Jennifer Reese

It’s seldom that I rate a cookbook five stars, but Make the Bread, Buy the Butter is so much more than a cookbook. Cover blurb says: “When Jennifer Reese lost her job, she was overcome by an impulse common among the recently unemployed: to economize by doing for herself what she had previously paid for. . . . So Reese began a series of kitchen-related experiments, taking into account the competing demands of everyday contemporary American family life . . . . Although you should make your show more hot dog buns, guacamole, and yogurt, you should probably buy your hamburger buns, potato chips, and rice pudding. Tired? Buy your mayonnaise. Inspired? Make it.”

Reese considers much more than just the cost-saving (or not) of making your own, but also time and effort expenditure, ethics, and quality & taste. Where her opinion is that you should make something, she provides a recipe – over 120 of them.

I always try at least one recipe from a cookbook before I pass judgment. In this case, it was ‘Simplest Buttercream’ frosting. It was that simple – and scrumptious.

But it’s not the recipes that made me love this book – it was the wit and warmth as she regaled me with the stories of cooking, baking and animal husbandry. I read this cover to cover, and every bit of it was a delight.

A huge shout of thanks to Leslie at Under My Apple Tree for prompting me to buy it.

5 stars show less

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter", by Jennifer Reese, is a fabulous, fascinating find for foodies! This is an entertaining encyclopedia of the pros and cons of making food from scratch rather than automatically buying it ready-made at the store. While I didn't always agree with the opinions and personal choices of Jennifer Reese, I have a tremendous respect for her expertise and love of subject. She writes with a sharp wit and a deglamorized, revealing look at her own life. This book is show more chock-full of delicious recipes and offers great insight into what is practical and what is not worth the trouble when it comes to preparing many of our favorite foods. The numerous references from popular American culture add extra emphasis to many of the observations made by Ms. Reese. This lady has mucho moxie! I am now a follower of her popular weblog, "The Tipsy Baker". I plan to try quite a few of the recipes in the book, especially "Skippy's Apricot Cake"--a simple recipe using a lemon cake mix enriched by the addition of apricot nectar. Sounds tangy-sweet and terrific, and my taste buds wait in impatient anticipation!

Review Copy Gratis Simon & Schuster show less

Jennifer Reese had me at page 4, where she writes about horrifying herself with visions of the parents who buy Uncrustables, the frozen premade peanut butter sandwiches:

"Who buys Uncrustables? I saw a woman in a peach velour tracksuit with a Kate Gosselin haircut. She appeared pouty and spoiled and indolent, someone who would recline on the sofa watching Real Housewives and eating fat-free bonbons rather than make her kids' sandwiches. Then I pictured a man buying Uncrustables. A widower, he show more pushed a cart through the IGA after a long day of honest toil, perhaps in the construction trade. He wore a rumpled flannel shirt and looked a lot like Aidan Quinn. ... I thought this. I was appalled at myself." She's good a few pages later, on the hippie homemakers of Laurel's Kitchen: "I will attest that you don't need to look like a Vermeer to make bread. You can look like an R. Crumb and smoke Parliaments while drinking Sanka spiked with Jim Beam, and still make amazing bread."

So yeah, I would drink with the author. But then we get to the recipes. This cookbook is a great idea, but it requires the reader to trust the author's judgment on the decision to make it or buy it, and her judgment is very different from mine. She likes an unsweetened, yeasted apricot-ginger bread (why?) and she's a big fan of fried chicken, which I might or might not eat if it were the last food on Earth. She sneers at Cheez-Its and Nutella, two of my favorite junk foods. Her ideas of what is a hassle are different too. She thinks nothing of rolling out some dough, even for tortillas (ughhh), but she says canning in a boiling-water bath, which I could do in my sleep, is the definition of a hassle. She has recipes for marshmallow creme and hot fudge sauce but she doesn't address ice-cream sandwiches, which are the only frozen custard product I really care about. I agree with her about making yogurt and bread at home, but I already have tried-and-true methods for both. I would love to make my own cheese and charcuterie someday when I have the money and space, but I have good books about these already, or I know where to get them.

Don't get me wrong. This book is fun to read no matter how you feel about DIY. I will be hanging on to a few of these recipes: the beef short ribs, the caramel popcorn, the vadouvan mac 'n cheese, the grapefruit and Concord-grape sorbets. It was probably worth the seven-month wait for this book at the library just for those recipes, that and the stories about keeping livestock in the backyard (something I'll never do myself). And it's good just to know that so many of the things we think we depend on getting from stores, even barbecue and Worcestershire sauces, will not be that hard to make at home when the zombie apocalypse comes. show less

I adore this book. ADORE. It's as if it were written just for me by a sassy, adventurous, food-loving friend willing to confess not just her wild homemade successes but her farcical, ill-advised, careening failures. Her Bay Area home base is similar enough to my own Seattle digs, her 70s childhood and its flirtations with the counter-culture movements of the era resonant, even her relationship to sensible daughter and patient, long-suffering husband all so familiar. Her judgements on whether show more to buy or make various food items, as well as her determination of how much hassle making these things really will be, strike me as completely sensible and exactly within my own cooking comfort zone. Moved this to my Must Own list before I even got to the end. Insightful, honest, and laugh out loud funny. show less