This narrative-style book is more about the author's quest to make everything from scratch than the recipes she provides. Different chapters cover her experiences raising chickens, making cheese, raising goats and trying to duplicate breakfast cereal. Each recipe is rated for make it vs buy it, hassle factor and a cost comparison. The prices are outdated of course but it is still an interesting and possibly useful study.

read 1/223/2024 ( )

So fun and interesting! Per other reviews, I’m not using the recipes, but the anecdotes and inspiration are wonderful. ( )

Lots of good info and good stories of family life. My favorite is all the difficulties they had keeping their chickens alive and how they discovered that they were not. duck. people. ( )

This is a delightful read! Her failures -- recounted with humor -- are very funny. Harold's been reading bits of this, and he's nit usually a food reader, and Michelle had me read to her from it a few times, so it's been broadly popular in the family. One of the big surprises for me was her real understanding if,and sympathy for, all the different pulls on someone trying to cook for a busy family. I knew she was a kindred spirit when she described grocery shopping and being torn by the competing pulls of convenience, ethics, health, environmentalism, and more. I also loved her account if how KFC on the sofa with a dvd can produce more warm family memories than absolutely perfect (and absolutely exhausting) homemade fried chicken. She hasn't inspired me to a lot of scratch cooking I wasn't already doing, but I was amused, intrigued, and supported by her stories of extreme kitchen diy. ( )

I adore this book. ADORE. It's as if it were written just for me by a sassy, adventurous, food-loving friend willing to confess not just her wild homemade successes but her farcical, ill-advised, careening failures. Her Bay Area home base is similar enough to my own Seattle digs, her 70s childhood and its flirtations with the counter-culture movements of the era resonant, even her relationship to sensible daughter and patient, long-suffering husband all so familiar. Her judgements on whether to buy or make various food items, as well as her determination of how much hassle making these things really will be, strike me as completely sensible and exactly within my own cooking comfort zone. Moved this to my Must Own list before I even got to the end. Insightful, honest, and laugh out loud funny. ( )