July 2025 Cookbook Reviews

 

The Blue Kitchen by Cider Mill Press

I was familiar with the Blue Zones and have watched the Netflix docuseries as well. Even though I don't 100% agree with all the dietary suggestions (mostly plant based) I thought I would check out this cookbook. I didn't realize there were prior Blue Zones cookbook so I can't compare this one to those. It's organized like a typical cookbook with chapters on appetizers/snacks, salads/bowls, soups/stews, etc. Not many recipes jumped out as something I want to try. I also felt like many of the recipes were either too basic (a cucumber salad that just marinated cucumbers) or overly involved. Overall, I wasn't super impressed with this one. Not saying it's a bad cookbook, just not for me.

Sun-Kissed Cooking by Brooke Williamson

Brooke Williamson has already had a long career in professional cooking starting from a young age in professional kitchens. This is her first cookbook and the focus is on vegetables. Growing up in Los Angeles there are fresh vegetables almost year round and as a professional chef she would build her menu around what's in season. I really liked that the recipes are organized by vegetable. I didn't find many recipes I wanted to try. I enjoyed reading her introduction about how she got into cooking and her career so far. Overall, if you're looking to add more vegetable recipes to your personal kitchen this one is worth checking out.

July 2025 Reviews

 

Slow Noodles: a Cambodian memoir of love, loss, and family recipes by Chantha Nguon

Chantha Nguon grew up in Cambodia in what would probably be considered middle class. She and her siblings were educated, she had money for treats, and their family ate well. After her father's death her mother is able to keep things going for the family but then Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge come in and their family flees to Vietnam. In Vietnam their circumstances are much reduced but she still has her mother and older sister and the three of them are doing OK. Then when her sister and mother die in quick succession, Chantha understands what real deprivation and poverty is. She cobbles together whatever means she can to make enough money to eat for the day. Eventually she meets her husband, Chan, who is also half-Khmer and also came from an educated, middle class family who also lost everything during the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam. Together they try to escape Vietnam, spending 10 years in a refugee camp in Thailand, before realizing they won't be able to emigrate to Europe or America. They go back to Cambodia and try to rebuild their lives. But back in Cambodia, Chan and Chantha not only survive but they begin to thrive. They also not only rebuild their own family, but help their community begin to rebuild. Throughout all of these trials food is what continues to connect Chantha to her family and Cambodia. She has nothing material from her childhood or family so the recipes and memories are what she cherishes and also passes on to her own children. An inspiring story of one woman's path from war-torn refugee to successful businesswoman. She also includes 22 Khmer recipes that sustained her through it all.

Secrets of Adulthood by Gretchen Rubin

This is a little book of aphorisms that Gretchen Rubin has put together to share her Secrets of Adulthood. In case you're not familiar, an aphorism is "a concise statement that contains an expansive truth." (p. 12) She initially started writing down these "secrets" to share with her daughters, but also realized they could be good reminders for her (or anyone) as well. The aphorisms are divided into 4 larger categories (Cultivating Ourselves, Facing the Perplexities of Relationships, Making Things Happen, and Confronting Life's Dilemmas), then each category has several subcategories/topics like Work, Creativity, Tough Decisions, Adventure, Friendship, etc. This is a really quick read - like you could probably sit down and read it all in an hour or so. This would also make a great high school or college graduation gift. A cute, quick read with lots of memorable quotes and aphorisms.

Cellar Rat: my life in the restaurant underbelly by Hannah Selinger

After Hannah Selinger finished college at Columbia University, she came home to Massachusetts and decided to work at a local restaurant for the summer. The dysfunctional connection she found as a restaurant worker led her on a 10 year detour from journalism (her college major) into the underbelly of the restaurant world. She worked her way from a local pub into fine dining working as a sommelier at restaurants like Bar Americain, BLT Prime, Jean-George, and Momofuku. Throughout all the restaurants Selinger worked, the common thread was dysfunction. Restaurant workers, whether front of back of the house, have brutal schedules - long, hard hours, working holidays, weekends, it's very hard to get time off, and it's rare that your days off align with anyone working a more "normal" job. Restaurants also tend to draw partiers and addicts and staff often go out after work to blow off steam leading to more unhealthy aspects of this career/lifestyle. Selinger found herself in a love/hate relationship with working in restaurants. It was like an abusive relationship - when it was good, it was really good, but when it was bad, it was brutal. After her father's death, Selinger realizes that is the wake up call she needs to get out of restaurants and go back to writing.

In 2020 Selinger saw a series of tweets about a powerful man in the restaurant industry that she had crossed paths with back in her restaurant days. That triggered her memory of all the dysfunction she witnessed and participated in during her restaurant working days. I was surprised at the mixed reviews of this book. Several people said that they thought the book would be more about wine and how to pair it with food (that is NOWHERE in the description of the book) or that Selinger was a narcissist who just wanted to whine about all the bad stuff that happened to her. She doesn't come across as narcissistic AT ALL to me. Nowhere in the book does she say that every minute of every day in the restaurant industry was awful and toxic. That's the whole point of the book the love/hate aspect of restaurants - when it's good it's intoxicating but when it's not, it's really bad. It's also frustrating and sad to keep reading about abusive people in power who are never held accountable. Certain industries are known for this but it's anywhere where there is enough money to shield people from their consequences. I really liked the book even though it was not a happy or light read. Selinger is a good writer and this book shines a light on things that are likely still going on in restaurants today despite the #metoo movement and everything else.

