Culinary Adventures with Camilla

   This is another book that was devoured, cooked from, but never posted last year -  Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream by Tung Nguyen, Katherine Manning, Lyn Ngyuen, and Michelle Bernstein. Amazon certainly knows how to suggest what I like. Seriously. Food. Immigrants. Food. I'm all in. On the Page Not being from Miami - in fact, never having visited Miami - I was completely unaware of the legendary restaurant that is Hy Vong. This is the story of Tung and Kathy - their friendship, partnership, and family - and the American immigrant experience. It is also a tale of the ripples of war as Tung came to American with all of the emotional scars of the Vietnam War. This memoir is told in alternating perspectives from Tung, Kathy, and Tung's daughter, Lyn. One of my best friends from high school was adopted from Vietnam and, after she returned and found her birth mother, I remember her telling me the story of bringing her here...

Last month wasn't a very productive reading month for me. But we headed out of town earlier this month for a back-to-school celebration camping trip and I was determined to read a book and relax. I had just acquired Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family by Hannah Howard* and it was a breeze to read. Hannah Howard is a writer and food expert. This is her second memoir and I will definitely be looking up the first soon! Plenty  is a timely memoir in which she poignantly details being pregnant and giving birth amidst this on-going COVID pandemic. Among many things, she writes about cheese. Glorious, beautiful cheese. "The cheese was perfect. It oozed out of its snow-white skin, leaving a puddle on the cutting board. It tasted of sweet milk and buttered mushrooms and joy."   "I wanted to taste everything and learn everything about what I was tasting, the person who made that cheese, their traditions, their dreams. I was also afraid of my own appetites and learned to loath...

This week, I breezed through  Freckled: A Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii  by TW Neal.* I had ordered it last month when we were lamenting the cancellation of our family vacation to Hawaii amid the coronavirus pandemic. I was reading anything and everything that was set in Hawaii; and the boys and I were re-watching the reboot of Hawaii Five-O  as well. We're into Season Five and enjoying seeing the sights we missed last month. Freckled  was definitely not a feel-good read about some of our favorite islands. In fact, it is one of the only books that has made me literally cringe while reading it, but still kept me reading it. Also, I was completely unfamiliar with the author, but her writing is incredibly evocative. I will definitely read more of her work...maybe just not more about her painfully abusive childhood. On the Page photo from amazon.com This book is raw in its honesty and so, so disturbing. It's jarring to see such unbridled ...