Melissa Coleman

Coleman opens the book with an introduction to minimalism and the minimalist kitchen, including how to minimize tools, pantry items and techniques. I love her quotation of Leonard Koren (from his book, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers): “Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry.” It captures why minimalism so satisfies me -- it’s not austerity; it’s a simplicity that promotes efficiency and frees me to appreciate my world.

It’s a beautiful book, show more well organized and formatted with some opening remarks to each recipe and then clear preparation instructions and tips, accompanied by a tantalizing, full-color photo of the prepared dish. There is no nutritional info, but these are hip-comfort foods (familiar but modern), not calorie-laden gourmet dishes. They are “normal” recipes; each includes an estimate of prep time (hands-on time and total time) and they’re generally not 5-ingredients/15-minutes nor the opposite.

Recommended for cooks who want some inspiration AND for “armchair cooks,” who love to read cookbooks cover-to-cover.

(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.) show less

There were several reasons I had to read Melissa Coleman’s The Minimalist Kitchen. With my small apartment kitchen, minimalism is mandatory. Also, who cannot read someone who calls themselves The Faux Martha, a genius mix of fangirling, self-deprecation, and the perfect humblebrag since you have to be pretty good to be faux.

The Minimalist Kitchen begins with an incredibly useful kitchen organizing and pantry guide including a list of ingredients you should have on hand as they will be used show more often. She does not encourage having every spice that ever grew, noting they become stale while taking up space in your spice drawer. She is beautifully organized and I am jealous of her containers. She does not have a long list of utensils, though it is still slightly longer than mine. But she doesn’t have a food processor, so yeah, she’s minimalist.

She organizes her recipes sensibly which makes me happy. There’s Breakfast, Main Dishes, Burgers, Wraps & Sandwiches, Soups and Salads, Sides, Drinks, and Desserts. Much logic, such common sense. To make your life even easier, there is a recipe index and a subject index where you can look up such things as expiration dates and buying in bulk to get her advice on a range of things.

Sometimes she mistakes fast for easy, though. For example, her recipe for a Dutch Baby suggests mixing in a blender. You know that’s harder to wash than a bowl and seriously, a whisk can beat those eggs in a minute. She probably has a dishwasher. I tried it, though, to see if it made a better Dutch Baby, but no, it doesn’t. In fact, oddly, the Dutch Baby stuck to the skillet in a couple spots though I think that was happenstance and not her recipe’s fault. The blender was hella more difficult to clean than the simple metal bowl I usually use.

The recipes are well-chosen with a good mix of basics (scrambled eggs) and more complex dishes including flavorful comfort foods from around the world. Her emphasis is on flavor and fun, you can tell she considers her kids when cooking with lots of finger foods, sandwiches, wraps, tacos, and fun desserts. The food is colorful, sure to please your eyes.

Everything is approachable, including the pictures which feature foods that are not too perfect, a bit of over-browning on one part of a galette, slightly uneven sandwiches. It’s all close to perfect, but not so close home cooks will be discouraged from trying. She’s a home cook and the rest of us home cooks can look at the pictures and think, yeah, I can do that. I think cookbook publishers have no idea how important that is. Impress me, yes! Intimidate me, nope.

She mentions hygge several times. It’s the Danish concept of feeling cozy in simple pleasures. I wish she had used the Swedish concept lagom, not too much–not too little, which actually fits the wabi-sabi aesthetic she enjoys better than hygge which seems to find its expression in America through consumption in the form of candles, lamps, quilts, and all sorts of other merchandise. I suppose if we count to a thousand, there will be a marketing campaign around lagom, too. What really surprises me is that she omits fika which is such an important part of that simple life, taking the time to sit down, chat with friends over coffee and cookies.

I received an e-galley of The Minimalist Kitchen from the publisher through NetGalley. It will be published on April 20th.

The Minimalist Kitchen is published by Time, Inc. but is not posted to their site. (at Powell’s Books)

Melissa Coleman web site – The Faux Martha

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/the-minimalist-kitchen-by... show less

It's taken a few decades for the "organic" lifestyle to work its way into the mainstream, but during the last ten years or so, the desire to eat foods that have been produced in a sustainable, low-tech way seems to have become much more widespread, and the producers and consumers of these foods don't seem to be viewed so much as crunchy, hippie-ish fringe-dwellers these days. Having said that, the movement has honest roots among crunchy hippie fringe-dwellers, and Melissa Coleman's family show more were some of the people who planted those roots (pun intended, for the record). In her memoir, This Life Is In Your Hands, Coleman takes readers to Greenwood Farm on the Maine coast, the pioneering community where her father worked to advance sustainable agriculture...and where her family imploded.