Some quotes I liked:

"But to be a woman who loved food was very different than to be a man who loved food. You were still supposed to care about restraint. You were supposed to love it, want it, understand it, obsess over it, talk about it constantly - but never really indulge in it. To indulge was to give up the last vestiges of control. To indulge was to slip from a size 0 to a size 2 to a size 4 to a size 6 and so on and so on." (p. 168)

"To fit in at Momofuku, after all, you couldn't be nice. You could pretend to be nice, but you couldn't actually mean it. It was hard to know where I fit in when it came to this jigsaw puzzle of personalities. I wasn't mean, but I was a misfit. After work, I was happy to commiserate with the servers and creative personalities at the late-night bars. Even though I was upper management, I wasn't treated like a manager, and I wasn't included in the camaraderie extended to Dave's so-called Momo family. From the outside, it was a happy place to work, a communal place, where everyone pushed everyone else to be better. But inside, it felt competitive and exclusive, and, for me, unwelcoming. It was a workplace led by people who wanted you to believe that they had your best interests in mind, when really they wanted you to fail." (p. 198-199)

The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon

I was all set to really love this book even though I wasn't familiar with Sharon McMahon or her podcast and "Governerds" fans. Reading about 12 "unsung Americans who changed the course of history" sounded like a fantastic book. I barely got through the first person she highlights and honestly only because I wanted to find out if Clara Brown ever reunited with her daughter. Not being familiar with her podcast style, I found her writing very off putting. As one review put it her constant "cringeworthy attempts at humor" fell flat for me. There was also a LOT of rabbit trailing and asides that took away from the person who was supposed to be the focus. I also agree with other reviews I read that said it was hard to tell who the 12 people were because there was WAY too much information (and in my opinion too many chapters) for each person. Why not have one chapter per person to be sure it's obvious who they are? There is a way to give historical background about a subject/person without getting too bogged down and there is a way to have humor shine though even when writing about difficult topics but none of that was present in this book. This was rambling and awkward in my opinion.

Night Magic: adventures among glowworms, moon gardens, and other marvels of the dark by Leigh Ann Henion

In Night Magic Leigh Ann Henion invites us to turn off our porch lights and explore some of the creatures of the dark. Covering everything from fireflies and glowworms to foxfire fungus and moon gardens, she explores things that are becoming more and more hidden or lost to our constantly "on" and lit up world. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she is from the NC mountains and lives in Boone so a lot of what she talked about was familiar to me. She explored some interesting things like Mothapalooza, a moth-focused festival and helping researchers trap and tag/record bats. While a lot of what she talked about was very interesting, a lot of it was overly-flowery or came across like she was trying too hard to make EVERYTHING extra special. I personally found the first half (which was focused more on things in NC) more interesting than the second half. I did like it and I do think she is bringing attention to important parts of our environment.

Some quotes I liked:

"...naturalist Lynn Faust, who used to spend summers in the now-defunct Elkmont community, grew up admiring the fireflies we're watching. As an adult, she came across and article about sychronous-flashing fireflies in Asia, and she recognized similarities in what the scientists were reporting and what she'd seen as a child. When she reached out to researchers in the 1990s, they were skeptical that an unknown-to-science species existed in the most-visited national park in the country [The Great Smoky Mountains National Park], so she sent a musical composition mimicking the sequences of flashes in Elkmont. It's what convinced firefly scientists that they should make a trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where they confirmed a never-before-recorded synchronous species: Photinus carolinus. (p. 6-7)

"We might think of songbirds as daytime companions as opposed to night owls, but 80 percent of North America's migratory birds travel at night, using stars as navigational devices while avoiding the turbulence of daytime thermals. In U.S. cities alone, 365 to 988 million birds are killed every year during these nocturnal migrations in part due to artificial lighting issues, which disorient and cause them to collide with buildings, often fatally. And without access to navigational stars in cities awash with LEDs, some birds simply lose their way, with city lights drawing them away from their ancestral migratory flyways." (p. 70)

News of the World by Paulette Jiles - History & Historical Fiction book club, re-reading

After the Civil War Captain Jefferson Kidd rides from small town to small town reading the News of the World from various newspapers. He's lived through three wars, is widowed, and enjoys the freedom of not being tied down in his old age. While at one of his stops he is offered a fifty-dollar gold piece to bring a rescued white child back to her family. Johanna Leonberger's parents and younger sister were killed by Kiowa raiders and she was kidnapped and lived with them for 4 years. She is now 10 years old, does not speak English, and doesn't want to leave her Kiowa family. The Captain agrees to take her against his better judgement, but while traveling across the wild Texas territory the two form a unique bond. Once they reach her extended family outside San Antonio the Captain has to make a terrible choice that will ultimately change both he and Johanna's lives forever. This is a short, but fantastic book with two very memorable characters and would make a great movie! Definitely worth reading!

Updated review after 2nd reading:

Re-reading this book was even more enjoyable the second time. There were scenes I didn't remember, but overall I was able to read it a little more slowly because I knew the ending so I wasn't rushing to find out what happens. I still got choked up at the very end. I just LOVE Captain Kidd and Johanna and now to find out there will be a movie later this year is even better!

