Book picks similar to
Recipes for Disaster: A Memoir by Tess Rafferty
non-fiction
memoir
nonfiction
first-reads
Trisha's Kitchen: Simple Recipes for Everyday Life
Trisha Yearwood - 2021
The 125 recipes include dishes her beloved mother used to make, plus new recipes like Pasta Pizza Snack Mix and Garth's Teriyaki Bowl. Every recipe tells a story, whether it's her grandma's Million Dollar Cupcakes, or her Camo Cake that she made for her nephew's birthday. As Trisha says: "I love to cook now more than I ever have, because for me, cooking is about love. It's sharing a meal with family and friends and talking about our lives. It's working out thoughts in my head about what I need to conquer or accomplish while I'm working on a homemade pastry crust. Sometimes the feel of cold butter in my hands working through the flour just makes me see things more clearly."
Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking
Elissa Altman - 2013
Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn't turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan — a small-town Connecticut Yankee with parsimonious tendencies and a devotion to simple living — it would change Elissa's relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever. With tender and often hilarious honesty (and 27 delicious recipes), Poor Man's Feast is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.
The Doctor's Kitchen - Eat to Beat Illness: a Simple Way to Cook and Live the Healthiest, Happiest Life
Rupy Aujla - 2019
Accompanying the advice there are 80 new delicious recipes.Following on from Dr Rupy’s bestselling cook book The Doctor’s Kitchen, Eat to Beat Illness distils actionable ideas for daily life to teach you how to use food to trigger and amplify your defences against illness. Accompanying the advice there are 80 new delicious recipes.In Dr Rupy’s second book he builds on the message that what you choose to put on your plate is one of the most important health interventions you can make. Food can not only affect our likelihood of disease but it can lengthen our lives, change our mood and even affect the expression of our DNA.The first section of the book explains how our bodies can better fight off illness through eating well and how we can heal our bodies through simple lifestyle changes including exercise, stress reduction, sleeping well and finding purpose in our lives.It is now scientifically proven that certain foods and food groups are beneficial for staving off illness and here Rupy will look at key conditions such as cancer, depression, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stress and explain what to eat to increase our chances of staying healthy.Complemented by 80 new recipes, full of tempting international flavours such as Roast Golden Beets with Italian Greens and Hazelnut Pesto; Bangladeshi Cod CurrySpatchcock Poussin and Middle Eastern Ful Madames; Iranian Dizi Stew; Garlic Chilli Prawn and Black Bean Stirfry with Bokchoy and Silverbeet; Pea and Broccoli Orecchiette Japanese Togarashi Mix, to name just a few, eating well for has never been so easy and delicious.
Grape Expectations: A Family's Vineyard Adventure in France
Caro Feely - 2012
But they arrive in France with their young family (a toddler and a newborn) to be faced with a dilapidated 18th-century farmhouse and an enterprise that may never, ever make them a living. Undeterred by mouse infestations, a leaking roof, treacherous hordes of insects, visits from the local farm "police," and a nasty accident with an agricultural trimmer, Caro and Sean set about transforming their "beyond eccentric" winery into a successful business as they embark on the biggest adventure of their lives—learning to make wine from the roots up.
Notes on a Silencing
Lacy Crawford - 2020
Paul's School recently came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered at St. Paul's decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note.Her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hard-working girl she'd been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford's assault and gone to great lengths to bury it.Now a wife, mother, and writer living on the other side of the country, Crawford learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn't been imagined as the effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America's elite. Her investigation looks beyond the sprawling playing fields and soaring chapel towers of crucibles of power like St. Paul's, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society.An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy?
My American Dream: A Life of Love, Family, and Food
Lidia Matticchio Bastianich - 2019
Now she tells her own story for the first time in this "memoir as rich and complex as her mushroom rag� (O, the Oprah Magazine).Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia's family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country. Heartwarming, deeply personal, and powerfully inspiring, My American Dream is the story of Lidia's close-knit family and her dedication and endless passion for food.
