Summary: Deborah Madison is a cookbook author, and - along with her partner, artist Patrick McFarlin - they began interviewing their friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers on the title question: what do people eat when they're by themselves? They've taken the answers and organized them into sections - on patterns in men vs. women's answers, uniquely bizarre personal snacks, those who eat alone every day, etc. (And, bizarrely, a chapter on meals to make when you're trying to seduce someone into sleeping with you so you no longer have to eat alone.) They've also taken several of the foods that were described to them in each chapter, and turned them into actual recipes... all the time stressing that when you eat alone, you only have yourself to please.

Review: I read this book because I absolutely loved Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, and I was looking for more of the same. And, while this book is on almost the exact same topic, it manages to come at it from a very different angle. While Alone in the Kitchen... was a collection of essays, some of them with a recipe, this read more like a cookbook with very extended (and moderately repetitive) introductions to each chapter. Not as interesting or fulfilling a reading experience, but probably more practical.

Although really... not even all *that* practical. The problem is that this was written by a) a primarily vegetarian b) cookbook author, who c) lives in New Mexico. Hence, she makes a lot of assumptions about how, why, and what her audience cooks that isn't going to be true for a large chunk of the readership. For example, Madison generally disdains frozen vegetables as inferior, without acknowledging that in most of the country, people just can't pop by the farmer's market to pick out organic fresh vegetables in February. Similarly, as most of her friends that get interviewed are fellow foodies, it's just taken as read that at any given time, a reader will have three kinds of fancy-pants cheese, artisanal bread, heirloom tomatoes, shrimp, ripe avocados, and fresh herbs on hand.

There's also a latent sexism present here that set my teeth on edge. There's a tone to a lot of the chapters where it's assumed that whenever women are cooking for one, it's because we've finally gotten a break from striving to please our husbands and families, but for men, eating alone is a valid lifestyle choice. (Including the use of the word "batcheloring" - or even more obnoxiously, "batching" - to refer to eating alone. Blech.) Overall, I wound up skimming a lot of the narrative, but it did give me some new dinner ideas, and it inspired me to be a little bit more adventurous with some of my cooking - after all, if something comes out horribly, no one will know... and that's why I keep a bag of tater tots in the freezer. 3 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: For people who like cookbooks, this would be an interesting browse, but I'd recommend getting it from the library - I don't know that the recipes are enough to make it worth owning when there are so many dedicated quick-and-easy one-person cookbooks out there. For people who are looking for good food writing on the subject of solitary dining, however... I'd recommend Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, instead. ( )

Not exactly a cookbook and not exactly a narrative non-fiction account of food lovers, this has aspects of both things in its composition plus charming and appealing illustrations (not of the food but rather the situations). Madison and McFarlin apparently spent years asking people what they eat when they eat alone, even before they came up with the idea of creating this book from the answers. Each chapter ends with recipes culled from the responses and scaled to serve one or at most two people. They look at but don't come to many meaningful conclusions about the differences between how men and women cook for themselves. They offer up the things they think everyone should learn to cook before they are grown. And they discuss the motives behind meals, the themes they ran across amongst solo cooks, and the comfort foods that hark back to childhood.

The stories told in the book started to feel rather repetitive as I read along. And I have not yet tried any of the recipes, although a few piqued my interest. But be warned that the recipes are heavily weighted towards southwestern food (perhaps because they live in NM or perhaps because southwestern fare is fairly easy to cook for one) and they pre-suppose a proximity to a wonderful market in which to obtain fresh and oftentimes tough to find ingredients in so many other corners of the country. Mostly I liked leafing through the book and savouring the quirky illustrations more than actually reading the text. It might inject some needed variety in the menus of someone eating alone though. At the very least, it will be something with which to while away a solitary meal. ( )

Unlike Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, this is really just about the food. And because it's what people in a very particular circle eat, there's not a lot of variety to the recipes. But they do sound tasty and almost all sound very quick/easy/affordable. A remarkable amount of blue cheese appears. As a bonus, it looks like doubling a solo recipe to feed two is significantly easier than starting with a recipe for 4-6 and cutting it down. You have to be willing to take all the sweeping generalizations with a grain of salt. It's in Madison's favor that she's well established as a Bay Area vegetarian author, so all the judgmental side comments are more 'go figure' than distractingly irritating. ( )