Update after 3rd reading:

It's been 5 years since I last read News of the World and I still love it. This time the poetic language really stood out to me and just how well she tells the story. She is able to pack so much description in so few words. Such a great book. Update to my second reading - I saw the movie and was not impressed. This is a hard book to turn into a movie because it's not super dramatic and more about the developing relationship between Captain Kidd and Johanna. Also just found out that Jiles passed away this month.

June 2025 Cookbook Reviews

 

Sunny Days Taco Nights by Enrique Olvera

I love tacos and Mexican food. My favorite summer snack is homemade salsa. So, I'm always checking out taco/Mexican cookbooks to get new ideas. This one was a huge disappointment. I've never seen LESS appealing taco photos - like NONE of them looked good. Several were like a tortilla with a huge slab of some kind of meat on it. Surely that's not how you're expected to eat it? So why not show what it looks like with either cut or shredded meat and some toppings? It was just a disappointment overall.

Grow Cook Eat: a food lover's guide to vegetable gardening by Willi Galloway

This is a unique half gardening half cookbook. The first 40 pages cover gardening basics - planning your space, creating good soil, planting, etc. Then the rest of the book is divided into types of plants - herbs, greens, legumes, squash, cabbage family, roots, warm-season vegetables, and fruit. Each section covers specific plants and tips for growing and then a recipe for that plant/veggie. There was a lot of good information but I do wish there were more recipes, one per plant/veggie just didn't seem like enough. But I think this would be a good book for a beginner gardener to help decide what to grow.

The Cook and the Gardener by Amanda Hesser

An American cook is working for a year in a French chateau and befriends a curmudgeonly French gardener. While the premise sounds great, I was expecting a cookbook. This was like half memoir/story of her time working as a chef at this French chateau and how she becomes friends with the older French gardener and his wife. I would read that book if it was published as food/gardening memoir/nonfiction book. But a cookbook with not one picture or photo of the recipes? No thanks. In the future, maybe I'll revisit when I have time to read all of the writing around the recipes. I also agree with one review I read that said it had a know-it-all vibe too. I haven't read any of her other books and after this one I'm not inspired to.

June 2025 Reviews

 

Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder

When Dr. Jim O'Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School, he was asked to defer a prestigious fellowship and help launch a grant-funded program to bring medical care to Boston's homeless population. He agreed and ended up finding his life's calling. Dr. O'Connell launched "the Program" from his initial involvement with a grant-funded clinic for the homeless in Boston that now hosts several clinics, a mobile outreach/clinic, and a building for respite care. He and a team of nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and social workers try to help Boston's homeless have "continuity of care" despite their circumstances. There have been some success stories - former patients who got clean, got housing, and became productive citizens. Some of those success stories now work for the Program and give back to the organization that helped them. Sadly, the vast majority of the people the Program has helped are either dead or still homeless. So, what keeps Dr. O'Connell and his team going despite the hard work they are doing? That's what Tracy Kidder explores in this book. It's a portrait of Dr. O'Connell, the Program, and several memorable people from the Boston streets. This is obviously not a job everyone could do, but Dr. O'Connell makes it seem interesting and even though he rarely sees huge victories he focuses on the small victories and making each person he works with feel like a worthy human being. Eye-opening, sad, and heartwarming all at once, this is a unique book about a very unique doctor doing what he can to address the issue of homelessness in Boston.

Some quotes I liked:

"In the shelter clinics and on the van, Jim came face-to-face with dozens of people who hadn't been to a doctor in years, let alone a psychiatrist or dentist. He saw many rotted teeth and many cases of scabies and lice...At times Jim imagined that he and his colleagues were practicing something like wartime or post-earthquake medicine. It was as if he had been parachuted into another world that modern technologies had never reached. The situation was appalling, the work overwhelming. And, if he was honest with himself, utterly fascinating." (p. 42)

"Homelessness had a complex taxonomy. It included families and also many lone individuals, generally divided into four categories. There were the 'hidden,' such as the Street Team patient who slept in a rented storage locker. The 'transitional,' by far the most numerous, fell into homelessness only briefly, while the 'episodic' did so a few times a year. A smaller category - about 10 percent in 2018 - belonged to the 'chronic' category, living in constant or near-constant homelessness. That chronic group had two main subgroups - those who spent most of their nights in homeless shelters and those who slept rough, on pavement and park benches, in doorways, ATM parlors, tents on the outskirts of town...Some rough sleepers claimed their own distinction, labeling as 'snowbirds' those who slept out only in warm months and retreated to shelters in the winter. In fact, the difference was important. In Massachusetts, the people who lived mostly in shelters suffered a death rate about four times higher than that of the state's general adult population. But the people who stayed outside year-round - the Street Team's special patients, whom Jim had once imagined as 'hardy survivors' - died at about ten times the normal rate." (p. 55-56)

"By contrast, neither Jill nor the workers from Home Start had any experience in teaching domestic arts to rough sleepers, whose finely honed skills for outdoor living didn't help them indoors. Jim remembered a patient who actually pitched a tent in his apartment. Industrial cleaning was needed sometimes, not just because of partying but because many new tenants didn't know how to clean a stove or a bathroom. Most didn't know how to pay bills or shop for groceries, let alone cook. One freshly housed man, unable to sleep for a few nights, went back out to the streets and made a tape recording of the sounds of traffic and sirens, which he used as his lullaby, his antidote to indoor insomnia. People who had adapted to the exigencies of street life had no idea how to fill their time indoors." (p. 102)

