It’s called a cookbook, but it’s more than that. To me it’s a combination of a memoir, a scrapbook, a photo album, a celebration of food, and, of course, a great collection of recipes. There are professional quality photos of her ranch and animals, her children, and the food she loves to prepare. Ree Drummond’s blog is famous for her step-by-step photos of her recipes. Many of those are in this book.
Pioneer Woman Cooks is organized by the following chapters:

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Soups
• Starters, Party Food, and Drinks
• Pasta and Pizza
• Supper
• Sides
• Sweets
• Canning

There are so many good recipes that I’m at a loss as to which ones to highlight. Since I’ve only tried one recipe so far, I think I’ll tell about that one: Whiskey-Mustard Meatballs. They are so yummy and unique. The meatballs are a combination of ground beef and pork, plus panko bread crumbs, eggs and spicy mustard.

After cooking the meatballs they are removed to a plate. Then a sauce is made using whiskey, beef broth, more spicy mustard, and heavy cream. When that has thickened the meatballs are put back into the sauce. I served them over egg noodles. The alternate suggestion in the book is to serve them between a split dinner roll as sliders. Next time I’ll try that.
There’s no doubt about it – this is a great cookbook. But in my mind, it also belongs outside the kitchen.  It makes a terrific coffee table book. Each page is joy to look at. I took a picture of a couple of pages so you can see what I’m talking about. This one is a great recipe for Corn Chowder on one side and the sweetest picture of her little boys at their pond.
I love this page with the pictures of a dirty kitchen. Obviously, Ree Drummond’s a real cook.
Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier, William Morrow Cookbooks, March 2012, 304 pages.

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Published by Penguin, March 2012

Last week I received two unsolicited cookbooks. They both gave me hours and hours of happy reading. Today I’d like to tell you about the first one and next week I’ll tell you about the second.

The Book Club Cookbook is a revised and updated version of the author’s original 2004 edition. The authors conducted a wide ranging survey. (I participated – probably why I got the book.) They collected information about favorite books read by book clubs along with food served at the meetings.

The result is a 474 page tome that’s a listing of the best pairings of great literature and great food. This is also a great resource to help book clubs pick their book list. And yes, it has some fantastic recipes in it. Many of them are from authors and/or their families.

There is so much info in this book that I was amazed. It’s chock full of useful stuff. To show you what I mean, let me share a few books I like and the food suggestions.

• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. When talking about each book, I found several paragraphs about the story. Then the recipe(s) begins. For this book there is a pairing of Teriyaki Beef Skewers and Teriyaki Sauce. In the story, when Sayuri first met the Minister, he is eating marinated beef on skewers. So, we learn how to make the beef and the sauce. At the end there is a section called “Novel Thoughts.” Here various book clubs share their experience with this book.
• In The Secret Life o Bees (Sue Monk Kidd) I was hoping for something with honey. I got more than I hoped for. If you’ve read the book, you’ll remember the beekeeping sisters served Honey Cake to the Daughters of Mary. In The Cook Book Club the Honey Cake recipe is one that the author’s husband created just for her book’s release. There were several other clever ideas from other bookclubs, such as drinking coke with a peanut in it. Do you remember that in the book?
• Half-Broke Horses is a novel I’m reading for one of my book clubs next month. So, of course, I enjoyed The Book Club Cookbook’s discussion of the story. The protagonist’s cooking is very basic, so the recipe for Cowboy Hash was just right. It was created by a book club member in Pennsylvania. Another bookclub created the Cornbread Fritters. There were lots of very good suggestions from other book clubs.

And that’s how the whole book goes. There are 100 books covered. Imagine! In the back there are two very good indexes. One index is for the food and the other is arranged by authors and titles and then by genre. A very helpful resource, but it also makes for great reading. Thanks Judy Gelman and Vicki Krupp.

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Some things have changed since those days. For one thing, I no longer deep-fat fry the tacos shells. It’s not because we didn’t like them that way or because we were attempting to de-fat our diet. It was a lot of work and made my stove a greasy mess. Today we use good quality tortillas and warm them in the microwave or briefly on a grill.

