Stir: My Broken Brain and The Meals That Brought Me Home by Jessica Fechtor

Sitr: My Broken Brain and The Meals That Brought Me Home by Jessica Fechtor
Published June 2015 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: my copy checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary: 
At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage, and thinking about starting a family. Then one day, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved.

Jessica’s journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking. Written with intelligence, humor, and warmth, Stir is a heartfelt examination of what it means to nourish and be nourished."

Woven throughout the narrative are 27 recipes for dishes that comfort and delight. For readers of M.F.K.Fisher, Molly Wizenberg, and Tamar Adler, as well as Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Susannah Cahalan, Stir is sure to inspire, and send you straight to the kitchen.


My Thoughts: 
I have had a sinus headache for a week. I'm not saying that to make you feel sorry; I'm saying it so that I can tell you that, even though I've had sinus headaches for more than forty years and even though I'm exceedingly familiar with their symptoms, every single time I get one that lasts for more than 24 hours, I begin to worry that I'm having an aneurysm or that I have a brain tumor. That's the way my thought process works.

It never occurred to Jessica Fechtor, on the other hand, to think that something might be seriously wrong with her when she felt a click in her head then what felt like water running inside her head. Not when she was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room of the local hospital. Not when she was transferred to another hospital, moved to the ICU, not when all of her family raced to be by her side. Not until they had to open her skull and put a clip on a blood vessel in her brain did she begin to understand that her life might have taken a turn for which she was not prepared.

Fechtor was a driven young woman who was working on her doctorate, running miles everyday, teaching, and entertaining regularly. She and her husband were nearly ready to start a family. She was not, in other words, a person who was used to sitting, taking it easy. But when a severe infection set in after her first brain surgery, it was the beginning of a long road to recovery. Fechtor was blessed to have family and friends who stepped up and really helped. But it was hard for her to sit on the sidelines, especially when it came to working in the kitchen. So it's no real surprise that it was the desire to get back to feeding her people that got Fechtor to push herself to recovery. It was not just a matter of building up stamina again. Fechtor had to learn to deal with the fact that her depth perception was off - the knife in her right hand might end up slicing the fingers on her left hand instead of the apple that hand was holding, the liquid she was pouring into a bowl was just as likely to run all over the counter instead of into the bowl.

I enjoyed this book on multiple levels - as a kind of medical memoir, as a memoir of a life in which food played a huge part, and for Fechtor's writing, which she honed by writing a blog as part of her recovery.

"Being sick is supposed to come along with grand realizations about What Really Matters, but I don't know. I think deep down, we're already aware of what's important and what's not. Which isn't to say that we always live our lives accordingly. We snap at our spouses and curse the traffic and miss the buds pushing up from the ground. But we know. We just forget to know sometimes. Near-death forces us to remember. It pushes us into a state of aggressive gratitude that throws what's big and what's small into the sharpest relief It's awfully hard to worry about the puddle of milk when you're just glad to be here to spill it."

All of the recipes Fechtor includes in the book come with the story behind them - the morel mushroom and fresh pea dinner she had on her 27th birthday that she worked to recreate - and explanations for why recipes give particular instructions, such as salting a chicken days in advance of roasting it. These recipes are all getting copied before I take this book back to the library!

Perhaps this was my favorite bit:

"Home is a verb. It's not only where we live, but how." 

I've never thought it home in exactly that way before, but it is absolutely the way I feel about my home. Fechtor has inspired me to up my game in the kitchen to get back to being the person who expresses my love through food but also in all of the ways I treat people - taking into consideration what will make the people I care about happy, what will provide comfort, what will make them want to linger.

Relish: My Life In The Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

Relish: My Life In The Kitchen by Lucy Knisley
Published April 2013 by Turtleback Books
Source: my local library

Publisher's Summary:
A graphically illustrated, recipe-complemented memoir by the indie cartoonist author of French Milk describes her food-enriched youth as the daughter of a chef and a gourmet, key memories that were marked by special meals and the ways in which cooking has imparted valuable life lessons.


My Thoughts:
Honestly, doesn't that summary make this book sounds kind of boring? It's the summary I found for the hardcover book. At the very least, it sounds so serious. Knisley may be serious about food but her storytelling is definitely not boring. First of all, it's a graphic novel - can they even be boring? For some reason, the paperback has an entirely different summary:

"Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions. 

A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a graphic novel for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product."