In some respects, Greenwood Farm would seem to be an idyllic place to experience one's childhood, particularly during the short and fertile New England summers. Melissa and her sisters could, quite literally, run around naked all day long, and they had the proverbial "village" of caretakers at hand in Greenwood Farm's "apprentices"--college and graduate students who came to work and learn from Melissa's father, Eliot, and who became an extended family. The less-than-idyllic part was that the Coleman children couldn't always count on their own parents. Eliot's first devotion was to the farm, even at, ironically, the risk of his own health; the girls' mother Sue was, all too often, just overwhelmed by the challenges of their everyday lives. The "pioneering" of the Colemans and their associates went all the way--they lived without electricity and indoor plumbing in small houses they built themselves.

I was quite intrigued by the fact that Eliot and Sue both came from fairly privileged backgrounds--particularly on Eliot's side, where there are some names straight out of the Preppy Handbook--and in choosing this "simple," "good" life for their family, they also chose extreme poverty. In some ways, there are similarities to Melissa Coleman's story and that of Jeannette Walls' family in The Glass Castle, but Melissa's parents chose to work a lot harder. Still, it's the rejection of a certain form of privilege that interests me, because in many ways, the products of the lifestyle that the Colemans chose instead remain most readily available to the privileged, even now.

But Melissa Coleman was a child during the years at Greenwood Farm, and it's her evocation of the wonders and feelings of childhood that make This Life Is In Your Hands such compelling reading. The adults in her life are frequently portrayed as seen through a child's eyes, which makes the effects on that child when they really don't live up to being adults that much more devastating. Without much exposure to other influences, children can be pretty accepting that whatever they know as "normal" is "the norm," but they may still have an innate sense of when the world around them feels wrong. Coleman conveys that well; reading her story, I had the feeling early on that things wouldn't quite work out, but I was completely surprised by the event that ultimately undid the family at Greenwood Farm. show less

Author Melissa Coleman was a child born during the back to the land movement of the 1960s-70s. Her parents, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearings book “Living the Good Life”- the story of how the Nearings moved to the unforgiving climate of the Maine coast and produced ‘all they needed’ from the land- moved to Maine, bought part of the Nearings property, and set out to do the same.

What they didn’t realize was that the Nearings weren’t entirely truthful in their books. They went show more south for the winters, they made profits from the sales of their books that enabled them to buy small luxuries, and, perhaps most important to the story Coleman tells, they didn’t have children.

While the Colemans weren’t hippies as hippies are commonly thought of- they didn’t do drugs, have any interest in communes or practice free love- they definitely strove to drop out of society. And really, they didn’t have any time for anything but the homestead. It was dawn to dusk (and after dusk and by the moon or kerosene lamps times), 365 days a year unending toil. Maine is a hard place to survive without modern conveniences. But after a couple of years, there was enough land cleared of trees and stumps, and the soil was enriched organically enough, that they had enough vegetables to be able to sell some at a roadside stand. Soon word of what they were doing got out, reporters came calling, and unpaid interns started showing up. The Colemans became famous within the organic and homesteading movement. While the interns meant more work could be done, they also were more mouths to feed, and then tended to spend their days on the farm naked.

Even though they were finding themselves successful at homesteading, Melissa’s parents were having problems. Sue was emotionally fragile and overwhelmed by the work, and just couldn’t take the extra labor of raising the girls (author Melissa and her little sister Heidi) or the stress of watching her attractive husband working with young, naked blond women all day. It was she that was expected to feed everyone, to put food by for winter, to do the mending and sewing and cleaning and goat milking, on top of working outside on the farm. She suffers from depression, especially after childbirth. She mentally ‘checks out’ at times, ceasing to react to the children’s needs- or much of anything at all. Eliot, on the other hand, is nearly manic. A hyperactive thyroid gland drives him night and day, from project to project- projects that seize his entire attention, leaving little for his wife and children. Melissa and Heidi are basically left to grow wild, with the neighbors and the interns there physically for them but not emotionally. No one is really there emotionally for the girls. Then, one day, Heidi drowns in the pond. This is the last straw for the marriage and for the farm. The dream is over.

The author seamlessly blends her own childhood recollections with accounts she’s garnered from talking with the adults who populated her childhood, allowing us a full view of what happened. In the course of these talks, she finally discovers that she was not to blame for Heidi’s death-something she was never accused of but felt guilty of just the same. She recreates the feel of the times, the idealism that infused these back to the landers. I remember this era well; the names and events she mentions bring back my own memories of how it felt to think that a homestead was the way to go, that this was the wave of the future, the way to health of both people and the planet, of having that same idealism the Colemans had. Excellent book. show less