Homemade: Finnish Rye, Feed Sack Fashion, and Other Simple Ingredients from My Life in Food

What a thoroughly enjoyable book. Beatrice Ojakangas is a Minnesota author of Finnish descent. She is also the author of 29 cookbooks. This, her latest project, is an autobiographical memoir. She covers, in great detail, her upbringing in Northern Minnesota, the beginnings of her career as a chef/cookbook author, the raising of her family, and her current roles as a wife/mother/celebrity. Ojakangas has a remarkable gift in her ability to tell a story, she makes you feel like you were next to her in the kitchen. Her memory of the details of her childhood is amazing. And her humor is contagious! As I noted in an update of my reading status, I was reading this on a cross-country airline trip, and the people seated next to me were concerned show more because I kept bursting out laughing and snorting. Great book, highly recommend it! show less

Really not what I was expecting, and not nearly as interesting as I hoped. It's a detailed but rather scattered (the same stories and facts told a couple times, in different chapters) memoir, with at least one recipe per chapter. I'm not really interested in the memoir - it sounds like the family stories we tell (The time my brother got hung in a tree. The time I was working as a cook for a rich lady), and is about as interesting to someone who wasn't involved. It might be better if I'd ever read anything by her before - if she was a person to me. Several of the recipes sound interesting, though it's going to be a pain to get to them - I have a PDF version of the book, which means scrolling through or at best searching to find the show more recipes I want. Actually, aside from the recipes, the part I found most interesting was the chapter about her cookbooks, how she started and continued with them - I admit it, I'm even more of a book nerd than a cooking nerd. I was a little frustrated, actually - in several chapters, she mentions four or five recipes and the one that is actually there is not the one (or ones) I wanted to make. I was amused that I have one of her recipes - from a Pillsbury Bake-off - and their version is quite different from the one in Homemade. I received a copy of the book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in return for a review. show less