Fantastic recipes, great cooking ideas/tips ( )

Lyrical food porn at its finest. Ahern writes about food like a poet, and obviously loves her subject. Her recipes are inspirational. Awesome read. ( )

As someone who is constantly trying to learn more about food and new ways to make recipes and who has a chronic illness with dietary reprocussions, I was really interested in reading this book. What a disappointment. I don't quite understand was she so obsessed with rehashing the foods of her childhood. It seemed like at least a third of the book was spent bad mouthing the food she grew up with (which seemed typical of many American family diets in the 1970s) without drawing any real parallels to her disease. I am glad she figured out what is wrong with her and is now eating so well, but her condescension was overwhelming and a real turn-off to me as a reader. By the end I was honestly hoping that her parents will not be able to read the book, her railing against the white bread and American cheese of her childhood was so frequent and harsh (not to mention excessive). The book was also quite repetitive, revisiting the same foods, ideas, concepts and anecdotes more often than was necessary to make her point. A lot of the book was lifted directly from her blog without much in the way of editing, which might help explain the disjointed feeling of parts of the book. I think that a better format for this book would have been either a straight memoir with recipes (if no other reason than that she could really just delve into the childhood stuff for a couple of chapters and then move on for the rest of the book) or a collection of food essays and recipes rather than trying to tell us how we can find "the food that loves us back", which I don't think the book quite accomplished. If helping others (rather than simply telling her story) was the main goal of the book (and I think the subtitle certainly gives that impression, despite the author's apparent reluctence to follow through on that aspect) I think readers would have been better served by learning more about her recipe development methods or by including some constructive advice to people who don't have the access to high quality ingredients that she has, money to spend on truffle oil or the time to bake bread 3-4 times a week. ( )

Finally, a real person that feels my pain. Shauna James Ahern writes with an honest and incredibly optimistic voice about Celiac Disease.

Her recipes are to die for! She has a passion for food and yearns to pass this on to her readers. ( )