When I had the chance to review a new book titled Just Tacos, at first I thought I’d pass. I figured I had a good grasp on the subject. But something was nagging at me to give it a try. I think it was the subtitle: 100 Delicious Recipes for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. It was a tease. Can there really be 100 different ways to make tacos?

The answer is yes, there really are 100 ways to make fantastic, good tasting tacos. And they are so much more than your everyday taco-bell, taco-truck tacos. These easy to make and  easy to eat sandwiches are gourmet level tacos.

The beginning of the book gets us going with an excellent basic chapter on tortillas, including several recipes for corn and flour tortillas as well as flavored tortillas. There are beautiful pictures and detailed instructions for handmade tortillas. It’s important because a poor quality tortilla can ruin a taco. It pays to buy the best or make them yourself.

A look at the table of contents gave me a look at the wide variety of tacos in this book. There are Vegetable tacos, Seafood Tacos, Chicken, Turkey, and Duck Tacos. In addition I found Pork and Beef Tacos and Breakfast Tacos and Quesadillas, Sopes, and Tostadas. Nothing is left out as far as I can tell.

Let me list a few of my favorite recipes so you can get an idea of the variety and quality of the recipes in this book.

• Swiss chard and potato tacos
• Lobster with mango salsa
• Shredded chicken with onion (my husband’s favorite)
• Chorizo and Potato Tacos
• Lamb Braised in Guajillo Sauce
• Fried eggs ranchero style

There are so many salsas tucked into this little book as well as little tricks and interesting tidbits of culinary history and lore. If you love Mexican food as much as I do, this will be a great resource.

About the author:

Shelley (Shelton) Wiseman is a multi-lingual food editor, teacher, and cookbook author. She developed recipes for Gourmet magazine for 12 years. Shelley has cooked professionally in France, Mexico, and the United States for 25 years, is co-author of The Mexican Gourmet Cookbook, and has hosted her own radio program in Mexico City, The Creative Cook.

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It’s lemon season here in northern California and they are plentiful. Here are some of my favorites: lemon chicken, lemon pie, lemon muffins, lemon bars, lemon anything.

I was thinking about lemon cake as I finished listening to the audiobook, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Amy Bender. The author was asked if she had a recipe for Lemon Cake and she did. Here’s what she had to say about her lemon cake and her book:

This is a recipe for lemon cake, similar to the one in my book, but different in some crucial ways. So, the cake in my book is also a lemon cake, but it comes packed with other stuff — the main character, Rose, requests a lemon cake for her ninth birthday, and I liked the idea of her wanting a type of cake that is sweet and sour at once. As soon as she bites in, that cake wakes up a certain new capacity in her, where she can taste the unknown feelings of the chef in the food prepared, and what is normally one of the most lovely and innocent parts of childhood comes packed with complication. 

And so begins Rose’s odyssey through the world of food tastes. Her brother’s friend George, a science geek, helped Rose experiment with food and her feelings. He took her to various restaurants, had her taste the food, and tell him what the cooks were feeling when they made the food. Then he asked the cooks what was happening when they were preparing the food. Their answers always matched Rose’s. Rose’s childhood was marred by her strange affliction. The only comfort she found was in manufactured food.

I’m sure most readers of this book have done what I did – tried to guess the cook’s feelings as we tasted various foods. Nothing happened for me, thank goodness. My feelings remained with the ingredients. I decided to try Amy Bender’s Lemon Cake recipe. I sincerely doubted I would feel sad. The result was just the opposite. As you can see, I took the liberty of changing the name of the cake so it tells you how it made me feel.

Happy Lemon Cake

Ingredients:

• 10 tablespoons butter, plus a little extra for greasing the pan
• 2½ cups all-purpose flour, plus a little extra for flouring the greased pan
• 2 cups confectioners’ sugar, plus 1 heaping tablespoon if you decide to make syrup
• Grated zest of 1 organic lemon
• 3 large eggs
• ½ cup milk, warmed in a small saucepan
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice (optional)

Directions:

1. Dice the butter and melt it in the microwave at low power.
2. Use a pastry brush to grease the bottom and sides of a 10-inch round cake pan with butter. Sprinkle the pan with flour, turn it all around to spread the flour evenly, and tap out any excess.
3. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
4. Sift the sugar into a bowl. Add the lemon zest. Mix the sugar and zest well with your fingers, then whisk in the eggs. When the eggs and sugar are thoroughly combined, whisk in the melted butter and warm milk. Add the flour and baking powder, whisking constantly throughout.
5. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 8 minutes. Lower the heat to 300°F and cook about 40 minutes more. The cake is finished when the blade of a knife inserted in its center comes out dry.
6. Remove the finished cake from the oven, unmold it onto a cooling rack, and let cool.
7. Just after cooking you can, if you like, use a pastry brush to coat the cake with syrup. Just boil 4 tablespoons water with 1 heaping tablespoon confectioners’ sugar for a couple of minutes. Allow it to cool, then stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Brush the syrup on the still-warm cake.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

It really is a happy cake. I didn’t think it needed frosting at all. I hope you’ll gice it a try with all the fresh lemons available right now.

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Subtitle

Author: Mennonite Central Committee

Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing, October 1, 2011

My Rating: A

I’ve contributed to and helped publish church cookbooks over the years. Those books usually contains favorite recipes from the congregation’s best cooks. Well, here’s one that is the mother, no make that grandmother, of all church cookbooks.

Over six hundred recipes from the best cooks among Amish and Mennonite congregations is an amazing set of recipes. Because many of the church’s members raise their own food, the recipes reflect that background. There are the standard chapters like main dishes, side dishes, breads and desserts. But there are also chapters on cheesemaking, pickling, jams, fruit butters and even soap making.

There are two chapters I think are unique. One is “Traditional Classics” and the other is “Grandma’s Remedies.”

In “Traditional Classics” the chapter starts with the social events that are standard within the community: Weddings, Funerals, Quilting Bees, Barn Raisings, and Threshings. What made it fun for me was to see what was on the menu at these events and the enormous quantity of food that was prepared. Keep in mind they do not call in professional caterers. This is do-it-yourself with help from friends and family. Here’s an example from a typical Barn Raising for 250 men:

24 loaves of bread; 5 pounds butter; 21 crocks potatoes, boiled and riced; 4 large roasters of gravy beef; 8 crocks carrots, boiled and buttered; 3 crocks carrot and cucumber pickles; 45 large jars applesauce; 12 crocks sweet apple schnitz and prunes; 350 Amish doughnuts; 5 gallons maple syrup; and 45 lemon drop pies.

There is usually enough left over to feed all of the women and children, usually numbering anywhere from, 50 to 90.

In “Grandma’s Remedies” there are recipes for a bread and milk poultice, lots of uses for honey, vinegar, and teas, hair tonic, liniment, mustard plaster and so forth. Here’s an interesting one:

Lily Whiskey

Fill a jar with the petals of the Madonna Lily. Get a bottle of good quality whiskey. Fill the jar so the petals are all covered. As they settle down, add more whiskey. This is especially good for burns and sores.

Scattered throughout the book are quotes about food and sometimes life in general. For example,

“Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers.”

I know I’ve said it before but my favorite cookbooks are those that read like a good novel. Treasured Amish and Mennonite Recipes makes for great reading. I’ve been on a roll lately reading about the Amish and this was a very nice fit. I’ll recommend this book to foodies who love the old-fashioned recipes from an area of the world devoted to the simple life.

About the Author:

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) works alongside local churches and communities in more than 50 countries, including Canada and the United States, to carry out disaster relief, sustainable community development, justice and peace-building work in the name of Christ. MCC also seeks to build bridges to connect people and ideas across cultural, political and economic divides.(from the publisher)

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If the answers to those questions are a.) within the past few months, b.) it had no taste at all, and c.) it came from the store or a restaurant, chances are you ate a modern-day relative of a real tomato.

“Perhaps our taste buds are trying o send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It comtains fourteen times as much sodium.” – from Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabroak.

That quote came from a new book that has caught my attention in a big way. I’ve noticed for quite some time that supermarket tomatoes have zero taste. But I like tomatoes in salad and other favorite dishes. I know they aren’t like “real” tomatoes from the garden or the farmers market, but I still buy them.

