November 2024 Cookbook Reviews

 

Baking in the American South by Anne Byrn

This cookbook is all about Southern baking. After and introduction and chapter on the author's baking pantry staples, the book is divided into chapters about specific types of Southern baking. You can't go wrong in my opinion when the first chapter is all about cornbread and the second is all about biscuits! There are other chapters on quick breads, rolls and yeast-raised cakes, puddings, pies, cakes, cookies, and frostings. Each chapter includes an introduction to that type of baked good and throughout the chapter there are other notes and tips. I was REALLY impressed with how thorough this cookbook is. Anne Byrn really did her homework here and showcases LOTS of classic recipes and variations in each chapter. There were lots of recipes I'd like to try and this is one I would consider purchasing because there is just so much great information and recipes here.

Salty Cheesy Herby Crispy Snackable Bakes by Jessie Sheehan

I was looking forward to this one because I love all things savory and cheesy. Sheehan organizes the recipes by type - muffins, breads, savory cookies and crackers, etc. There is also a chapter at the end called "the essential savory hacks" with tips for savory staple ingredients (dough, caramelized onions, etc.). While I love a good savory baked good, I guess I originally misread the title and thought it would include other savory snacks like dips, cheeseballs, etc. There were a few recipes I'd like to try but I was a little disappointed with this one.

Meateater's Wild & Whole by Danielle Prewett

When Danielle Prewett was in college her boyfriend, now husband, was a hunter and she started learning to cook wild game. Then she moved into hunting herself and started a blog about her wild game cooking that became this book. I really like that she has a few chapters in the beginning about eating consciously and how to source quality food several ways - local farmers/pastured animals, gardening, hunting, foraging, etc. This is REALLY good information. And while I'm a huge proponent of sourcing ethically raised, local meat, I haven't personally gotten into hunting or cooking much wild game. So this is not a cookbook for everyone, but I think it looks like a really good cookbook and I very much appreciate the author's personal food journey and highlighting the importance of sourcing good quality meat.

Southern Get Togethers by Kelsey Barnard Clark

I liked Clark's previous cookbook, Southern Grit, better than this one. I did know by the subtitle, "a guide to hosting unforgettable gatherings," that it was focused on entertaining but I still thought it would be more recipes that entertaining. There were a few recipes I'd like to try but the book was organized by type of entertaining event with menus. I don't have enough friends to have a fraction of the gatherings she has covered in this book. If entertaining is your jam, then this is the book for you. If you just love Southern food, check out her previous cookbook.

November 2024 Reviews

 

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Books & Banter book club)

Martha Ballard is a midwife in Hallowell, Maine in 1789. On the way home from a birth, she is called to determine the cause of death of a man found frozen in the river. The man is Joshua Burgess and it's obvious he's been murdered and dumped in the river. Burgess is one of two men accused of rape earlier in the year. When a new resident of Hallowell, a Harvard educated doctor, contradicts Martha's cause of death, she is determined to find out what really happened. What ensues uncovers lots of small town drama and gossip, a plot by another resident to cheat people out of their properties, and a little vigilante justice.

This story definitely drew me in from the very beginning. Martha's role as midwife means she knows a LOT about the people in her town and she also has a little more freedom than the average woman. Her adversarial relationship with the new Harvard doctor highlights the beginning of the medicalization of childbirth and downplaying the role of midwives and their herbal remedies in the care of women. I also loved her husband, Ephraim, and their marriage and family life. I also felt like the rape case highlighted that some things don't always get better with history - a lot of the issues brought up in this story are still issues today. Although, today we do have DNA technology which helps, at least when rape kits are actually tested.

