Book Review - Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

I recently read the book Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. It's half cookbook, half memoir. Reese chronicles her efforts to make tons of food items from scratch after losing her job. She documented the cost of the homemade version, the cost of the store bought version, and how difficult or annoying it was to make the item herself. She chronicled both her successes and her failures.

I found the book to be both funny and useful. I especially liked her empirical approach to the issue. Since I'm saving up to buy a house, I don't want to waste money on things that are more trouble than they're worth. Plus, I'm not someone who finds great joy in cooking. I like to take on a big project now and then, and there are some things I find fun to do, but mostly I see cooking as a chore - something that I do simply because it needs to be done. I do, however, have a bit of a mad scientist streak, and this book appealed to that part of me.

Reese enjoys cooking way more than I do, so her calculation falls a little more to the "make" side of the equation than mine does. However, I was surprised by some of the things she said fell in the "buy" category. Burritos and jam both fell under "buy" for her. While I love a good taqueria burrito, they're not that hard to make at home. And homemade jam is far superior to anything at the store and costs about the same.

Several times throughout the book, I found myself surprised that anyone would think to make certain items homemade. There's a recipe for pop tarts, for example. I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to make ricotta cheese. I'm going to have to give it a try sometime. She has a marshmallow recipe that I want to try as soon as I can figure out what to use in place of the gelatin to vegetarianize it. (I'm thinking either pectin or agar-agar.)

I skipped most of the meat chapters, but I did start reading the one on chickens with the hope that I could find some egg recipes. But halfway through a rather graphic description of killing a rooster, I decided to skip the rest of that chapter, too.

In all, I recommend the book. There's something for the urban homesteader, the person who loves to cook, and the mad scientist.