January RandomKIT: Eat, drink and be merry

January is often a time when we decide to be more frugal in our eating after the excesses of the Christmas period. However, that doesn't have to extend to our reading! For this month's RandomKIT, I invite you to read a book about food or drink, or with a food or drink in the title.

There are lots of books to choose from - fiction-wise, it seems that every other romance book (at least this side of the Pond) is set in a coffee shop, cake shop, cafe, bakery, etc, and there are plenty of classic books referencing food in the title (eg Chocolat, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, Green Eggs and Ham, James and the Giant Peach, Like Water for Chocolate, and many more). An excellent graphic novel I read thanks to the LT Early Reviewer programme is Amla Mater by Devi Menon, about an Indian woman in the UK who tries to recreate the flavours of her childhood, particularly amla pickle, while waiting for her baby to arrive.

Non-fiction-wise, you could read the memoir of a celebrity chef or food writer, or a polemic about commercial food chains, or a celebration of a particular region's cuisine. Just looking on my e-shelves, I can see the following: Music to Eat Cake By (essays), Vegetables: A Biography (essays), Doughnut Economics, Ultra-Processed People (about ultraprocessed food), Taste: My Life Through Food (memoir), Food Isn't Medicine (polemic), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (memoir).

Or you could read one of the cookery books you got for Christmas, or that how-to book about canning and preserving you've always meant to get to! The possibilities are endless (and delicious!).

Don't forget to add your book to the wiki when you've read it: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2025_RandomKIT#January:_Eat.2C_Drink_and...

For a change (for me) I'm going for fiction this month. I'm looking forward to cosying up with Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree.

>2 Jackie_K: Great topic, Jackie!

I think I will go with a NF, How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother's Cookbook.

I already had Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci on my list for 2025, so this is a good opportunity to read it.

And I can highly recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It might be a little outdated by now, but still a wonderful book.

My next book up in the Southern Ghost Hunger Mystery Series is Sweet Tea and Spirits, so that will be perfect!

>4 dudes22: Yes, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a couple of years ago and really liked it.

>3 Tess_W: I have that one on my TBR too.

>3 Tess_W: That sounds fascinating.

I don't have many food-themed books, but I do have Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp, which should fit the bill.

I have Brighton Rock scheduled for colour cat, it may well be doing double duty here. Excellent topic!

Not sure yet what I'll be reading, but I've already done one this month and am in the middle of my food mystery for MysteryKIT this month, as well!

As a suggestion for a celebrity biography, it was one about Julia Child I listened to for this month. Others might be interested. The one I read was Julia Child: a Life. I've also (in the past) read her autobiography My Life in France.

I've read 2 of Jennifer Ashley's Below Stairs Mysteries this month, and will save the last two novels and one novella for next month. The sleuth is the cook in a Victorian household and she often talks about her work.

Lovely theme, I think I’ll continue with my culinary mysteries, of which I have quite a few...

At this point I think I am going to add to my 1,001 List with Cakes & Ale by Somerset Maugham.

I am hoping my hold on the audio of Be Ready When the Luck Happens comes in during January. It's unlikely so I will search for another..shouldn't be hard to find.

I plan to read Tiny Tilda's Pumpkin Pie since that will also work for a BingoDog square and the CoverCAT challenge.

I'm sure The chef by James Patterson will give me some good restaurant addresses in NOLA.

I'm not sure yet how many CATs/KITs I will be able to accomplish, or if my choices may change between now and reading, but right now I'm planning on Eats, Shoots & Leaves which has been on my list for a little while! And if that doesn't work out, Lynne Truss also published a children's picture book on the same topic, confusingly also titled Eats, Shoots & Leaves but with a different subtitle. I'm sure I'll be able to finish that one by January 31.

If I get to starting it and decide not to read about grammar, Who Cooked the Last Supper and Eating the Dinosaur are also under consideration.

I will be reading Anything that moves by Dana Goodyear (and I will also use this book for the CoverCAT tea party challenge.)

