Wilson’s debut cookbook carries the same exuberant, humorous tone as her popular blog, coupled with beautiful photographs of her one-of-a-kind recipes.
As a celebration of butter and sugar, this cookbook is not for the faint of stomach or high of cholesterol. Recipes feature peanut butter and bacon cookies, avocado fries, strawberry cookie dough ice cream and coffee bacon. Displaying easy-to-follow recipes, Wilson believes that “(b)aking isn’t about high-tech gizmos. It’s about stepping into your kitchen with a monster sweet tooth and coaxing something beautiful out of the oven.” With an upbeat, quirky tone, the author comes across as the perfect friend with whom to spend an afternoon baking cookies. But with quirkiness comes occasional disorganization, and the chapter contents seem a bit random at times. Wilson also includes important extra information about the recipes, including how long they will keep, what texture to strive for and when to let imperfections pass. In a chapter of kitchen tips, the author provides advice about whether you really need to sift that flour, what size eggs to use and why, and how to get the most out of fruit zest. Wilson offers surprising but delicious combinations: parmesan seaweed popcorn, peanut butter and jam milkshakes, vegan chocolate avocado cupcakes, chocolate black pepper goat cheese truffles, and sweet potato chocolate chip cookies. You have to love a cookbook that features an incredible one-person chocolate lava cake that is easy to make and dubbed the “single girl melty chocolate cake.” A joyful, entertaining cookbook.
Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-1060-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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