A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

A great combo of story telling and recipes!

A book that begins with a father, surveying the dinner table, remarking, "You know, we eat better at home than most people do in restaurants" --- how can you not be instantly hooked? Especially when you learn he's not praising a wife who's studied at Cordon Bleu and whips out four-star masterpieces night after night. As his daughter tells us: "There were hot dogs sometimes, and cans of baked beans. Our garlic came in a jar, minced and ready, and our butter was known to go rancid." So what was so great about meals at the Oklahoma City home of Morris Wizenberg? "It was the steady rhythm of meeting in the kitchen every night, sitting down at the table, and sharing a meal. Dinner didn't come through a swinging door, balanced on the arm of an anonymous waiter; it was something that we made together. We built our family that way --- in the kitchen, seven nights a week. We built a life for ourselves, together around that table. And although I couldn't admit it then, my father was showing me, in his pleasure and in his pride, how to live wholly, hungrily, loudly." And so it came to pass, right there on page two of "A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table", that I fell in love with Molly Wizenberg. Because she had what so many of us want --- a childhood with a steady rhythm and loving parents. And because she had incorporated what she learned during those meals so she can, without embarrassment, write directly and emotionally about her family and its meals. This book has 50 recipes, and many of them are fine and useful, if a bit tilted in favor of cakes and breads, pancakes and French toast. But they're not the reason that [...]--- the blog that got Molly Wizenberg started, the blog that got her a gig at Bon Appetit magazine and a book contract --- was named "the world's top food blog" by The Times of London. I mean, her father's recipe for potato salad called for ranch dressing and three-quarters of a cup of mayonnaise. That ain't gourmet. The reason to read this book --- the reason to put down whatever you're currently reading and devour these 300 pages right now --- is that it connects the food to the people who cooked it and ate it. It's a memoir about a family, a real family. About a father who loved crossword puzzles, Dylan Thomas, his kids, his wife in high heels, a cold beer on Saturdays. And his daughter. A kid who is loved by her father and knows it --- life will have a hard time crushing her. Molly Wizenberg left Oklahoma for graduate study in France before deciding she really wanted to do something with food. To support herself, she sold olive oils and taught English in Paris, then moved to Seattle and worked at a Pilates studio and as a publicist for an academic publisher. She didn't have many dates. Her first major kiss came rather late, in my view; her first big love (in Paris, of course) was unconsummated, unless you give him extra points for introducing her to Tarte Tatin. Not exactly a "career path". But the m

I expected this book to be about food, since the aurhor's blog, Orangette, is my favorite among several I read, and a number of the recipes I have tried, from granola to boiled kale (neither are included in this book, but are available on the Orangette site), now make regular appearances on our table. As delicious as the recipes are, however, this is not primarily a cookbook. The recipes are a bonus feature in as lovely a book of essays as I remember reading in--well, I think--ever. I don't much like essays, usually, but then I didn't think I'd like boiled kale either, and we're having that once a week now. If you skip the essays and only make the recipes, you'll miss the best of the feast. Ms. Wizenberg's stories of finding her place have obviously been carefully crafted, with deft imagery, but they are also page-turners. You can't wait to see how each little episode ends, even though you know it ends with a recipe and the subject matter is familiar to us all. She dusts the ordinary, whether she's writing about dough or death, with a shimmer of something that makes it special.

I had to save a little for leftovers. Have you ever had a dinner so good you had to save a little bit at the end of the meal just so you could have a little left to savor the next day? Well, this was Molly's book. I stayed up until 1 a.m. reading this book and when I was finally to the last chapter I just couldn't take that it was going to be over. This morning I got up and made coffee and the Scones from the recipe in A Homemade Life, and sat down to savor the last chapter and the scones. It was perfect both the book and the scones. The scones may very well be the best I have ever made and that says a lot considering I have written about a dozen blog posts related to finding the perfect scone. Really, I'm so glad for Orangette as I know the story does not have to end. I was only a mild follower of the blog before this book, now I want to go back and read every post. All the recipes look amazing as well.

I have only made it up through the coconut macaroons, and I have already cried. Twice. I preordered this book, being a longtime Orangette reader with unshaken trust in Molly's palate. The combination of ingredients in her Buchons Au Thons alone changed the way I consider food, flavor, and a can of tuna. More than that, Molly writes about food the way I feel about food -- simple meals are intertwined with memories and people and how we become who and what we are. Even if I someday manage a perfect souffle, I will still crave my mom's egg salad sandwiches, white bread only, on Sundays in July. I tend to fall into Nigella Lawson books -- she makes cooking look SO sexy and fun -- but the domestic goddess is missing an accessibility Molly manages easily. Her voice and the sometimes heart-rendingly personal stories she tells with each recipe really do bring you to her kitchen table. And then they give you a cookie. From its simple, delightful design to the stories to the recipes that come with USEFUL instructions (seriously, so many recipes fail at this), this is already one of my favorite cookbooks. This, to me, is what food is about. If I have one complaint, it's that the simple design doesn't allow for glossy 8x10 photos of each recipe's results. Thank god she's still got Orangette for that!