September 2025 Cookbook Reviews

 

3 Doughs 60 Recipes by Lacey Ostermann

In 3 Doughs, 60 Recipes Lacey Ostermann does just that - gives 3 basic dough recipes and 60 other recipes using those dough bases. The 3 doughs are sandwich bread, focaccia, and pizza so the cookbook is basically divided into three sections with the first dough recipe and then other recipes either using that bread or that dough in another way. Ostermann has really great photos of each step in the 3 dough recipes that should make it easier to follow the steps. I already make my own pizza dough regularly but I would love to make focaccia and sandwich bread regularly too. This is a cookbook I might buy because there are so many recipes that I'd like to try. If you're interested in making your own bread without the commitment of sour dough, definitely check this one out.

Feasts on the Farm by Tamara Hicks and Jessica MacLeod

Feasts on the Farm includes 60 seasonal recipes from Tomales Farmstead Creamery in California. The dairy is made from sheep and goat milk so the book includes lots of cute animal pictures. The photographs of the farm and the food are beautiful. I didn't really see many recipes I wanted to try and obviously the dairy in all the recipes are their specific cheeses - while you may find a comparable substitute, not having tasted their cheese it would be hard to know if your version compared with theirs. Overall, a beautiful cookbook but just not tons of recipes I want to try.

September 2025 Reviews

 

Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever

I think a more appropriate title for this book would be Drinking and cheating: a memoir. Of course, if that had been the title I wouldn't have picked it up to read it. There was virtually no "care" and very little "feeding" in this book. Laurie Woolever went to culinary school and worked for two of the most well-known and powerful men in the food world - Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. But about 75% of the book was about her completely out of control drinking, drug use, and random sex/cheating. I know the restaurant world, especially pre-#metoo, is known for debauchery, but Woolever seemed to make it her personal goal to out-do almost everyone in her orbit.

She never had a great experience working with Batali - he was always a predatory dick - but she knew he could open doors for her and he did. He was the one who recommended her to Bourdain. Bourdain, thankfully, was not a predatory dick and seemed like a nice guy - although still a celebrity with the expectation of all things magically getting done for him. Woolever seemed to have a much better working environment with Bourdain and he also opened a lot of doors for her. She was just such a trainwreck of a person. I could never figure out what if anything led her to becoming an alcoholic. There didn't seem to be any obvious family trauma or anything that happened to her that would explain her need to be checked out. She also dated or cheated with some of the WORST guys imaginable. Her poor husband. He seemed like a really nice guy who married a tornado of chaos. To me the only enjoyable part of this book was when she was working for Bourdain and when she finally got sober. But I also feel like her sobriety was REALLY glossed over because she made it seem like she just decided to stop when up to that point she was drinking or smoking pot pretty much continuously when she was awake (including a lot of her pregnancy...).

Overall, I would not recommend this one. The only reason I gave it 2 stars was for the parts when she worked for Anthony Bourdain. She was just not a likable person AT ALL.

Some quotes I liked:

"This was one of the many ways that the well-connected rich stay rich, which is by underpaying young, ambitious skilled workers, trading on the promise of access to more rich and/or famous potential clients. Any rich person could pay top dollar for a catered dinner from Glorious Foods, but the real game was to find a hungry, unincorporated lone wolf like me, with a persistent doubt about her own worth, too polite and concerned about seeming greedy or losing the gig to negotiate for anything, for fear of losing out." (p. 108)

"This was the downside of working hard in the shadow of an important man. I should have known better, because I'd spent almost my entire career working in such shadows - Mario's, Hector's, all the big chefs I interviewed for Art Culinaire, everyone with power at Wine Spectator, and now Tony. Very few people are curious about the unknown women who prop up the work of important men. Without the Tonys and Marios and Hectors of the world, there would have been no book or TV show or magazine work for me. The flip side of this, that the end products, credited solely to the marquee men, wouldn't exist without the work of women like me, was both a maddening riddle and a colossal 'no shit.'" (p. 245)

Reconnected by Carlos Whittaker

Carlos Whittaker is an author, podcaster, speaker, and content creator so he basically lived on his phone and social media. But he knew it was becoming an issue and a crutch when he realized he was spending over 7 hours a day on his phone, so he decided to do something radical (by today's standard) and go phone-free for 7 weeks. The first two weeks at a monastery, the second two weeks on an Amish farm, and the final three weeks at home. He literally had a friend in California keep his physical phone so there could be no cheating. The book is divided into two sections - one about his time at the monastery and the other about his time on the Amish farm. The chapters are short and funny with tips/ideas from his time in these places and how we can translate those ideas into our phone-filled lives. He also had a brain scan before and after his phone fast to see if there were any noticeable changes.