The Adventurer's Son
Roman Dial - 2020
. . . It should be difficult to get lost forever": These were the haunting last words legendary adventurer Roman Dial received from his son, before the 27-year old disappeared into the jungles of Costa Rica. This is Dial’s intensely gripping and deeply moving account of his two-year quest to unravel the mystery of his son’s fate.In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, twenty-seven-year-old Cody Roman Dial, the son of preeminent Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial, walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica’s remote Pacific Coast that shelters miners, poachers, and drug smugglers. He carried a light backpack and machete. Before he left, he emailed his father: "I am not sure how long it will take me, but I’m planning on doing 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. I’ll be bounded by a trail to the west and the coast everywhere else, so it should be difficult to get lost forever."They were the last words Dial received from his son.The Adventurer’s Son recreates the author’s two-year quest to learn the truth about his child’s disappearance. Immediately after Cody Roman’s planned departure date passed without a word from him, Dial set off for Costa Rica. As he trekked through the dense jungle, interviewing locals and searching for clues—the authorities suspected murder—the desperate father was forced to confront the deepest questions about his own life. Roman had raised his son to be fearless, to seek out adventure amid earth’s wildest places. Was he ultimately responsible for his son’s fate?A harrowing story of drama, adventure, and a father’s love for his son, set in the most beautiful and dangerous reaches of the planet, The Adventurer’s Son is a mystery, the memoir of a father and his son, and an unforgettable story of love and profound loss.The Adventurer’s Son includes 25 color photographs.
My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business
Dick Van Dyke - 2011
His trailblazing television program, The Dick Van Dyke Show (produced by Carl Reiner, who has written the foreword to this memoir), was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s and introduced another major television star, Mary Tyler Moore. But Dick Van Dyke was also an enormously engaging movie star whose films, including Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, have been discovered by a new generation of fans and are as beloved today as they were when they first appeared. Who doesn’t know the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? A colorful, loving, richly detailed look at the decades of a multilayered life, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, will enthrall every generation of reader, from baby-boomers who recall when Rob Petrie became a household name, to all those still enchanted by Bert’s “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a “simple song-and-dance man,” but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.From the Hardcover edition.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Leslie Jamison - 2018
Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction--both her own and others'--and examines what we want these stories to do, and what happens when they fail us.All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace, and Denis Johnson, as well as brilliant figures lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.For the power of her striking language and the sharpness of her piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.
Simple Cooking
John Thorne - 1987
John Thorne's classic first collection is filled with straightforward eating, home cooking, vigorous opinions, and the gracefully intelligent writing that makes him a cult favorite of people who like to think about food.
I Have Something to Tell You
Chasten Glezman Buttigieg - 2020
Through Chasten’s joyful, witty social media posts, the public gained a behind-the-scenes look at his life with Pete on the trail—moments that might have ranged from the mundane to the surprising, but that were always heartfelt.Chasten has overcome a multitude of obstacles to get here. In this moving, uplifting memoir, he recounts his journey to finding acceptance as a gay man. He recalls his upbringing in rural Michigan, where he knew he was different, where indeed he felt different from his father and brothers. He recounts his coming out and how he’s healed from revealing his secret to his family, friends, community, and the world. And he tells the story of meeting his boyfriend, whom he would marry and who would eventually become a major Democratic leader.With unflinching honesty, unflappable courage, and great warmth, Chasten Buttigieg relays his experience of growing up in America and embracing his true self, while inspiring others to do the same.
Orange Is the New Black
Piper Kerman - 2010
But when she least expects it, her reckless past catches up with her; convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at an infamous women's prison in Connecticut, Piper becomes inmate #11187-424. From her first strip search to her final release, she learns to navigate this strange world with its arbitrary rules and codes, its unpredictable, even dangerous relationships. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with tokens of generosity, hard truths and simple acts of acceptance.
Dear Mr. You
Mary-Louise Parker - 2015
You renders the singular arc of a woman’s life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted. Readers will be amazed by the depth and style of these letters, which reveal the complexity and power to be found in relationships both loving and fraught.
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen - 1993
She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo
Matthew Amster-Burton - 2013
Now, Matthew Amster-Burton makes you fall in love with Tokyo. Experience this exciting and misunderstood city through the eyes of three Americans vacationing in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Follow 8-year-old Iris on a solo errand to the world’s greatest supermarket, picnic on the bullet train, and eat a staggering array of great, inexpensive foods, from eel to udon. A humorous travel memoir in the tradition of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Pretty Good Number One is the next best thing to a ticket to Tokyo.