The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats by Alyson Brokaw

If you are interested in bats, this is the book for you. It is FULL of all kinds of information about every aspect of bats - how they use echolocation, how they fly, different roosting spots, what different kinds of bats eat, how they mate and raise young, etc. There is also a chapter on what we can learn from bats, how they are keystone animals, and what people can do to help bats. The book is full of lots of color photos of a variety of bats. The book is pretty easy to read, but some sections are a little science-heavy and may not be interesting to every reader. It reminded me a lot of The Owl Handbook by John Shewey - it's the same size book, full of color photos, and a mix of science and easily readable non-fiction writing. I really enjoyed this one and I hope to add a bat box to my back yard this year so that I can promote more bats in my yard.

Some quotes I liked:

"In 1953, [George] Griffin dragged a literal truckload of equipment to a pond near Ithaca, New York, and listened to bats as they hunted insects above the water. He noticed that foraging bats were adjusting their sound production patterns in flight. At this point, no one had suspected that bats could use echolocation to detect and capture small, fast-moving insects on the wing. Even Griffin himself was surprised, later writing that 'echolocation of stationary obstacles had seemed remarkable enough, but our scientific imaginations had simply failed to consider...this other possibility with such far-reaching ramifications.'" (p. 27)

"Bats can process acoustic information from echoes with impressive speed and accuracy. A recent study found that Mexican free-tailed bats can accurately discriminate between different textures. Bats were trained to associate coarser grit sandpaper with a mealworm reward. They easily discriminated between ten different sandpaper comparisons...Put another way, these bats were able to differentiate textures using sound with about the same accuracy of a human hand discriminating texture using touch." (p. 35-36)

"Two species of bats deserve special recognition for their ability to ambulate on the ground: the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat and the common vampire bat...To study how these bats move on the ground, researchers trained them to walk and run on a treadmill while recording them using high-speed video. Both bat species were observed to use a lateral sequence walk, a widespread form of walking in terrestrial animals where the left forelimb moves forward at the same time as the right hindlimb. Common vampire bats were notably very smooth during this movement, keeping their body at a constant height to move with a smooth, horizontal, catlike gait." (p. 104) [There is also a picture of a bat on a treadmill in the book!]

"As of 2013, more than 500,000 bats were estimated to be killed annually from wind farms in Canada and the United States...Bats either die by colliding with the turbines - which at the tip are moving at more than 200 miles per hour - or from trauma associated with rapid pressure changes near the turbines." (p. 240)

Sloth by Alan Rauch

This is a unique book all about sloths. It covers the modern sloth, the giant ground sloth that existed during the time of the dinosaurs, sloth anatomy, sloth (as in one of the seven deadly sins), sloths in current culture, and sloth conservation. While I LOVE sloths and was excited to read all about them, this book was disappointing. I felt like there was WAY too much focus on historic/giant ground sloth and not as many pictures as there could have been. I also feel like the chapter on sloth as one of the seven deadly sins didn't need to be included. That has nothing to do with the animal sloth. There was some good information but it wasn't amazing. I did appreciate that the author reiterated that any entity that allows people to hold sloths for money is NOT good for the sloths. Seeing them in person can be done but it is not good for them to be held, especially by hundreds of tourists/strangers.

"Recent studies have uncovered 'rod monochromacy' as part of the evolutionary development of sloths. What that means is that sloths, over time, have lost the cones that enable color vision and so the animals can only see the world in black and white." (p. 62-63)

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

I really enjoyed Stanley Tucci's book Taste but this one was not as enjoyable. It is less a food memoir and more of a food diary with a few extra thoughts thrown in some of the entries. I like Tucci's writing and he is funny - there were several times I laughed out loud reading. But there were also several times he seemed to imply his wife wasn't working but out cheating or something. I'm like did I miss something? Is this a weird on-going joke? Not sure if it's dig/joke because of their age difference, but those couple instances were off putting to me. The main themes I got were Tucci eats a LOT of pasta - like more than you can imagine, a lot and cooks a LOT - both for his family and dinner parties, on vacation, etc. At times the format did get old, but I did finish it. Would I highly recommend it or read it again? Probably not. But he is pretty funny and I'm glad I finished it.

Some quotes I liked:

"I like to make tomato sauce whenever I return home after a trip, or when I arrive at a vacation home or wherever I'm staying while filming. I find it grounding. After the sauce has cooked for even just a few minutes, the new space smells more like home." (p. 66)

[On celebrating Thanksgiving even though they live in London] "Why do we do it? Because we like turkey? No. Frankly those busty, fatless fowls are a pain in the ass to cook, even though somehow Felicity has found a method of cooking them brilliantly. But we do it, we celebrate it...[because] the idea of communing through food is beautiful and something to be celebrated. People always think of the turkey when they think of Thanksgiving, but to me it's the side dishes, the trimmings, those ubiquitous 'fixin's', that make that day's meal wonderful rather than the big bird itself." (p. 293)

"We watched a couple of short Christmas films. I tried to find the ones I grew up with made by Rankin/Bass in the sixties, like Rudolph and the one about how Santa came to be, but to no avail. I couldn't even find the original Grinch narrated by Boris Karloff. I am sure they're all lurking out there somewhere in the ether, but I am simply not capable of finding the right button on the right remote to bring them back for a nostalgic holiday visit."