Not any more. Tomatoland made me take a good look at the tomato industry and I didn’t like what I saw at all. The author, Barry Estabrook decided to find out why we can’t buy a decent fresh tomato and discovered that it’s not a simple question and answer.

He learned that Florida “accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the U.S., and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes..” It’s an example of industrial agriculture at it’s worst.

In addition to growing a taste-less fruit, many Florida tomato growers are responsible for some very shameful practices: modern-day slavery and inhumane treatment of the tomato workers. There are shady legal and political practices as well. Numerous herbicides and pesticides are sprayed on the tomato fields, often right on the workers.

Besides learning how awful these growers are, Tomatoland taught me a lot about plant biology and the genetic and political history of our beloved plant. For instance, I had no idea tomatoes originally came from Peru and were the size of peas. The book is filled with the stories of the people surrounding the subject of tomatoes. Barry Estabrook brought them all to life.

There is no doubt about it – this is good reading. It’s part expose, part history, and all very good journalism. I dare you to read this book and not want to DO something. That’s what happened to me.

I’m now calling myself a Tomato Activist. What does that mean? For me, here’s how I’m defining it:

1. For one thing, I’ll never again buy or eat a fresh tomato unless I know exactly where it came from and under what conditions it was grown.
2. I will ask at restaurants where their tomatoes came from. If I’m not satisfied, I’ll ask to have the tomato removed and I’ll let them know why.
3. I have letters drafted to my senators and congressmen asking them to stick their noses into the working conditions for Florida tomato growers.
4. I’ll can enough tomatoes to keep us supplied with tomatoes until the next season.
5. I’m telling everyone I know to read Tomatoland.

I hope you’ll join me and become your own Tomato Activist.

About the author:

James Beard Award-winning journalist Barry Estabrook was a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine for eight years, writing investigative articles about where food comes from. He was the founding editor of Eating Well magazine and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Men’s Health, Audubon, and the Washington Post. He lives and grows tomatoes in his garden in Vermont.

Ask for this book at your local library and/or your local bookstore. Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook is also available at Amazon. (I am an Amazon Associate.)

This post is linked to Weekend Cooking, a weekly feature at Beth Fish Reads. Click the button below and it will take you there..

Then a friend took me to wine-tasting that was different. At this tasting, wine was paired with food! It made all the difference in the world for me. The young woman helping us gave me a basic education in wine that got me enthusiastic about learning more.

Here’s what the young woman did to introduce me to wine: she had us take a little sip and carefully, thoughtfully, taste it. Then we took a bite of the food and took another sip of wine. I was surprised! The wine tasted different when paired with food. That did it for me. I had to learn more about how to enhance the taste of food with wine.

I have to tell you the total experience was a pleasure. The quiet farm country, the majestic tasting room. I liked the dark wood cabinets, tables and huge walnut bowls filled with oranges. It was very peaceful.

This whole experience had me heading to the library’s website. I was happy to find a new cookbook written by a local, Sonoma County winemaker, Christine Hanna. The Winemaker Cooks: Menus, Parties, and Pairings by Christine Hanna was just what I needed.

Christine has been involved in her family’s vineyards and gardens since childhood. She is now the president of the winery (Hanna Winery). She’s very knowledgeable when it comes to wine, but she also loves growing and cooking her own food. Her love of food and entertaining is very evident in this book.

Christine organized the book by the four seasons. Within the seasonal sections there are five menus and then recipes follow each menu. The only way I know to describe the type of food in this book is to call it California-wine-country-chef style. It’s all very rich in a healthy way. It’s seasonal, organic, locally grown and raised, and includes wine, both in cooking and paired with food. I’ll give you a sample menu. This is a Summer Weeknight Dinner:

Haricort Verts, Goat Cheese and Watermelon Salad

Grilled California Shrimp Kabobs with Raita

Saffron and Pine Nut Couscous

Sugared Icebox Plums with Basil

And the wine? An aromatic Riesling

The only recipes we’ve tried from the book are the ones for fava beans and for fresh peas and fresh onions. But I have two I want to try this week – Artichoke, Prosciutto, and Chive Frittata as well as the Haricort Verts Salad mentioned above. (Haricort Verts, I’ve learned, are skinny French green beans.)

