Slices of Life
A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Bad Haircut Kale Chips. Post-ER Roast Chicken. New Baby Risotto. Frantic Dinner-Party Calming Soup. These are some of the dishes that food writer Leah Eskin has turned out during her years of raising two children, enduring one dog, and tending her marriage. She's also nurtured her ten-year-old food column, "Home on the Range," providing a recipe and accompanying vignette in the Chicago Tribune every week. Slices of Life transforms those columns into a memoir that readers can savor in small or large bites. It's a compilation of more than 200 recipes, with a generous helping of the life stories that happened along the way: moving-day potatoes, summer-vacation apricot pie, dead-microwave ratatouille, sullen-child oatmeal squares. Whether preparing recipes for disaster or delight, Leah Eskin has made it all delicious!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For the first time, food writer Eskin (two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee) offers readers of her beloved Chicago Tribune column "Home on the Range" a collection of her work that is equal parts cookbook and memoir. She includes more than 200 recipes for the at-home cook, each prefaced with a short essay retelling the personal moments that inspired them. Individually, the essays and their subsequent dishes each named to reflect the occasion of their creation, "Beach-House Spaghetti" or "Red-Hot Pepper Cure" are as much fun to read as for Eskin to write and whip up. Loosely and not altogether efficaciously organized into six chapters of her life (the early days of her column, her family's move from Chicago to Baltimore, her battle with and triumph over breast cancer, etc.) the collection's double-duty feels, as a whole, slightly at odds. A cook looking for recipes may find it difficult to navigate, while a reader hoping for an overarching narrative won't find one. Even so, Eskin's clever storytelling, deft command of language "Consider filo with its connection, however flaky, to ancient Greece" and practical, straightforward recipes will delight both audiences.