From the Ground Up: the women revolutionizing regenerative agriculture by Stephanie Anderson

I was REALLY looking forward to reading this one but I had to quit. After reading the first couple of chapters I realized the author was hardly talking about the women-run farms that were supposed to be the focus of each chapter. It was more of a few pages about that farm and then the majority of the chapter about the evils of White men, industrial agriculture, colonization, how BIPOC people are discriminated against, etc. Not to say that what she was talking about wasn't true but I thought the point of the book was how these women are "revolutionizing regenerative agriculture." Not beating us over the head about how disadvantaged they still are in this field. This could have been an amazing book. Instead it was a lot of virtue signaling from a White woman. I would have much rather actually gotten more of the stories of these women and their regenerative farms.

May 2025 Cookbook Reviews

 

Snacking Dinners by Georgia Freedman

The subtitle of this cookbook "50+ recipes for low-lift, high-reward dinners that delight" didn't come through for me. I could easily have a few snacks for dinner but it felt like the majority of the snack recipes in here were either just a few random things tossed together on a plate or just as much work as making a quick grilled cheese or sauteed chicken. Overall, I wasn't impressed with this one and didn't find any recipes I wanted to try.

Cooking Out by Michael Symon

I think the purpose of this cookbook is to show that you can cook almost anything outside on a grill. And I agree with that, but I felt like a lot of the recipes in here would have just been easier to do inside. Can you bake a cake on a grill? Yes. Is that the easiest way to do it? Probably not. I guess depending on where you live if you just want to be outside doing all the cooking then this cookbook might be helpful. My husband and I grill year round but it's often me making sides inside while he grills the main course outside. There were also a few inconsistencies like for a recipe about grilled corn the picture shows corn with the husk pulled back (almost like a handle) but the recipe talks about marinating the corn - how are you marinating it with the husk still on? That kind of stuff was frustrating to me. Overall, the photos of the food are beautiful and I do think you might be inspired to try more outdoor cooking, but I didn't love it.

Cupcakes for Any Occasion by Rachel Lindsay

This is a really cute cupcake cookbook. I like that the author takes the first 2 chapters for basics - basic baking and decorating tools and basic recipes. My only (minor) complaint is that the recipes are all by weight or ounces. I understand baking is better when you weigh the ingredients but I don't know how much 500g or 17.5 oz of powered sugar is without doing some math work. Other than that the recipes and decorating ideas seem great. Most of the decorating doesn't seem too far out of reach for the average home baker. The decorating ideas are organized by type - like holidays, seasonal, animals, etc. Overall, it's a really cute book with a lot of creative ideas.

The Italian Summer Kitchen by Cathy Whims

Cathy Whims is a restaurant chef who first worked in an Italian restaurant in Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s. Even though she had been cooking Italian food at the restaurant, when she was able to visit Italy it changed her way of cooking. Instead of focusing on fancy, fussy recipes, she started focusing on more simple, ingredient-driven recipes. This cookbook shares what she's learned about Italian cooking during her career - both in restaurants and studying in Italy. The recipes are organized like a typical cookbook - starters, soups/salads, pasta/bread/pizza, entrees, desserts, and basics. Overall, the recipes look good and there were several I'd like to try.

The Garlic Companion by Kristin Graves

This is a great all around book about garlic. The author covers the history of garlic, recipes for using garlic, garlic crafts, how to grow your own garlic, and how to preserve garlic. As a huge fan of garlic I thought this book was great. I am personally not into garlic crafts but I will say the author really includes EVERYTHING to do with garlic. There were a few recipes I want to try and as an avid vegetable gardener I will say it is VERY easy to grow garlic and deer and rabbits leave it alone too. Once you start growing your own, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

May 2025 Reviews

 

How to Read a Chicken's Mind by Melissa Caughey 

This is a very quick read with tons of great photos all about how chickens minds work. The term "bird brain" is usually an insult and comes from how small birds brains are in relation to other animal brains. But there is a lot going on in a chicken's brain. Melissa Caughey covers 4 areas - how chickens and humans have interacted throughout history, how chickens communicate with each other, how chickens experience the world, and "chicken psychology" - what might be going on in a chicken's mind. If you've ever owned chickens you know they can be very smart and also each have their own personalities. They are MUCH more entertaining that you might imagine. This was a really quick read that gave a lot of good information about chickens and what might be going on in their minds.

A Well-Trained Wife: my escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

Tia Levings grew up in a loving home and attended a large Baptist megachurch in Jacksonville, FL. Within her church, there was a segment who followed Bill Gothard's Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). The IBLP organization focused on rigid rules and a strict hierarchy with men at the top and women and children under them. Her church discouraged dating and encouraged young, quick marriages. Tia married a man she barely knew who was already abusive even in the month or two of their "courting." But to her he was the man God sent her so she felt like if things weren't working it was her fault. Tia's husband continued to dive deeper and deeper into Christian patriarchy and was constantly searching for a church or theology that aligned with his disturbed views. They had several children very quickly and Tia was overwhelmed by both their life with several young children and her husband's erratic temper and likely mental illness. When she was 33 she and her children finally escaped.

