What Summer Tastes Like

Hello Fellow Bakers,

Sorry for the delay in my writing. I know I promised baking results on Monday, but I was feeling sick and stayed home from work. However, I think the end results are worth the wait!

I had a very successful weekend of baking. I made a declaration last week that I would bake the blueberry-raspberry pound cake recipe found in A Homemade Life. I also asked for volunteers to join me in my baking endeavors. Luckily, Jenny, made a vow to bake as well. Thank you Jenny for participating in my idea. I really enjoy when the books we read bring club members closer.

What it is even more fun is Jenny and I had two different baking experiences. No cake is the same you know! I, being the control freak that I am, followed the recipe to a T, while Jenny exercised her creative side and improvised.

This recipe was fun for me because I learned so many new things. For example, I had no idea what Kirsch was, much less where to buy it. However, luckily Doug is always an e-mail away.
For those of you who also don't know what Kirsch is it is a: "unaged brandy distilled from a fermented produced esp. in Germany, Switzerland, and Alsace, France." (dictionary.com) However, the kirsch I bought was not produced in Europe, but Oregon. I also learned that in Washington state you can only find Kirsch in liquor stores. I recently turned 21 so my first trip to a liquor store was to get ingredients for cooking :)
I also have never heard of cake flour (pathetic...I know) . I had to buy my first bundt pan as well. I really enjoyed shopping and learning about these ingredients. I have to agree with Molly Wizenburg on this one, this cake really does taste like summer. The blue from the blueberries and the red from the raspberries created a beautiful celebration of summer's fruits. The blue and the red color combination really reminded me of the Fourth of July.

After spilling kirsch all over the counter, splattering batter all over my shirt( an apron is next on my to buy list), and scaring my dog with my cursing I produced my first beautiful, delicious, and perfect pound cake.

Jenny's improvisation skills also produced a delicious cake. She related to me that the store was out of red raspberries so she bought golden raspberries instead. "Same taste but not so pretty..." Jenny said. Her liquor cabinet didn't contain kirsch so she used 2 tsp of Amaretto as a substitute. Good thinking on your feet Jenny!

Below are the pictures from my and Jenny's baking experience. My cake is on the left and Jenny's is on the right. Hopefully, these pictures will inspire you to try your hand at baking this cake. PS it is on page 20 of A Homemade Life

Mouthwatering BBQ Book Recommedations

Hello Fellow Readers,

It's BBQ season! It is time to break out the grills, charcoal, and lighter fluid and have a good old fashion BBQ. I recently bought a charcoal grill, and I am wondering how I lived before grilled steaks, shrimp, kabobs, and salmon.

Now that I am an amateur grill master, I can say with complete confidence that the recommended books below are wonderful tools to aid you in becoming a master griller. I am a little partial towards charcoal, but in an effort to remain unbiased I did select books that cater towards propane grilling as well. So fire up the grill, crack open the recipe book, and get to it! Also, don't forget to share your experiences here.

Our book for the month of July: The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis will probably contain some great recipes and insights into BBQ so consider these recommendations a precursor.







All of the recommendation below can be found at Garfield Book Company!

Char-Broil's
Everybody Grills!
$24.95
"Char-Broil’s Everybody Grills! is the definitive cookbook and how-to guide for everyone who loves preparing meals in the great outdoors, from beginners to seasoned barbecue enthusiasts. Developed by Creative Homeowner editor and food writer Lisa Kahn in partnership with one of North America’s leading grill manufacturers, Char-Broil’s Everybody Grills! features hundreds of easy-to-follow recipes for grilled and barbecued appetizers, main courses, salads, vegetables—even desserts—that will have family and friends licking their fingers."

The Big Book of BBQ: Recipes and Revelations from the Barbecue Belt

$24.95

• Over 200 succulent recipes from pit masters and our test kitchen pros for barbeque beef and pork ribs and roasts, poultry, fish, and shellfish as well as kabobs, fajitas, steaks , burgers and chops
• Dozens of Tips from the Pit Master and recipes for secret rubs and sauces reveal how to slow-smoke the authentic stuff and speed-grill tasty facsimiles.

Blueberry-Raspberry Pound Cake

Good Afternoon!

I just started A Homemade Life and I am hooked! In reading the first 20 pages I have already been inspired to cook. That is why I am going to bake Molly Wizenberg's mother's Blueberry-Raspberry Pound Cake.

I am declaring to you right now that I will make it this weekend. I will even take pictures! Come Monday morning you will discover how it turned out. By making this declaration to you I feel it will motivate me to make it. Also, baking this recipe, taking pictures, and blogging about my experience is very much in the same spirit in which Wizenberg's blog, Organette, was created for.

Wizenberg states why Organette is so important to her: "I got a place to tell my stories and a crowd of people who, much to my surprise, seemed eager to listen and share" (5). With that in mind, I would love to create that same type of space here for our book club. With that said, who would like to join me on this endeavor? By baking at the same time this weekend we in a way will be cosmically linked :)

The recipe is on page 20 of A Home Made Life so break out the sugar, flour, and massive amounts of butter and make a declaration to bake with me! :)


Also, it's BBQ season! Stay tuned later this week for my BBQ edition of recommended books.