There were a few things I didn't love. 1) I hate a book with no chapter numbers. This one was divided in to sections so that did help. 2) Martha's character was overly modern for her time period. Her ideas were very current-day and ultra-modern especially for that time. I think in this book Martha's modern ideas were a little overdone. 3) There was a LOT going on in this book. Beside the main storyline, there were several rabbit trail storylines that at least some could have been cut out for length and just to have a few less characters to keep up with. 4) As the book went on, the storyline got more and more dramatic. It would have been just as powerful of a story without all the extra, over-the-top drama. 5) Finally, the end. Really. I won't give anything away but the ending was very over-the-top and would have NEVER happened. She also just drops one of the other storylines that had been a major part of the book and you get no answer on one major plotline.

Overall, I did like it. I wish it hadn't been as long and detailed and the author had reigned in some of the over-the-top drama. But I know my book club is going to LOVE it. I'll also note that in the Author's Note at the end of the book Lawhon gives a lot of historical information about the real Martha Ballard that the book is based on and that is really interesting to see how much of what was in the book was based on a real woman's life.

A quote I really liked:

"Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal." (p. 39)

The Fury by Alex Michaelides (Evening Edition book club)

Lana Farrar is a reclusive movie star who takes a trip to her private Greek island with her husband, son, housekeeper, and two long-time friends. But at the end of the trip, Lana ends up dead. How and why is explained by Elliot Chase. The Fury comes across as an amalgamation of Agatha Christie, The Guest List, The Woman in the Window, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. But for me it fell flat. Elliot's character is an annoying narrator who speaks directly to the reader (which I don't like). I suspected him immediately, but like The Silent Patient we had to take several VERY odd turns to get to the weird point/finale. I did NOT like The Silent Patient at all, so I didn't have high hopes for this one. It wasn't a terrible read, but just way too many weird turns in the storyline that were just too over the top. I'll be curious to see what my book club thinks of this one.

Life and Death of the American Worker by Alice Driver

Just when you thought you knew how evil Tyson Foods is, you read this book and find out even more reasons to hate them. Alice Driver spent four years interviewing current and former employees of Tyson meatpacking plants, specifically about the impact of COVID on these workers. You probably heard about high COVID rates in meatpacking plants during peak-COVID, and you probably also heard about the Trump administration's executive order to keep meatpacking plants open in spite of any state-level COVID restrictions. What you didn't hear about in the media was for the workers Driver interviewed, many of them had been working in a Tyson plant in 2011 when there was a chemical spill. That spill caused a lot of health issues for the workers most directly exposed, in particular lung issues. So when COVID came around, a lot of these workers who already had compromised health from the chemical spill almost immediately began dying of COVID. And Tyson, like any monopoly dependent on low-paid workers, first tried to ignore COVID, then later decided that every employee would be required to be vaccinated against the illness they had told their employees didn't exist. Many of the employees at these meatpacking plants are immigrants (some legal, some not) and many either don't speak much English and/or are illiterate. Tyson definitely preys on this demographic and preys on the fear of these workers to get them to comply and work in horrible conditions even before COVID came around. The book also covers a class action lawsuit that was brought against a specific plant in Arkansas - unfortunately, the case ends up being dismissed which was a downer of a way to end an already hard book. While this is not an easy read, it's an important read. THIS is the real cost of food. Anyone who buys chicken at the grocery store should be required to read this book. Is Tyson who you want to give your hard-earned money to? My suggestion is to find yourself a local farmer who's doing things on a smaller scale to support.

Some quotes that outraged me:

"Similarly, in addition to employing undocumented workers, Tyson also exploits vulnerable prison populations. For example, some nonviolent criminals facing jail time in Oklahoma are offered an alternative to prison...those who know the programs call them 'the Chicken Farm' as they require people to work at Tyson or other meatpacking companies, where they are paid little or nothing." (p. 13-14) [Maybe this could be a better deterrent than jail time]

"[Tyson] was at a loss for years about what to do with the gizzards since customers weren't fond of them. In the early 1990s, Tyson began to sell gizzard patties to prisons. Don Tyson, the company's chairman at the time, described imprisoned people as a 'captive market' for gizzard burgers." (p. 23) [Another deterrent for jail time]

