashore, forest, grasslands, desert, tundra, probably due primarily to habitat loss from development and agriculture, as well as pesticide use. One recent study found that insecticides known as neonicotinoids prevent migratory birds from gaining the body mass and fat stores they need to start their journeys in a timely fashion." (p. 324-25)

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy

I was interested in this book when I read that the author was partially inspired to write it after being groped in a nightclub at age 50 and then beating up her attacker. But, the book is just basically RAGE AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY. And not that I don't feel that same rage as well, but I just can't live constantly being so angry I could explode at any moment. Eltahawy models the book after the seven deadly sins, but frames it as things women and girls SHOULD be doing to fight patriarchy. While I don't really disagree with her message I feel like this book would be off-putting for all but the most radical feminist. And that might be her point - to make people uncomfortable to hope they look and really see what is going on in our world. I agree with the quote, "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." and Eltahawy brings attention to a lot of real, important issues. Overall, while I agree with most of her major points I wouldn't really recommend this one.

Some quotes I liked:

"Attention is power. When you command attention, you command power, and so patriarchy has muddied the waters around attention with the word 'whore.' A word intended to shame is used to convince women that to want attention is to want something shameful. Much like sex." (p. 37)

"In the summer of 2018 Tokyo Medical University (TMU) was forced to admit it had 'systematically lowered the scores of female applicants to keep the number of women in the student body around 30 percent,' Agence France Presse reported...Unsurprisingly, the university blamed women for getting in their own way. The determination to limit to 30 percent the number of women admitted to the medical school, said an unnamed source to the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, was due to 'concerns female graduates were not going to practice medicine in employment.' [Because obviously they would have children and quit working]" (p. 89-90)

"We must refuse those crumbs [patriarchy gives some women]. Those crumbs are offered as compensation for a host of oppressions that patriarchy employs to maintain itself. I don't want crumbs; I want the whole cake. And I don't want patriarchy's cake - we must bake our own." (p. 108)

"If every act of violence against women were reported on the news, it would be recognized for the epidemic - the war - that it is. Instead only 'especially' violent attacks are reported and not even all of those, which tells you that society does not care and/or is immune to them." (p. 136)

"The national US average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to fifteen years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners." (p. 145)