Summer Reading is Here!

Greetings Fellow Foodies'

As the sun starts to make its appearance, I believe there is some kind of internal clock that goes off in avid readers that screams: "It's time to read, read, read!" Not only is it time for BBQ's, trips to the lake, and vacations but Summer is the season for reading! This is why I will begin recommending food related books to you every week. All of which will be available for purchase at Garfield Book Company!

Below is a list of books that came out today. They are a diverse group of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction. I hope you enjoy. Also, if you do read one of my recommendations I would love to hear your reviews.

My Life from Scratch by Gesine Bullock-Prado

“A sweet memoir that will have you devouring every savory morsel like the macaroons that put author Gesine Bullock-Prado on the foodies’ map of the world.” Times Argus

Big Appetite: My Southern-Fried Search for the Meaning of Life by Sam McLeod

“This is a delicious book full of the finest kind of love stories about family, friends, and food.

I can’t wait to make those chicken and dumplings." –Celia Rivenbark, author of You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain

“The kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages. Bourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory.” USA Today

Mediterranean Harvest: Vegetarian Recipes from the World’s Healthiest Cuisine by Martha Rose Shulman

“Martha Rose Shulman understand who those of us who care about food today are drawn to the sun drenched cuisine of the Mediterranean, and she writes about region and it cooking with expertise, intelligence, and style. He book celebrates the seasons through fresh, locally grown vegetables and fruits. And Martha’s recipes are consistency appealing, authentic, easy to cook, and good for you, too.” Wolfgang Puck

A Homemade Life

Hello Everyone,

We are going to be spoiled this month with a visit from Molly Wizenberg. Wizenberg's is the author of A Homemade Life and the author of the wildly successful blog Organgette.

I did a little research on the internet and I found a great article that shares a lot about the motivation behind a A Homemade Life as well as Wizenberg's life story. A Homemade Life will be a difficult read much in the same ways Eating Heaven was. Wizenberg details the life and death of her farther in A Homemade Life. Wizenberg also spills the beans about her world wind romance that began Orangette. I have no doubt that we will have lots to talk about when she visits us on Wednesday June 30th at 6:30pm!

Below is bits and pieces from an article I found. I cut and pasted as much as I could. It is a bit long, but well worth the read.

Ballard Blogger Molly Wizenberg Makes Sense of the World Through Food

By Rebekah Denn

We are what we eat, and Molly Wizenberg is French lemon yogurt cake, and buckwheat pancakes, and potato salad, and so much more.

The cake is the recipe that inspired a stranger from New York to introduce himself to Wizenberg via e-mail. (He's now her husband.) Pancakes represented "a strange sort of coming of age," learning at age 15 they could be made without a boxed mix. And the potato salad is all about her late father, Burg, made with ranch dressing and "a ballsy ¾-cup mayonnaise," about a teaspoon for each potato.

Food blogs abound -- as do books from blogs -- but Wizenberg always has stood out as a storyteller as well as a cook, each written entry a jewel box of an essay and an impeccable recipe.

"For me, food is really never just food," she said last week in the small kitchen of her Ballard home, a 3-pound jar of castor sugar on the counter and Polaroid film in the fridge.

The foods she writes about and photographs, she said, help her understand who she is and where she came from, her city and the people in her life. "It's a way of making sense of the world."

Wizenberg's family's life was built around the kitchen table, she wrote, and "I learned to cook because the kitchen was where things happened."

But she did not want to be a chef, she decided, after a kitchen internship at the high-profile Greens restaurant left her unmoved. She drifted through travels and studies in France, degrees in biology and French and cultural anthropology.

Then, as she attended graduate school in Seattle, her father was diagnosed with cancer. Wizenberg was 24 and went home to Oklahoma for his short, vicious battle against the disease. After weeks of pain, he died.

"I won't tell you that it was hard. You already know that," she wrote. "I was so numb sometimes that my hands stopped working, just locked themselves into funny, pinched fists. But then there was the gratitude, a sort of low-grade, queasy gratitude, that he was free."

She was given the standard advice for those in grief: Make no major life decisions for 18 months. As the months came to an end, she made the decision that ultimately changed her life's course. She moved to France, intending to work on a doctorate for a career in cultural anthropology. Within weeks of arriving in Paris, she realized that her life kept coming back to food. It was "what I thought about, what I cared about, what I wrote about, what got me out of bed in the morning."

A writer friend suggested she start a food blog. She returned to Seattle, working in a Pilates studio and then the University of Washington press, and she wrote the first Orangette entry in July 2004.

Orangette's audience steadily grew, and Wizenberg's life inched more into its pages. In April 2005, a young New Yorker named Brandon Pettit wrote her that her writing was exactly how he felt about food and life. Two months later, after an intense cross-country romance, she introduced him to her readers. The next year, they were engaged, and Pettit bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. In spring, he's opening a restaurant, Delancey, in Ballard. Wizenberg will bake the pastries, help develop the menus and otherwise participate -- but she'll mainly continue to write and blog.

Here is the link to her blog http://orangette.blogspot.com/. You can even go back into the archives and see her very first blog entry in July 2004!