A homemade life

Last weekend, I felt the need to indulge myself. So I went to the bookstore to pick a book to read explicitly and purely for the joy of reading. But however much I tried in the novel section, I found myself drawn again and again to the cookbooks. Finally, I found a happy compromise in A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg. I had read about this cookbook cum memoir some time ago in Sunset Magazine, and I am awed by the clean beauty and lovely writing on Molly's blog, Orangette. This, I think, is one of the most well written blogs I know, every entry is flawless and professional (although sometimes a bit on the long side, for my personal taste). So I was looking forward to reading an actual book by this very same author.

I really enjoyed her writing, as always. It's just beautiful. She put in an essay that she wrote in high school, about how she started cooking, and, I swear to god, she wrote better in high school than I will in my whole life, ever. The story is uplifting- In a nutshell, she grows up in a food centered family, falls in love with France (duh! :)), and, when she finds herself unexcited by her anthropology graduate studies, drops out, moves to Seattle and starts a blog about food, Orangette. Much to her own surprise (not to mine, when you look at the blog), Orangette quickly develops a following (these days, any one of her posts will generate several hundred comments). To make the real life fairy tale complete, she meets her lovely prince and future husband through the blog when he contacts her about one of the recipes. The book ends with a recipe for wedding cake, of course.   

Although I liked the book as a whole, I wasn't too excited by the format of mixing recipes in with the memoir part. Although I enjoy reading cookbooks per se, I find that recipes embedded within a story, like here, somehow interrupt the flow of the tale, and thus take away some of the joy of immersing myself in it. So I ended up skipping over the recipes while I was reading, although many of them are gorgeous by themselves.
I doubt that I will use it much as a reference for cooking (there are too few recipes for me to consider & use it as a "cookbook"). This is too bad, because the recipes sound quite tasty. In my perfect world, Molly would have written two books, one a memoir to read, and one a cookbook to devour. Perhaps the cookbook is still out there, who knows?