"On March 3, 2020, Carlos Lynn, thirty-nine, was sanitizing a fifty-foot chicken chiller at a Tyson plant in Baker Hill, Alabama. Lynn, a Black man from Alabama, worked for Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., which paid formerly incarcerated men like him $12-$15/house to do dangerous sanitation work. [While cleaning, the machine was accidentally turned on decapitating Lynn.]...The following day...the plant required all workers to sign a legal document stating that they understood the risks of sanitizing the chicken chiller, and, if they were decapitated, they accepted responsibility for such an accident since they had been warned of the risk beforehand." (p. 29-30)

"'All the waste from the debone area, the skeleton, the skin, the neck, the hip bone - all of that is ground up to make nuggets which have almost no meat in them,' [Victor] said. Nuggets, a product Tyson created for McDonald's, helped transform Tyson from a small-town business into a global empire. The nugget recipe involved forty-pound frozen blocks of chicken parts: three blocks of chicken breast; two of ground skeleton mixed with blood, necks, and other bits; and one of chicken skin and fat." (p. 41) [Doesn't that sound appetizing...]

"In the 1970s, when more women were entering the workforce, and fast-food empires were growing, Don [Tyson] saw an opportunity to sell packaged chicken products. Under his watch, Tyson Foods invented McDonald's Chicken Nuggets and the Burger King chicken sandwich, among thousands of other prepared food items. At that time, chicken was unpopular, so the company had to convince restaurant chains that it could be packaged as a healthier option than hamburgers." (p. 47)

"In 2021, in OSHA needed to inspect all of the meatpacking facilities in the US, it would take them 165 years. And the average fine for a potentially life-threatening hazard that year was $3,700. It was cheaper to pay the occasional fine than to keep machinery, chemicals, and labor conditions safe for workers." (p. 53)

"He mentioned a program Tyson had recently launched called Helping Hands, which encouraged workers to donate part of their paycheck to help other Tyson workers affected by COVID...'It's as if they are making fun of us,' he added, noting that a company that makes billions of dollars should not ask workers to contribute to covering the cost of COVID infections." (p. 118)

"During the pandemic, Arkansas prisons and Tyson facilities shared a unique distinction - they were the sites with the most significant coronavirus outbreaks in the country...Despite the rapid spread of the virus and CDC recommendations, prisons and Tyson facilities lobbied to keep workers in the fields and in the factories. Tyson operates in four states that allow prisoners to be forced to labor without compensation: Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas. Tyson employs prisoners via work release programs that place prisoners at various companies." (p. 184)

"While waiting for robotics to catch up with industry needs, Tyson Foods began to diversify, investing in meat products that were less labor intensive. In 2016 and 2017, Tyson Foods invested $34 million in the plant-based meat company, Beyond Meat. In 2022, Tyson announced that it would contribute to a $400 million investment in Upside Foods, a lab-grown meat company. Although many assumed that meatpacking companies would see lab-grown meat as a threat, the same profitable subsidies underpinning the meatpacking industry are flowing into lab-grown meat. The tech industry is selling lab-grown meat as if it were revolutionary, but it is simply an extension of the status quo in which the US continues to subsidize cheap and plentiful meat. Lab-grown meat is also a proprietary product, once again placing the food system in the hands of a few companies." (p. 204)

Long Haul: hunting the highway serial killers by Frank Figliuzzi

In 2004 a crime analyst with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation noticed a pattern of murders taking place along Oklahoma highways. She reached out to the FBI for help and eventually the Highway Serial Killer Initiative (HSK) was created to track both murder victims and serial killers who are using the nation's highways to find and dump victims. Most of these highway murders that have been solved are linked to long haul truck drivers. So, why are there so many truck driver serial killers? Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence with the FBI, sets out to try to answer that question in this book. Figliuzzi looks at both the victims and the perpetrators and what leads both to do what they do.