I didn't know who Carlos Whittaker was before reading this book. I wasn't an Instagram fan and I hadn't read any of his other books. I didn't even know the book had a Christian theme/focus when I picked it up. I was just curious about his idea of not only going phone-free but doing so in such different environments. I liked the book and it was an easy read. But it didn't go too in depth in any of the areas or how he adjusted afterward. I would have liked at least another chapter or an afterward that talked about how he was doing a couple months after this experiment/fast ended. I was also a little skeptical that the brain scan would really show anything noticeable after 7 weeks - but I'm not a neurologist so maybe that is possible.

I also think there is an opportunity for a play on Morgan Spurlock's 30 days TV show where people from different walks of life/ages/etc. could go smartphone free for 30 days and see how they fare. Overall, I liked the book and everyone could use tips on how to have better boundaries around phone/social media use.

Good Soil: the education of an accidental farmhand by Jeff Chu

In his 30's Jeff Chu had a successful career as a magazine writer and was living in New York City with his husband. After struggling for years to reconcile his sexuality and Christian faith, he decided to enroll in seminary at Princeton. There he was introduced to the Farminary - a 21 acre working farm that sought to help students see the ties between farming/food/agriculture and the Christian faith. Chu never grew up gardening, but he did love cooking and so he found that he really enjoyed working on the farm more than he expected. As he continues to wrestle with his faith and future, he finds the farm is his go-to place for peace and solitude.

I knew who Jeff Chu was because of Rachel Held Evans and even though I knew on the front end that I wouldn't agree with his theology I wanted to give this book a chance because of the tie between Christianity/faith and farming. I personally found Chu to be borderline insufferable. Everything was very "woe is me," no one has suffered like me, no one is an outcast like me, etc. To me he still seemed very conflicted on how to reconcile (or not) his sexuality with the faith he grew up in. There seemed to be a LOT of guilt - some could say it's because of the way he was brought up or some could say it's conviction. Either way, he didn't come across very likable at all. He also was never clear about why he actually wanted a seminary degree - from the author info at the back of the book he's back working in magazines again. So why spend all that money on a degree that you never intended to actually use? I also wish there had been more about how he became friends with Rachel Held Evans. While the writing is good and the parts about the farminary were interesting, the rest of the book was just way too much complaining for me. If you're interested in the intersection of faith and farming/food I would highly recommend Joel Salatin's The Marvelous Pigness of the Pig.

Nashville: scenes from the New American South by Ann Patchett, Heidi Ross, and Jon Meacham

We went to Nashville for vacation this year and I had to go visit Ann Patchett's bookstore, Parnassus Books. I picked this one up as a souvenir of our trip since it's a collection of photographs from all around Nashville, TN. Ann Patchett writes the introduction to the book. We only visited Nashville for a week but I felt like the book did a good job of showcasing the city and it's vibe. It's a great book to flip through and the perfect souvenir of our trip.

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horowitz had been married for thirty-five years when he died suddenly and unexpectedly while on his book tour on Memorial Day 2019. Memorial Days tells two stories - the immediate aftermath of Horowitz's death and then 3 years later when Brooks went to Flinders Island, a remote island in Australia, to take time to properly grieve her husband and revisit their love story. While this is not a fun memoir to read, it is beautifully written. The reader can feel the love between Brooks and Horowitz and Brooks's devastation after his death. She writes about their life together as foreign correspondents, authors, and parents. She also writes about the callousness of dealing with death in American culture. This is definitely a reminder of how quickly someone can be gone and the importance of enjoying people while they are still here.