Tia's story is horrific and almost sounds like something from another time and place, not modern-day America. She is also included in the Amazon Shiny Happy People docuseries about the IBLP organization and theology. She's a good writer and especially the chapters about her horrific years with her now ex-husband are visceral and you can feel her fear and pain as the reader. But there were several things that didn't make sense to me - 1) her immediate family was NOT like this and it's never stated that they wanted this life for her. I think if at ANY time she had told her parents what her husband was like (even before they married) they would have helped her and not told her to "submit more." 2) I personally didn't see how her childhood and their church in Jacksonville groomed her for IBLP and Christian patriarchy. Her parents seemed normal and loving and nothing she shared about the church seemed way off to me. 3) I think her biggest issue was not trusting herself and not asking questions. If she had followed her instincts she would have never married her now ex. And if she had asked her parents or other people her theological questions, I don't think they would have led her down this path. That's not to say any of this was her fault. But I just didn't really understand how her childhood groomed her for this.

I also felt so bad for her kids. I wish there had been a little bit more at the end about what, if any reckoning they had with religion and/or their Dad. It was also crazy how after she left her ex-husband, she had a TON of health issues. Once she got into trauma specific therapy, her physical ailments improved dramatically. The body really does keep the score. This is not a fun read at all. But I'm glad I read it and this stuff is still going on today all over the US so it's important to know how women get sucked into this and how they can get out.

Some quotes I liked:

[After 9/11] "The Christians we knew were angry about the burkas we saw on the news. It was un-Christian, they said, to force women to be invisible and uniform. But I silently laughed at that, American Christians had burkas too. I wore one. The denim jumper was the American burka." (p. 158)

"Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, recanted his teachings on courtship. He stopped publication of his books and disavowed his position on purity culture and Christianity. I felt like I understood conversion from the inside out - he admitted his complicity without deflection - and I trusted it. To this day, Harris stands out as not only a high-profile ex-evangelical, but also one of the few who's taken tangible action steps to address the harm done by his former work. He's unique in the field that way because the rest of them seem to sneak off and wait for their chance to come back." (p. 266)

Heart of the Hive by Hilary Kearney

This small book is packed with all kinds of information about bees. The anatomy of bees, how they operate as individuals within the colony, how they make honey and decisions, and much more. Plus there are tons of AWESOME photographs. I'm curious how the photographer was able to get some of them because they are so detailed and appear to be taken inside the hive. I've read a lot about bees and kept bees before (and hope to again) but I still learn things whenever I read books like this. If you're interested in honeybees, this is a great book with a lot of information.

Some quotes I liked:

"A portion of the microbes in the hive lives inside the bees' bodies and is passed from bee to bee during feeding and grooming. Studies have shown that it's critical for newly emerged worker bees to have contact with older workers...It turns out that these microbes are the key to how nestmates recognize each other. They give the colony a unique scent that all the bees share, and this acts like a 'members only' pass into the hive. To test this theory, researchers inoculated bees from the same colony with different microbes and found that afterward, they fought! They no longer recognized each other as being from the same hive, even though they shared genetics." (p. 55)

"Honey bees have an astonishing ability to learn. They can recognize and remember colors, shapes, patterns, and scents. They can count, add and subtract, sequence, and combine concepts that they learn...Bees have also been credited with understanding the concept of zero, an ability few other animals possess and one that even human children struggle with." (p. 82)

"Given the collaborative nature of comb building, some have wondered if older bees teach the younger ones how to do it. One study sought to answer this question by raising bee larvae in round cells. They found that even though the bees had never seen an example of hexagonal comb nor had contact with any bees who had, they still managed to build hexagons...[the bees in this study built comb that was hexagonal but not quite right] This suggests that while the use of the hexagon shape may be instinctual, the fine details of comb construction must be learned.

How to Share an Egg by Bonny Reichert

Bonny Reichert's father survived the Holocaust - losing his entire family except for 2 cousins. While he was open about what happened to him, his way of coping was to not dwell on anything bad and focus on the positive. Bonny was the youngest of 4 girls and was the "overly sensitive" one in her family. As a child she constantly tried to imagine what her father's experience would have been like and she also never wanted to upset him because how could her problems compare with surviving the Holocaust? After nearly starving during the Holocaust, Bonny's father's passion was food. He owned two restaurants and was ALWAYS thinking about food. Bonny also loved food and especially enjoyed spending time cooking with her maternal grandmother. As an adult, Bonny finds that food is her connection with her family - both current and her father's lost family. Bonny attends culinary school at 40 years old and later begins to reconnect with her father's history through the food he remembers his mother cooking and trying to recreate it. Several trips back to Germany and Poland (both with and without her father) also help Bonny reconcile her father's history with her own life and future. This is a unique memoir in that it's not 100% about her father or the Holocaust, and not 100% about her either. It's how her father's legacy of surviving the Holocaust is interwoven into her life primarily through food.

Dodge County, Inc.: big ag and the undoing of rural America by Sonja Trom Eayrs

Sonja Trom Eayrs grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota. The farm went back several generations and was the pride and joy of her family. Like many family farms, it was diverse - growing a rotation of crops for sale and a large vegetable garden for their family. In the late 1990s and early 2000s they noticed a huge change in local farming. Huge pig CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) were being constructed all around them. When anyone in the community tried to fight back or enforce current county codes, there was a LOT of pushback from the CAFO owners and operators. Not one to easily give up, Sonja and her family filed several lawsuits, started grassroots organizations, and fought back equally hard. Spoiler alert: they didn't win. But they do see some progress in other areas and help other communities with what they learned along the way.

