Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste

Loved, loved, loved this book. Picked it up on a whim and then couldn't put it down again. Halarious! One of those snort-out-loud kind of books....I completely reccommend it if you are looking for something completly different from all the other books out there. So good in fact that now I am half-way through her travel book called "No Touch Monkey!" and it's right up there with "Dirty Sugar Cookies". Ayun Halliday doesn't hold back on anything and for that I say, thank you!!

As devout foodies, we bought blindly Ayun's book from the food section. While we may have been expecting an Anthony Bourdain description of food, we found ourselves laughing out loud to the point of tears remembering our own childhood. This book is not about gourmet food but it was about how food shapes our lives. A definite must read!

Ayun Halliday is one of my all time favorite writers. Her style cracks me up and I love her cooking flair in this book. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to cook and also has a sense of humor. Ayun rules!

I read it slowly as to savor it! I especially liked reading about the quest for Gran-Gran's recipe box!!!!! I enjoyed Ayun's sugar cookies, dirt and all, every evening for over a month. I read a tasty morsel each night (to help me unwind after a crazy day of summer library program) as long as I could keep my eyes open. Sometimes I stayed awake long enough to mark the page with my new magnetic monkey bookmark recently acquired from a friend who is scared of monkeys. Sometimes I was just conscious enough to dog ear my page before nodding off so I could find my spot the next night. (Don't tell anyone a librarian would do that to a book, but hey it's my book, not the library's copy!) Sometimes I passed out before marking my spot only to roll over and squash my glasses and kick the book onto the floor. Anyhoo. I woke up this morning determine to finish this long, delicious meal. After enjoying the index, (Ayun, you crack me up! Did you index it your ownself?) I flipped through to the two pages before the last page to find an amazing replica of a squashed pill bug. I thought, dang, whoever designed this book has quite a sense of humor...realistic drawings of flies lighting on the first page of each chapter and now this life-like bug at the end. Jeeze it looks so real, it's almost 3-D. Wait a minute...it was 3-D...I flicked the squashed pill bug out of the back of my copy and just had to laugh. Very ironic. He must have crawled aboard on one of those nights the book got kicked to the floor. The pill bug skeleton is lurking with the dust bunnies under my bed, but the stain remains! Anyway...thanks again for another great read, Ayun! (P.S. I loved the cover!!!!! Disgusting AND sweet. You should have seen the looks I got in the doctor's office waiting room...)

As a professional cook and boringly-avid reader of coobooks and food memoirs, this one--dare I say it--hit the spot. Halliday's self-deprecating honesty, sense of crazy fun and scary talent of total recall about growing up in the seventies and all the cream-of soup casseroles that entailed made it a read-in-one-sitting book. All that with some saliva-inducing recipes. So fun!