I liked the talk about food in this cookbook, but I really appreciated the talk about wine. The author took a bunch of questions she’s asked every day, and scattered them throughout the book with the answers. Here are the ones, as a beginner, I found most helpful.

• How do I decipher a wine label?
• How do wines get their color?
• What does it mean when a wine is “corked”?
• How do I pair wine with food?
• How do I store my wine?

For me this was a good book to start me on my new path of understanding the pairing of wine and food. The book was filled with color photographs by Sheri Giblin. Not a picture for every recipe, but so many that I was satisfied. A perfect book to read from beginning to end and then go back and dabble at different menus, dishes and sidebars.

I’m still a wine novice and will probably be one for a while. But now I know how I want to learn more – one bottle at a time. I brought home a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. It was delicious when paired with a light salad of vegetables and rice. The sauce was not too acidic, as that can make the wine taste bitter. See? Lesson one went well.

Tell me about your wine experiences. Novice or connoisseur? Do you have a favorite wine? Do you like to pair wine with food? If so, what is your favorite pairing?

The Winemaker Cooks by Christine Hanna (Chronicle Books, 2010) can be purchased at Amazon. (I’m an Amazon Associate.) For more about Christine and/or Hanna Wines visit their very nice website HERE.

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“The horizon was like a perfect circle, a great embrace, and within it lay the cornfields, still green, and the yellow wheat stubble, miles and miles of it, and the pasture lands where the white-faced cattle led lives of utter content,” wrote Willa Cather in The Best Years.

Among those fortunate enough to have been born and raised in the Midwest, this is how we think of it. The Heartland holds us, comforts us, makes us stand up straight. Even if we leave, it still claims a place in our hearts.

Thus begins a new book just out this month that completely spoke my name. Heartland: The Cookbook by Judith Fertig is, yes a cookbook, but it’s a lot more. This book celebrates everything that is so wonderful about the very center, the heart of the United States. That would be it’s soil, all it’s vegetation. it’s rivers and lakes, it’s weather, it’s animals, and all the people who live and have lived there.

The first sections of the book makes for very good reading. The Introduction is everything a person wants to know about the Midwest. It’s very interesting, even for those of us who have lived there. The Pantry section sets out some key techniques and recipes that are basic for many of the other recipes in the book. The remaining chapters are about breads, breakfast, appetizers and drinks, salads and soups, main dishes and desserts. Finishing the book was a good listing of resources and an index.

There are so many dishes I want to try but let me just show you my top ten. My plan is to share them with you as I make them.

1. Sweet Potato Waffles With Whipped Orange Butter
2. No-Knead Clover Honey Dough for various rolls and breads
3. Grilled Pear Salad with Bleu Cheese and Honey
4. Beet Queen Salad with Smoked Goat Cheese (including how to smoke the cheese)
5. Two Drinks: Farm Girl Cosmo and Garden Gimlet
6. Crisp Refrigerator Dill Pickles
7. Blackberry-Lavender Syrup
8. Apple-Smoked Trout with Horseradish Creme Fraiche
9. Carmalized Cabbage Rolls
10. Honeycrisp Apple Upside-Down Pie

I received this book from the publisher, Andrews McMeel, via NetGalley. That means I have the digital book for only 60 days. But, I loved this book enough that I am going to buy my own copy. It’s one I know I’ll read, use, and treasure for a long time. It’s perfect for people like me with a Heartland heart.

This post is linked to Weekend Cooking, a weekly feature at Beth Fish Reads. Click the button below and it will take you there.

CHEF’S WALKS SEATTLE

Author: Tom Douglas and Shelley Lance

Publisher: Amazon Kindle, 2011

Although this book is only available to Kindle owners, I wanted to tell everyone about it because it’s such a great idea. Here’s the basic premise: Ask a well-known chef/restauranteur/cookbook author to write about the best places to eat and visit in his hometown. Divide the chapters into neighborhoods so a visitor could walk from place to place. Include maps, info about each establishment (name, address, phone number, and website address) and tell us what’s the best thing to eat or see at each place. And, if it’s not too much trouble, could you share a few recipes?