I've read a LOT about factory farming and know full well all the evils that come from this way of "farming." But reading this book made my blood boil. In Eayrs community and nearby communities she witnessed Big Ag taking over the governments of these small towns with their yes men who would ignore the law or in some cases CHANGE IT to better suit the construction of the CAFOs and the destruction of the communities. Then to have the nerve to threaten anyone who spoke out - death threats, false police reports, dumping trash and dead animals on their lawn, etc. She had people interviewed for this book who still wanted to be anonymous 25 years later because they were still afraid of speaking out. After reading this book I decided that every one of the people who lied, schemed, threatened, paid off, and bullied their way into forcing these abominable CAFOs on these communities should be forced to live there. Not just on site, but inside the pig barns. They want to lie about the health issues around CAFOs - show me. Live in it yourself. Or we could just throw them in the manure lagoons... While this book is definitely not a happy ending or a triumphant David vs. Goliath story, it's still an important read. What Eayrs exposes is not just the evils of CAFOs but the way these corporations are taking over small towns - changing the government, forcing people out of generational land and farms - all to line their pockets. May each one of them rot in a special hell just for them of pig manure.

There were a lot of good quotes, I'll try to limit here:

"The bit of propaganda repeated most often by 'Big Ag' (big agriculture) lobbyists is that corporate agriculture 'feeds the world.'...But consider this: the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released numbers in 2018 that indicated the United States produced approximately seventy-three million hogs that year - the same number of hogs it produced in 1943." (p. 15)

"By signing a contract, young farmers essentially become low-wage corporate employees. Most growers do not receive a pay increase, not even a cost-of-living adjustment, during the contract term. Likewise, they do not get a pension contribution, profit sharing, or health insurance. Many economists and ag scholars deem the grower-integrator relationship today's version of sharecropping." (p. 37)

"The single most important organization in enabling the rapid takeover of hog country was undoubtedly the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and its state affiliates. The Farm Bureau has a chapter in every state and is active in 90 percent of all U.S. counties...the AFBF is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC and is comparable to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in terms of its influence and reach. But unlike the NRA, many people are unaware of the organization's partisanship and politics." (p. 49-50)

"Indeed, at the time, proximity to a meatpacking plant was the greatest predictor of a community's increased likelihood of COVID infection, illness, and death. Research published in July 2020 found that communities near meatpacking plants had more COVID deaths than would be expected by the baseline, in the range of 4,300 to 5,200 excess deaths, representing an elevation of between 37 and 50 percent above the baseline rate. The researchers also reported that these impacts were lessened in communities where the meatpacking plants chose to shut down. Yet most didn't, and those that did close reopened within an average of nine days." (p. 225)

[On keeping meatpacking plants open with the argument of a potential meat shortage] "In reality, it was a booming time for the meat-packers. In April 2020 the pork industry, led by Smithfield and Tyson, exported a record-setting amount of pork to China...the industry produces at least 25 percent more pork than needed for domestic consumption, and government data reveals that in the spring of 2020, Smithfield had 'hundreds of millions of pounds' of meat in cold storage, or enough to feed the entire country for several months even in the theoretical complete absence of more production." (p. 226-27)

"Officials estimated that during plant closures in April 2020, about seven hundred thousand pigs across the nation could not be processed each week and had to be euthanized...Many CAFO operators resorted to depopulation methods that the AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association) classifies as 'not recommended' but 'permitted in constrained circumstances.' Ventilation shutdown was a common procedure during the 2020 factory closures. Contract growers shut off the ventilation fans inside the CAFOs, closed the vents, turned up the heat, and piped a cocktail of carbon dioxide and steam into the barns. The animals died from overheating, suffocation, and poisoning...In Iowa in May 2020 a whistleblower employee at Iowa Select Farms, the state's largest pork producer, informed the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) when such an extermination would be taking place. DxE installed a hidden camera. The footage captured the sounds of hogs crying out in agonized pain and distress for hours. When employees arrived the next morning, some of the hogs were still alive. Workers killed them with bolt guns." (p. 228)

"Tom Butler, a North Carolina hog contract grower with about 7,500 to 8,000 hogs, told his integrator, Prestage Farms, that he would insist on sending his hogs to local butchers and distribute the meat to the hungry. His pitch was unsuccessful, and there was absolutely nothing Butler could do about it. Prestage owned the pigs...When Butler's integrator announced tentative plans to come to his farm and kill thousands of healthy adult hogs, he continued his plea to send the hogs to local butchers or just give them away to the community. Butler lives in a rural community where most residents know how to slaughter, preserve, and save pork. Finally, the integrator agreed to remove the overweight animals and transport them to their own meat processing plant in Wright County, Iowa. While an imperfect solution, it was preferable to the total waste that the industry was promoting." (229-30)

"The majority of voters in Iowa, including the majority of Republican voters, favor a statewide CAFO moratorium, and 75 percent favor stricter permitting requirements. For six consecutive years - annually since 2018 - members of the legislature introduced a bill cosigned by dozens of local organizations to enact a CAFO moratorium in Iowa and to tighten the regulation of existing facilities. Yet nothing happens. The state's legislature won't even bring the bill to the floor." (p. 243)

"In a final act of retribution against the Trom family, local industry operative spread manure on the land for nearly thirty-six hours the weekend of Lowell's [the author's father] visitation and funeral. They spread it just steps from the funeral home in Blooming Prairie on the day of the visitation...Spreading continued through the night and the following day. As our family gathered around my father's rural gravesite, several family members had to remain inside their vehicles, unable to bear the foul odor." (p. 264) [I hope every single person who did this drowns in a hog manure lagoon.]

