Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pretentious Platters and Elitist Elements Served with a Certain Tone (but it really does look good)

Mostly Plant-Based Platters & Boards by Lea Dixon

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Bingo 4: Golden Since this square is about perception, appearance, status, and maybe also the question of gilding vs purity vs who cares, I’m going to use Mostly Plant-Based Platters & Boards. The foodie board trend is almost always about appearance and about interesting frequently high end ingredients that must go together. The pictures in these kinds of cookbooks are almost always really pretty, but how reproduceable are they really? And then there’s the question of who really has access to locally, and has the […]

Baking with Pride means lots of food coloring

Baking with Pride by Janusz Domagala

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Baking with Pride involves a lot of baking with color; seriously, stock up on gel food coloring if you plan on baking much out of this book. Janusz Domagala was one of the fan-favorites on a recent season of Great British Bake Off, and his book is out just in time for Pride month; not a coincidence, as Janusz sort of quietly advocated for LGBTQ causes his whole season (watch his shirts). Every other recipe or two page has factoids about LGBTQ history, or some […]

A timely reminder for outdoor cooking

Grilling Vegan Style by John Schlimm

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Grilling Vegan Style is a) basic, b) more varied than I’d guess, c) mildly inspiring. I own a small charcoal grill (ground-level standard Weber) and I live in a region where grilling season is essentially March through October. I might actually want to pull that little grill out of the garage, clean it, and try out a few things. The first chapter is actually about grilling equipment, and the various options ranging from gas to charcoal to electric to stove-top to hybrids. You get general […]

Cooking by numbers equals 20 percent chance of cauliflower

Vegan Buddha Bowls by Cara Carin Cifelli

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It’s an interesting thing to me that sometimes cookbooks often have favored ingredients not directly related to the theme or title; case in point, Vegan Buddha Bowls seems enamored of cauliflower with lesser attention to sweet potato, carrot, and cabbages. For example, in the first section, “Beautiful, Bountiful Buddha Bowls”, there are 17 recipes. Of those 17, 4 rely on sweet potato, and 5 on cauliflower as the main starch. The salad bowl have 1 sweet potato and 2 cauliflower out of 15 (1/5, 20%); […]

A CIA book that’s more user friendly than I thought

Pies and Tarts by Kristina Petersen Migoya

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I like cookbooks, both for reading and for use. I’m always on the lookout for something new, interesting, or that might fill in a gap. I was mostly curious about what the CIA thought about Pies and Tarts which are some of my favorite things. Possible challenge here is that I usually don’t go for super chef-y cookbooks both because of the degree of difficulty and time required to gather ingredients, prepare sub recipes, and assemble; and the format that often shows up in the […]

But the Parsnip Cake Can Go Straight to Hell

Snacking Bakes by Yossy Arefi

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If you are kind enough to ask me about myself, I will tell you I’m a baker. If you are unwise enough to have follow up questions, I will feel compelled to provide immediate clarification. Baking yeasted bread is not especially enjoyable for me because, to quote Lizzie Acker on The Great British Bake Off, “You never know what it’s thinking.”  While I made my family’s bread for years, and recently started again to redirect my baking impulses into something less calorically suspect, I don’t […]



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