The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks

It was a great book about creating meals from real ingredients.  It is something that I like to do – bake bread, make cakes from scratch – and I thought it was very well-written.  I loved reading about the evolution of cake mixes and how in the 1950s the women could tell the difference and didn’t like that they just had to add water, so they created them so that we could add eggs, oil AND water.  The rest of the ingredients should read flour, sugar, salt, soda, but the ingredient list goes on and on.  Crazy.

It was a great book and would be a great gift for someone who is wanting to change their fast-food ways and to learn how simple it is to really prepare real food.

Next I plan to read my back issues of magazines and dig into the pile of books that are on my nightstand!  They are books I own, books I was given as gifts, and books I borrowed.  And I’ll read the next book for book club – The Center of Everything.  Again, I love the book club in a bag concept!

On a book and movie related note – I mentioned that I read and loved “The Paris Wife” and I’m excited about meeting the author on Sunday!  Tuesday night I watched the movie “Midnight in Paris” (love it! own it!) and watched carefully the scenes featuring Ernest Hemingway and I ordered the movie “The Sun Also Rises,” based on a Hemingway book of the same name.  Very interesting to put it all together – Hemingway living in Paris, with his first wife, drinking in bars and his melancholic diatribes, and the wounded expatriate living in Paris and going to Spain for the bull fights.  I hope to actually READ some Hemingway in 2012 – not just read about him!  I love it when one book leads you to another…

Off to read!