monday again
That means book review time. While my eyes are still quite dry and cranky, I did manage to get through a few books this past week and actually try to write something coherent about them.
(I really need to figure out LibraryThing’s image book cover deal, I just had other things to do this afternoon.)
Cat Cora’s Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends
by Cat Cora
Each Spring I seem to yearn for the bright fresh flavours of the Mediterranean. In recent years this has included rediscovering the tastes of Greece. While I’ve never visited and I doubt that I’ve ever had proper Greek food, I find what I read in cookbooks and create to be appealing at this time of year. This is Cat’s first cookbook and I like that it lays out a bit more who here influences are than her more recent Cooking from the Hip (which I read first and enjoyed). This book is organized into areas of influence (her childhood in the South, family on Skopelos Greece, her restaurant in Northern California and cooking at home). Furthermore, each section centers on a collection of menus/meals. This layout really appealed to me as while my cooking skills have improved over the years, I still struggle to put a cohesive meal together. I am always taken in by memoir and story sprinkled in with my recipes. (There’s a comic strip I’d love to link here, but I’ll have to go search further for it).
I should add here that it’s not all Greek food all the time, but you definitely can see how Greece has influenced Cat.
However, while I do not doubt this slim volume is the product of a considerable amount of time and planning, I am not very happy with the layout of the recipes. They often break across a page turn and that’s very frustrating when cooking. I’ve been spoilt recently by a rash of craft books published in hardback with dual-coil bindings.
My design nitpicking aside, I think this is a great book to check out and experience an innovative chef and a wonderful cuisine.
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Sew What! Bags: 18 Pattern-Free Projects You Can Customize to Fit Your Needs
by Lexie Barnes
Storey Publishing, LLC (2009), Edition: Spi, Hardcover, 128 pages
I reviewed this book at Library Thing. Additional information about this book can be found at www.sewwhatbags.com.
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Switch Craft: Battery-Powered Crafts to Make and Sew
by Alison Lewis
Potter Craft (2008), Edition: Spi, Hardcover, 144 pages
I reviewed this book at Library Thing. Additional information about this book may be found www.iheartswitch.com/switchcraft.
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I really hope I’ve not violated any ToS by including books reviewed at both GoodReads and Library Thing at once. I think I’m good because I’m reviewing each and keeping LibraryThing and LibraryThing and GoodReads at GoodReads. I see them both as different services and treat them as such. LibraryThing is for my personal library of books I own. GoodReads is for anything, mostly the trillions of library books I take home each week and then return the following.