Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley is a level Z on the Fountas and Pinnell reading level scale. Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is about Lucy Knisley’s love for food. She is the daughter of a chef and the book talks about specific memories she had while growing up that started her love of food. I like that each chapter is bookended with recipes that are family recipes and things of her own creation. This book is great because you could make some of the recipes for students to try in class, and encourage students to start cooking with their parents or cook on their own with adult supervision. 

Just because I have virtually no sense of smell, or taste, (and am unable to cook worth a damn because seasoning is a mystery: "to taste"!?!? What, my taste? That's either way too much salt or way too much sugar for normal people) and am absolutely not a foodie, I do enjoy reading about other people's relationship with food. I don't care about recipes, but the emotional weight of food, and dinner parties, and all that. Knisley has enjoyed a particularly deep love affair with food, uncomplicated by so many of the eating issues and disorders. It's like reading about anything that anyone really loves: it's engrossing even when you don't see it.

Knisley's motto would seem to be "there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... about in boats — or with boats." Only replacing "boats" with "food." It's a charming memoir, reflecting well on family and friends, and memorable meals with same.

Library copy

Food memoirs are generally not my cup of tea. I’m not a foodie or all that interested in cooking; I read this to fulfill part of a reading challenge. While I wouldn’t consider this on par with favorite graphic novel memoirs like Persepolis or Fun Home, it was an enjoyable little trip into a genre I generally don’t think about much.

Taste, like smell, is a powerfully associative sense. Certain flavors can conjure very strong memories and can be particularly nostalgic. I’ve never been terribly concerned about food, but I do have strong memories associated with certain tastes, so I can understand the impulse to use it as a method of memory conjuring. Lucy Knisley builds her entire book around this sort of nostalgia and the comfort associated with it, using food as the central element around which she centers experience and personal milestones. She also builds a strong case for the appreciation of food and how it can be an important part of life when it is treated with respect and care rather than as simply a necessity. I share this philosophy in theory, but not much in practice, since eating with care takes money and time that isn’t always available to everyone.

Knisley comes from a foodie family and has snob credentials (thankfully sans the attitude that often comes with them). While she is open about her love of occasional fast food and junk food, it is an indulgence and not an unfortunate necessity as it can be for some, so there are some limits on her perspective. The art is lively and expressive, the colors particularly vibrant; it is extremely polished work, and she imbues it with a lot of personality. She also incorporates illustrated recipes as interstitials throughout the story, which will be great for people really interested in cooking. As I am not one of those people, I skimmed or skipped them entirely, though I may go back to them someday, on one of those rare occasions when I feel like cooking something that doesn’t involve a microwave.

I took on a reading challenge this year to force myself to try new things. Will the food memoir now be a personal genre staple thanks to the influence of Relish? Honestly: no. This was cute, but as it was about a combination of subjects I don’t care much about (food and the lives of middle class twenty-somethings), I’m not too worried about revisiting the genre anytime soon. Memoirs like this tend to come from and appeal to a certain demographic that doesn’t really include me. I do enjoy Knisley’s style and sense of humor, so perhaps I’ll keep my eye out for her other books and see if I can connect better with less food-oriented storytelling.

A few images from Relish:

I like food. In point of fact, I looooove food. I'm always suspicious of people who aren't interested in branching out and trying new dishes. What kind of a person doesn't want to explore what fabulous foods might be out there that they haven't discovered? (I even keep trying bananas despite my utter loathing of the horrid things.)Therefore, it wasn't a huge leap to pick up Lucy Knisley's (yes, it's her again) book entitled Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. Lucy has lived the kind of foodie life that most of us can only dream (or read) about. Her mom was a caterer, her dad is a connoisseur of exquisite dishes, and she seems to have been surrounded by chefs of all kinds throughout her life. (I even learned there is a job entitled Cheesemonger which might be the best factoid ever.) This book wasn't all narrative though. In fact, my favorites were the added on bits: Recipes, food facts, and at the very end were actual photographs of her and her journey with food. Warning: Will make you hungry.

Last summer I indulged myself in aWTF Friday read of Triangulum Stain by Moctezuma Johnson. It was pure b-grade schlock, a literary science fiction cheese-fest (with a sexually subversive spin) that played with all the alien invasion tropes. I enjoyed it, but lamented that the story really just stopped, with only a suggestion of an end, and left me with a lot of questions.

Fortunately, Johnson has since reopened the case (and provided some answers), introducing The Battle for Alien Relish as the second book of the Triangulum Stain series. Basically, without spoiling too much of either book, the ladies of the Five Hive were a tad too successful in stopping Dildoggeddon, and now the entire universe is dying, robbed of the lust and the passions that drive us as a species.

There is a lot going on in this second book, but the breathless sort of reading experience is entirely suited to the story being told. It's a bold, busy, and bewildering, but somehow the convergence of sci-fi schlock, monster erotica, and ribald humor really works. Johnson opens up the world here, taking us outside the confines of the original Andromeda Strain homage, and lets his imagination run wild, this time using the Cthulhu mythos (and celebrity pop culture) as his inspiration.

The absurdity of The Battle for Alien Relish simultaneously amuses and arouses, making it not just for mature readers only, but also for intelligent (and open minded) ones.