Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum - Hardcover

"Leah Eskin's recipes are seamlessly interwoven into her reminiscences, vignettes of domestic life, and culinary apercus, and the result is as charming as it is practical." --Colman Andrews, editorial director of TheDailyMeal.com "Leah Eskin's writing is like her food--honest, heartfelt, and tremendously appealing. She writes about the challenges of modern family life with wit and good humor, and firmly believes that good food will make any day better." --Jack Bishop, editorial director of PBS' America's Test Kitchen "Reading Leah Eskin's columns one by one is a pleasure; reading this collection from start to finish is a joy. It's also proof that the sum is much greater than the parts, even when the parts are terrific. Smart, honest, literate, funny -- very funny -- and packed with recipes for happy days and calamitous ones, Slices of Life is bound to find a place in your heart and your kitchen." --Dorie Greenspan, author of Around My French Table "For charm, you can't beat Leah Eskin's memoir and cookbook, Slices of Life. [Eskin] brings an irreverent humor, cool precision, and gustatory gusto to her accounts of American family life." --Saveur.com "I feel like I've discovered a treasured writer who I didn't know existed, on par with Laurie Colwin and M.F.K. Fisher. For me, reading Eskin's essays is like taking a graduate course in creative writing. I keep studying her sentences, dissecting her use of personal pronouns and marveling at her choice of words." --News & Observer "Slices of Life is one part cookbook, one part memoir, and two parts feel-good read...Although Eskin's columns are often charming and funny, it's the recipes that will leave copies of this book heavily earmarked." --Bust magazine "The book reads like a novel." --KitchenTable4.com "This book bubbles over with Leah's love of food, and her belief in the profound importance of eating--and cooking--together with family and friends. The recipes are great, too!" --Ted Allen, host of the Food Network's Chopped

Bad Haircut Kale Chips. Post-ER Roast Chicken. New Baby Risotto. Frantic Dinner-Party Calming Soup. These are some of the dishes that food writer Leah Eskin has turned out during her years of raising two children, enduring one dog, and tending her marriage. She's also nurtured her ten-year-old food column, "Home on the Range," providing a recipe and accompanying vignette in the Chicago Tribune every week. Slices of Life transforms those columns into a memoir that readers can savour in small or large bites. It's a compilation of more than 200 recipes, with a generous helping of the life stories that happened along the way: moving-day potatoes, summer-vacation apricot pie, dead-microwave ratatouille, sullen-child oatmeal squares. Whether preparing recipes for disaster or delight, Leah Eskin has made it all delicious!