I was already familiar with HSK thanks to The Killing Season docu-series. Figliuzzi spends time with both a truck driver (riding along with him for a week) and people who are working to help women escape prostitution/human trafficking. While I liked his approach, the book was kind of unorganized and he would often segue into other related stories to the detriment of the initial story in a chapter. It seemed like his focus was much more on current trucking and why that job/life would or wouldn't encourage serial killers. There was not much at all about HSK or much about any of the serial killers caught. I agree with some other reviews that the subtitle (hunting the highway serial killers) is not really what the book is actually about. Overall, I did learn a few things but it wasn't amazing. I learned a lot more about the proliferation of serial killers by watching The Killing Season docu-series.

Figliuzzi did have some good suggestions/ideas in the epilogue - 1) human trafficking education should be a mandatory part of getting a CDL (commercial drivers license), 2) better health care and specifically mental health care for truckers, and 3) better pay and better vetting and hiring of truckers. I thought all those suggestions were very good and would be beneficial overall.

The Chair and the Valley: a memoir of trauma, healing, and the outdoors by Banning Lyon

When Banning Lyon was fifteen he was put into a psychiatric hospital for depression. It was supposed to be for two weeks and ended up being almost a year. The worst part? Banning wasn't clinically depressed or suicidal until AFTER being held in the hospital for a year. Prior to his hospitalization, he was somewhat depressed because he was dealing with the aftermath of his parents very messy divorce. Neither parent seemed to want him and the hospital seemed as good a place as any. If anything I think his mother could have benefited from some psychiatric care - which she never got. A few years after getting out of the hospital, Banning finds out there is a lawsuit with former patients suing the hospital - it was an insurance scam with doctors taking kickbacks for admitting patients who stayed until their insurance coverage ran out. Even after winning the lawsuit, Banning is struggling. Struggling to fit in, struggling with direction in his life, struggling with trusting people and abandonment issues. Eventually after a few more major crises he starts to reconnect with his Dad and also nature. His fondest memories were with his Dad exploring, hiking, and just being outside. Banning eventually starts working as a guide in Yosemite National Park and later working for REI's Outdoor Skills program. This reconnection with nature as a way for healing for himself and also to connect with people again is really what saves Banning's life. Similar to the Netflix series "The Program" this is an eye-opening look at a dark part of our culture that specifically targets teens. Banning is an amazing example of resilience and the power of both the human spirit and nature's healing ability.

*As a side note. Both his parents seemed AWFUL but wow his Mom was something else. I truly think she had some kind of undiagnosed mental illness.

Some quotes I liked:

"I'd been confined to my chair for weeks because I'd forgotten to close the door to my room. After I remembered to close my door, she said I had to keep sitting chair because I'd gotten test marks for slouching or laughing. Then, when I finally started cooperating, she said I was being too compliant and wasn't taking therapy seriously. None of it made any sense. Dr. Fisher said I was depressed, but she made me sit in a chair in the hallway. She said I had a hard time making friends, but she said I couldn't hug anyone or have any private conversations. Staff told us to share our feelings, but they tied kids to beds for raising their voices or getting upset. How was I supposed to take therapy seriously when it looked and felt like abuse?" (p. 53)

"...I came to understand why I'd been sent to Cassidy Place. The outside world wasn't my home anymore. I had been sent away to live with others like me, kids who lived in a strange land on the outskirts of the real world, like the Island of Misfit Toys. We had schools and jobs, but no home. We had no family, but we had one another. The halfway house wasn't meant to reintroduce us to the real world. It was designed to introduce us to a new one." (p. 98-99)

October 2024 Cookbook Reviews

 

Bravetart: iconic American desserts by Stella Parks

I can't remember now how I heard about this cookbook but it seemed really interesting. While there were a few recipes I want to try, a lot of the recipes had tedious amounts of work or odd ingredients. It didn't seem like it was really geared for the home baker, or at least a more advanced home baker. If you want to try to make your own at-home versions of popular snack cakes, cookies, or candy bars then this is definitely the cookbook for you. While I'm all about making things from scratch, sometimes it's OK to just buy a candy bar.