I'm planning on moving a cozy off of my TBR, it's been there since 2018! Coming Home to the Comfort Food Cafe by Debbie Johnson is the third in this series.

I am planning on reading Like Water For Chocolate. Also reading it for my bookclub. Win!

Chosen for the category from the title, I read Honey and Spice by Bolu Babalola
Set in the Black community of a mostly white London university, this is a modern romance that might appeal to the college set. I’m sorry to say it didn’t appeal to me, in part because it is mostly all dialogue and the enemies-to-lovers trope could be seen coming a mile away. I will count it as read even though I gave up at about 75%. I wrongly believed Reese’s Book Club label and blurb on the cover. If this is what modern romance is like, I’m glad I’m too old to take part.

Bite Me: A Gingerbread Shifter Story by Ariel Dawn ★★★½

Sugar, Spice, and...a Gingerbread Man? The clock is ticking for Chance Graham. If he doesn’t find his mate by Christmas, he’ll be forced to live as a giant gingerbread man forever. But finding a mate isn’t as simple as it sounds… Holly Berryman dreams of romance, like the ones in the Hallmark movies she loves to watch every Christmas season. When fate brings a chance meeting with a sexy man dressed as Santa, Holly finds herself the star of her very own holiday movie.
Will Chance and Holly make it to happily ever after? Or will Chance’s sweet curse be the death of their snow-kissed romance? (description from Amazon)

I picked up the book for the cover and the gingerbread twist. This standard Christmas and shifter trope contains a sweet (literally) twist. The book itself was good and an easy read, although I removed 1/2 star for the graphic sex scenes. I wish authors would learn that you can write a good romance without being overly graphic.

>22 lowelibrary: I agree with you. It is not necessary to tell all the details. Most people have an inkling as to how it is done. I prefer "kisses only" and closed bedroom door.

>23 LadyoftheLodge: Exactly.

>22 lowelibrary: >23 LadyoftheLodge: >24 lowelibrary: I totally agree.

I just reread Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, where one of the main characters is a caterer, and the plants in her family garden have magical properties.

I finally read Legends & Lattes, which indeed fits this KIT perfectly! While I don't like coffee and thus the descriptions of it didn't add anything for me, I could almost taste the lovely bakery goods featured in the story.

I read Coming Home to the Comfort Food Café. The small café is the primary location of the story and food talk always takes place when the primary characters are there. Actually, so is drink though not quite as much.

Finished Sweet Tea and Spirits by Angie Fox, and it was so much fun, just like every other book in the series so far. I've written a full review, but in short, if you like cozy paranormal mysteries, you'll enjoy Fox's Southern Ghost Hunger Mysteries!

(And apologies for folks seeing this message more than once--this book somehow fulfilled four different challenge spots for me this month!)

>29 whitewavedarling: Filling in spots is a good thing. I am trying to do it also. I do think I have read any cozy paranormal so I will check on the book.

>30 mnleona:, It really helps when I'm trying to follow so many challenges! I don't think I've ever had a single book manage to check four boxes in a month, though, so it feels like some kind of weird personal achievement to start the year off lol.

COMPLETED 2 novels:

The Secret of Bow Lane
Speculations in Sin

and 3 novellas:
A Measure of Menace
The Price of Lemon Cake
Mrs Holloway's Christmas Pudding

all by Jennifer Ashley and featuring Mrs. Holloway, the cook in a Victorian household.

Fun read - Acquired Tastes by Peter Mayle. Best chapters on restaurants, truffles, champagne, caviar, and Scotch wiskeys.

I'm going to be using the RandomKIT this year to help me pick books from my various to read lists, so I got Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe from the library to read this month.

Food Pets Die For / Ann N. Martin
4 stars

This is the third edition. The author is looking at commercial pet food diets, what’s in them, the animals testing, all kinds of other crazy things the pet food companies do for profits (potentially at the expense of people’s pets, and certainly at the expense of animals who are used for testing). The author advocates for people making their pets’ food from human-grade foods.