Now doesn't that sound more like a book you'd want to pick up? Knisley's writing and drawings are lighthearted and fun. What's more, although she's clearly a woman who appreciates fine food, she's not a food snob, confessing to a fondness for fast food and baking cookies.

The recipes Knisley shares at the end of each recipe are fully illustrated and, for the most part, not complex. She even makes rolling sushi look do-able. This book will not be going back to the library until I make copies of all of them. Sure, I could just write them down; but they wouldn't be nearly as much fun to make without the drawings!

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Heartburn by Nora Ephron
Published December 1983 by Cengage Gale
Source: my copy purchased through Better World Books

Publisher’s Summary: Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes.

My Thoughts: Nora Ephron died seven years ago. I am still in mourning. There will be no more wonderful movies that will become classics. There will be no more books to make me laugh out loud, cry in public, and astound me with Ephron’s wonderful way with words. So periodically I watch one of her beloved movies. And every so often I read one of her books. There are so few of them; and while you can always reread and enjoy them, you can only read them for the first time once. So Heartburn’s been sitting on my bookshelves for a while waiting for me to need some Nora. Recently, I needed me some Nora.

Heartburn is a thinly disguised (and I mean very thinly) novel based on Ephron’s marriage to and divorce from journalist Carl Bernstein (you know, Watergate Carl Bernstein). When asked by her therapist why she has to turn everything into a story, even the sad or terrible things, Rachel says:

 “Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” 

Which you can’t help but think is maybe the truest thing Ephron ever wrote. She and Bernstein divorced in 1980 and by 1983 the book was in print. Truth be told, don’t we all tell stories for much the same reasons, especially those stories about things that are painful? Ephron just does it so much better than we can. She can make you feel the pain behind the humor. She can make you find the humor in the pain. And as funny as this book is, it is also really sad. It’s hard to see a marriage fall apart; it’s hard to read about someone betraying a person they once loved so much they begged and begged for the marriage.

Does Rachel have any deep epiphanies about how she found herself in a second bad marriage? No. Does Ephron give us any deep conversations between Rachel and Mark to help us understand their marriage? No. But then we aren't really looking for that in this book; at least I wasn't. I was looking for what I always want from Ephron - humor, humaneness, wonderful conversations. My one little problem with the book is that it is written from Rachel's first person point of view which means that we are to believe that this is a book like the others she has written, books that general contain heaping helpings of stories with recipes. As such, "Rachel" also includes recipes in this book.  But here, they just sort of seem superfluous.

As someone who has always needed to use humor to survive the tough times, I could so relate to Rachel’s need to deflect her pain with her stories and her humor. I saw the movie adaptation of this book years ago. Even though I know what Ephron and Bernstein look like, I still kept picturing Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson as Rachel and Mark which made it slightly easier to imagine this as something other than autobiographical. A story. Because that’s the way Ephron wanted it.

Soup's On!

Welcome! I'm so excited to be part of this week's Progressive Dinner Party; I'm picking up new recipes as quickly as I usually get new book ideas! Now that you've enjoyed your appetizers, please pull up a chair and we'll begin with the soup and salad course.

At my table, I'll be serving Southern Peanut Soup. My brother-in-law, who's quite a good cook, particularly of soups, first introduced me to this soup many years ago. Then he had the audacity to never make it again. But I still love him anyway; well, I do now that I know how to make the soup.

Southern Peanut Soup

2 T. butter
2 T. onion, grated
1 rib of celery, thinly sliced
2 T. flour
3 c. chicken broth
1/2 c. creamy peanut butter
1/4 t. salt
1 c. light cream
2 T. chopped roasted peanuts

Melt the butter over low heat in Dutch oven. Add onion and celery. Saute for 5 minutes. Add flour and mix well until blended. Stir in broth and simmer 30 minutes. Remove from heat; strain broth to remove onion and celery. Stir in peanut butter, salt and cream until well mixed. Serve hot. Garnish each serving with a teaspoon of chopped peanuts.

For another soup course, visit:

Review From Here - www.reviewfromhere.com - Creamy Tomato Soup

And for salad, stop by:

Rundpinne - www.rundpinne.com - Grandma's Cranberry Salad
Bermudaonion's Weblog - www.bermudaonion.wordpress.com - Pear & Blue Cheese Salad
Booking Mama - www.bookingmama.blogspot.com - Strawberry Poppy Seed Salad

Be sure to check out Book Blog Social Club for all of this week's festivities. My family is going to be trying new recipes for weeks!