Spend With Pennies Everyday Comfort by Holly Nilsson

Holly Nilsson started her blog, Spend with Pennies, as a way to share her love of cooking with the world. Good, homemade food doesn't have to involve tons of ingredients or rare spices to be good. In this cookbook, Everyday Comfort she shares budget conscious meals that will satisfy your family. There were LOTS of recipes I'd like to try and this is one I might consider buying because there were just SO MANY recipes that looked simple, yet really good. The recipes are divided into several categories like weeknight meals, pasta, sheet pan dinners, etc. and I really liked that she had a separate chapter for recipes with ground beef, and one for chicken. Overall, I was really impressed with this cookbook. This is one I would definitely recommend.

October 2024 Reviews

 At the very beginning of October I REALLY hurt my back - like bedridden, going to the ER, missed 3 weeks of work level hurt. So, I only got 1 book read and that was after I was well enough to go back to work. 

That Librarian: the fight against book banning in America by Amanda Jones

Being a public librarian, I had heard about Amanda Jones and other public and school librarians who were being personally targeted for standing against censorship in libraries. I was excited to read this book and find out more about her story. Her story is pretty crazy in that she was targeted for something she did completely outside her job. She is a school librarian and went and spoke at a public library board meeting when she found out the "book content" was on the agenda. Her speech was not inflammatory in the least, yet the next day she found herself the target of vicious online attacks. After initially being shaken up and crying for an entire weekend, she started to get mad and decided to sue the main two people behind the attack campaign for slander. At the end of the book her case is still pending appeal.

While the description of the book is "part memoir, part manifesto," I could have done with a little less manifesto. I very much enjoyed the first few chapters even while I was enraged with her for what was happening. Then the book started to get pretty repetitive - LOTS of small town drama with local politicians and people who jumped on the bandwagon of defaming her, LOTS of repetition about how important it is for White, straight people to stand up for marginalized communities, and LOTS of repetition about how much this impacted her physical and mental health. I don't want to demean her story AT ALL but there was just a lot of repetition to the point I started skimming those sections.

Let me be 100% clear - as a librarian intellectual freedom is a hill I'm willing to die on. Even if I vehemently disagree with the content, I stand behind public libraries offering any and all viewpoints. If there is something I see that I don't want to read, I don't read it. I don't try to force other people to not read it though. There is definitely a huge rise in book challenges in both school and public libraries and online campaigns have a lot to do with it. This is something EVERYONE should be concerned about. As Jones says, if you have questions about book policies any librarian would be willing to explain their library policies with you. And if you hear about a "concerning" book - check it out from your local library and READ IT before you challenge it or post about it's dangers. While I didn't love every page of this book, it's still an important read. Amanda Jones is a hero and she is standing up to ignorance and censorship.

Some quotes I liked:

"At a recent Livingston Parish Public Library Board of Control meeting in my community, a board member suggested that we should not allow anyone under the age of eighteen in the library without a parent in case they go into the adult system...John Chrastka of EveryLibrary...pointed out that in Louisiana sixteen-year-olds can get married. I hadn't even thought of that. Sixteen-year-olds cna also have jobs. Wanting to ban a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old from entering the library without an adult when they can work and get married at that age is perverse to me." (p. 42-43)

"In 2022, the Office for Intellectual Freedom received a record 1,269 book challenges, the highest number of demands to ban books reported to ALA since the association began compiling data about censorship in libraries." (p. 46)

"When speaking about Utah, Peter Bromberg told Utah's KSL News-Radio, 'It's not school libraries that parents need to be concerned about. It's their phones. If we're really concerned about the deleterious effects of pornography on children's brains, that's where we should be focusing. Not on books or literature.'" (p. 52)