I knew of some of these things, but there are horrifying things going on, particularly the animal experiments. I will add that this book (I don’t think there is a newer edition) is from 2008, but I’d be surprised of many of these practices have changed. The author is Canadian, and looks mostly at pet food in Canada and the US.

There is a good chunk of detail explaining what many of the ingredients you see on packaging actually mean. For this reason, I feel like this is a good book to have as a reference (I borrowed a library copy). It’s hard to keep all the ingredients straight. Pets that were euthanized, but not cremated, are likely in most of these foods… this includes the drug used to euthanize those pets ending up in these foods. Also dead livestock, roadkill, and zoo animals. These are all sent to rendering plants that grind and mix them up, then send them to pet food companies to use in pet food.

The drug companies do awful tests on animals for useless purposes (some, actually useless, while other testing is likely done to find the cheapest things they can add to the food to make more money). I’d already read this, but vets are rarely taught about nutrition except in elective courses, and even then, those courses are taught by the pet food companies themselves. Regulations are pretty much nonexistent, and what regulations there are, are mostly voluntary.

Despite the author preferring a home-made diet for pets (and she includes all kinds of nutrition information that needs to be included (for cats and dogs), as well as recipes), she also mentions a few of the companies that she thinks are better than others (at least back in 2008).

There is a lot of repetition in the book, but I just assumed that was in case someone read the chapters out of order (that is, if they were reading a certain chapter on a certain topic, then maybe later (or not) came to read a different chapter on a different topic).

I have completed A Civil Contract for this month's RandomCat.

I decided to read Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci.

February thread is up https://www.librarything.com/topic/367617#8730003

Finally I got round to a book that fits the theme: Der Gin des Lebens, which, you guessed it, is mostly about the making of gin. According to the cover, this is a mystery, a misleading description, and the plot turned almost ludicrous as the story advanced. Still, lots of info about the drink, and there are even some recipes included.

I finished Margery Sharp's first novel, Rhododendron Pie (1930), and loved it.

I read Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia Manasala, a mystery where the sleuth is opening a cafe next door to her aunt's restaurant.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

This was a nifty and witty little volume with a brief introduction to the history and correct usage of punctuation, filled with humour and cringe-inducing examples of what happens when punctuation is used incorrectly, left out, or added erroneously. As a certified stickler of grammar and punctuation, I rather enjoyed this delightful little book.

There was some interesting conjecture at the end of the book: it was published in 2003, when the internet was clearly starting to change our habits of grammar and punctuation, and the author laments what texts and emails have done to our literacy, and the tragedy that the internet has no editor. While I can agree on the last point, I have noticed that some of the trends she bemoans, such as using ellipses to excess... and to end thoughts... in emails... have already (mostly) faded out of fashion. Of course, I see cringe-inducing grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors on the internet daily, but in professional correspondence, I have been lucky enough to observe an acceptable level of literacy in the past decade or so.

Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this little book.

I finished Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which I very much enjoyed, and it has recipes at the end as a bonus.

I read Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood, a mystery featuring a baker. Much baking and eating is done, and muffin recipes finish off the book.

I finished Be Ready When the Luck Happens. This delightful memoir was a great listen as the extroverted author relays the story of her business success and reveals the ways that she and Jeffrey navigated their marriage to honor each other's needs. The narrative is filled with delicious descriptions of her journey through the food world from specialty store owner to famous author and TV personality.

>45 beebeereads: Lovely review! I am wanting to read that one.

I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers which is about a travelling tea monk.

Sorry for the late post, but I read Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. I am still not sure how I feel about the book, but I love Laura Esquivel's story telling and writing style.

Embarrassingly late, seeing as I was hosting, but I've just finished Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes. I enjoyed it very much, although I did think the story was a little slow in finding its stride. I enjoyed the descriptions of Thimble's pastries, and I'm sure my mouth watered more than once while I was reading!