That’s what you’ll find in this new venture that features Seattle, Washington. Tom Douglas is the guide. He’s an award-winning chef, the owner of five restaurants in Seattle, and the author of three cookbooks. I love Tom’s approach. He takes the reader down the streets and into the food places and tells us what’s the best thing to eat at each place. He also takes us to great bookstores, gift shops, museums, and other attractions.

There are five chapters covering the five major neighborhoods in Seattle. Each section has one of Tom’s special recipes. Each section also has an essay on a topic appropriate to that area. I especially enjoyed his essay on the rising wine industry in Washington state.

I had no trouble reading this book on my Kindle. I did have trouble seeing this maps at the beginning of each chapter. If I had an ipad with a Kindle app, this would be the perfect companion for a visit to Seattle. I’m very hopeful that this idea will spread to other great food towns. Think about your own hometown or favorite city. Wouldn’t you love to have a chef guide you to his/her favorite places and tell you what’s the best thing on, or off, the menu?

About the author:

Tom Douglas is well known for helping to define Northwest cuisine and igniting the Seattle restaurant scene, winning the James Beard Award for Best Northwest Chef in 1994. His restaurants include Dahlia Lounge; the Greek-inspired Lola; Serious Pie pizzerias; Palace Kitchen; Pike Place Market’s iconic seafood restaurant, Etta’s; and the newly opened Seatown. He also owns Dahlia Bakery, famous for its Triple Coconut Cream Pie. Douglas is the author of “Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen,” named Best American Cookbook by the James Beard Foundation, “Tom’s Big Dinners,” and “I Love Crab Cakes!” (from Amazon)

Chef’s Walks Seattle with Tom Douglascan be purchased at Amazon ($3.99)

I love to talk about food almost as much as I love to eat it. Other bloggers like to talk about food too, and I hope you’ll also read their food posts. For more, click the button below. It will take you over to Beth Fish Reads and her Weekend Cooking feature.

Well, thank goodness, someone decided to re-publish the I Hate To Cook Book – fifty years later. I loved this book back then, but not because I hated to cook. I loved it for Peg Bracken’s attitude toward food and the life of women in general. With her unique brand of humor she pulled us all together in a sisterhood that forged a new era in food preparation.

The first thing I remember about Peg Bracken is this wonderful piece of advice. She told me (okay, all of us) to fix a nice fortifying drink prior to a big job in the kitchen. Yes, she really did. I have thought of her and that gem of wisdom often over the years, especially during those times when I knew I was facing many hours of food preparation.

Fixing that drink was to be a symbol of my attitude: This is fun. I can do this and enjoy it. I think Peg often made it a martini. Mine was a less glamorous coke, sometimes with a little rum in it.

In I Hate To Cook Book you will find recipes but overall it’s a cookbook that you actually should just read. You’ll like the humor in addition to some very good tips. The number one tip from this book that I’ve kept all these years is in the first chapter.

In the first chapter Peg suggests that a homemaker develop a list of thirty tried and true everyday main dishes. This chapter actually has thirty recipes that the reader can use. The idea is to have a month’s worth of meals that you can confidently cook. Then you just keep repeating them, especially if they are the ones your family loves. You can stop inventing the wheel every night.

The remainder of the book covers menus and recipes for dinner parties, children’s parties, last-minute suppers, as well as chapters on side dishes, desserts, and so forth. There is one chapter containing seventy-five household hints that is still excellent.

I must say that the majority of the recipes are outdated. There is a heavy use of canned soups and other canned items. However, in Peg Bracken’s defense, this was the cutting edge back in the 1950s/60s.

For me, reading I Hate To Cook Book was a lovely experience of remembering the good old days. I recommend reading this book to all of you who remember Peg Bracken’s writing. For those of you younger than me, it may remind you of dishes your mom used to serve. For the rest of you it makes great research into the food customs of the mid-twentieth century.

I borrowed my copy from the library but The I Hate to Cook Bookis also available at Amazon. (I am an Amazon Associate.)

Talking about food is a regular feature on my blog and other blogs as well. Please visit Beth Fish Reads for more Weekend Cooking posts.