Close to Home: the wonders of nature just outside your door by Thor Hanson

Biologist Thor Hanson encourages readers to look for all the nature they can find Close to Home. If you stop and actually look around, you'll be surprised just how much is going on in any given natural space around you. Hanson uses his own backyard in the Pacific Northwest to show how promoting biodiversity with both plants, animals/insects, and landscape can turn the average backyard into a natural wonder. The book is divided into three sections - seeing, exploring, and restoring. In the "exploring" section he really gets into all the ways to explore nature around you including focusing on what's above, below, in any nearby bodies of water, and nighttime. Throughout the book he gives other examples from around the world of how scientists made discoveries in small, often urban settings. His two main focuses are "citizen science" where everyday citizens can report on their local nature data to help scientists work on larger data/papers/discoveries and "backyard biology" - basically not going to a destination to look at nature but encouraging it in our own backyards or nearby nature spots. The book is a good mix of science and general nonfiction that would appeal to many readers. There are a few black and white photos or illustrations throughout the book but I would love to see a section of color photos of the author's backyard and some of the habitats he explores in the book. Overall, a great read that will inspire you to look more closely at all the nature that's around you.

Some quotes I liked:

"Too often our observation of birds - or any other wildlife - end at the moment of recognition. We look just long enough to see what something is, and then turn away, neglecting to ask the next logical (and arguably more interesting) question: What is it doing? To really understand what is happening in the natural world, we need to pay attention to behavior. That's not always easy. Watching closely takes time, a precious commodity that is often hard to spare..." (p. 75)

"Urban ecology is now considered a distinct field of study, focused on the many adaptations springing up in built environments that simply don't occur anywhere else...a growing number of studies have documented local species embracing new habits, from bats and birds feasting on insects at streetlights to brushtail possums, stone martens, and chipmunks denning in artificial structures." (p. 87-88)

The Grand Canyon: between river and rim by Pete McBride 

I read A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko about his experience hiking the length of the Grand Canyon with his friend Pete McBride. McBride is a photographer and he and Fedarko have had lots of adventures together with McBride photographing and Fedarko writing about their experience. After I read Fedarko's book I found that my library system had McBride's photo book from their trip. It is stunning. I do wish that I had this one while I was reading Fedarko's book so that I could see the larger, color photos of what was being described in the book. I've been to the Grand Canyon once and it is amazing. But this is beyond what most people see. Kevin Fedarko writes the introduction and Pete McBride writes a few pages at the beginning of each section of their hike to give some background to the photos. McBride's photography is amazing and if you haven't been to the Grand Canyon in person, this book will make you want to go.

April 2025 Cookbook Reviews

 

There's Always Room at the Table by Kaleb Wyse

I wasn't familiar with Kaleb Wyse or his website wyseguide.com but now I'll have to check that out. I love that in his bio at the back of this book it says he "...documents his life on the farm and shares his expertise on subjects like cooking, gardening, and canning." This cookbook is full of "farmhouse recipes" that you'll want to try. While Wyse's approach is more Midwest than Southern, there is a lot of focus on fresh produce and homestyle recipes. There are several recipes I want to try and overall this is a solid cookbook.

Small Batch Cookies by Edd Kimber

I thought this might be a good cookbook to be able to try out some cookie recipes without making 3 or 4 dozen. But I think it's a little too small batch - I want more than 6 cookies, especially if they're good! There is a wide variety of cookies here but I personally would prefer recipes that make a dozen.

Make More With Less by Kitty Coles

I wasn't sure what to expect with this one but it was a little disappointing. To me making more with less would be focusing on leftovers or how to not waste food. This seemed to be more a collection of recipes with pantry type items. To me the categories didn't really make sense. I did like that the chapter on chicken had a recipe for stock from chicken bones, but otherwise I wasn't overly impressed with this one and didn't see any recipes I wanted to try.

When Southern Women Cook: history, lore, and 300 recipes with contributions from 70 women writers by America's Test Kitchen

"Throughout history, food and cooking have sustained women as they have carved out a place for themselves in society and their communities. This is particularly poignant when you listen to women's stories in the American South; in this book, we highlight those stories, exploring how food has enabled women to overcome adversity, provide for themselves and their families, advance society, exercise their creativity, and claim their identities." (p. x) This first few sentences in the Introduction of this comprehensive cookbook/Southern women's food history book perfectly sums up what you're about to read. This is a cookbook. But it is much more than a cookbook as well. Their are 14 chapters of recipes, but each chapter also includes LOTS of other information either about the food/recipes, historical women, and/or current women working in food in the South. The recipes are created by America's Test Kitchen but using both historical and current recipes to find either the best combination or an easier home cook recipe. This is one I will definitely buy. There are several recipes I'd like to try and I could definitely see this being a cookbook you turn to regularly.