The Secret Recipe of Ella Dove by Karen Hawkins

The Secret Recipe of Ella Dove by Karen Hawkins

Published by Gallery Books ISBN 9781668018309

Hardcover, $28.99, 368 pages

Coming from a small city, I enjoy a good book in a small town setting, and if you throw in a food theme along with recipes at the end, I am definitely in. Karen Hawkins' enjoyable The Secret Recipe of Ella Dove has all that and more.

Ella Dove has become famous on social media for her wonderful baked goods. She sold her company and after a stint in Paris and New York, she returns to her hometown of Dove Pond (named after her ancestors) for what she hopes is a brief visit with her sisters. She can't stay there, she will become bored.

She also hopes to confront a longtime family friend to get to the bottom of a controversy. Ella was accused of stealing The Book of Cakes, a family heirloom belonging to the Stewart family that contained recipes going back to 1792. Worse, she was accused of using those recipes to create her popular recipes.

The Stewart family have owned a popular local restaurant for many years, now run by Jules and her son Mark. Her other son Gray has had an unrequited love for Ella who broke his heart twice many years ago. Jules not only has to deal with seeing the woman she believes stole her family's heirloom book, she now has to see Ella and Gray growing closer again, knowing it will end badly.

Jules' mother Angela has also returned to Dove Pond following the death of her second husband. Angela is determined to repair her relationship with Jules, which fractured after she divorced Jules' father, even if she has to resort to some deceit to do so.

The characters in this novel are wonderful. Angela is delightful, using everything in her power to get what she wants. She convinces her grandson Gray to help her hide the truth from Jules, and their playful grandmother-grandson banter and relationship is adorable. Angela manages to get Ella to do her bidding as well.

Jules is a helicopter mom, and I think many of us know someone like her. She is fiercely loyal to her family. I found it an interesting character development that Gray has an anxiety disorder, and it's dealt with compassion. 

I also found the social media angle intriguing, as it has become ubiqitous in today's world. We get a peek behind the curtain there. There is a bit of a magical element here too, as Ella's baked goods cause people to remember specific good times in their lives when they eat them. I'll have to make some of the recipes in the book to see what happens.

After reading the third book in the series, I am going to read the first two books- The Book Charmer,  about Ella's sister Sarah, a librarian who can give the perfect book to someone in need (isn't that every librarian's special power?), and A Cup of Silver Linings, about Ava Dove's tea shop and her magic tea leaves. I can't wait to return to Dove Pond. 

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with a book in exchange for an honest review.

Weekend Cooking- The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn
Published by Atria ISBN 9781451674200
Hardcover, $26, 320 pages

Emily Nunn, a former New Yorker magazine editor, was in love and living with her fiance`, "the Engineer" she called him, and his lovely young daughter in Chicago. While on vacation in Barcelona, she got word that her brother Gil had committed suicide.

Emily was devastated and the Engineer was upset that Emily couldn't just snap out of her depression and move on. The Engineer broke up with her and she lost her fiance, his daughter, her home and had no job. She began to drink heavily, and one night she poured out her heartache on Facebook.

The next morning, she discovered many of her Facebook friends had responded to her post, asking Emily to come visit them. Her sister Elaine got Emily into the Betty Ford Clinic to deal with her alcohol problem, and took charge of Emily when she got out of rehab.

But things soured quickly. In Emily's family, her mother and one of sisters didn't speak to anyone else in the family. Elaine would decide not to speak to Emily for long periods of time, and Emily never knew why. Emily grew up "in a family of seven- an exquisitely dysfunctional southern family, in various members stopped speaking for years in various convoluted and confusing configurations."

Emily decided to go on on comfort food tour. She would travel the country, visiting various extended family and friends, and that led to her memoir The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart. She stayed with an aunt and uncle in Virginia, trying to learn why her family acted the way that they did. Childhood pals, high school friends, college chums, cousins- they all invited Emily to come visit and cook with them.

The Comfort Food Diaries is part food memoir, part travel guide, part family story, and part self-discovery story, filled with wonderful recipes for the food that nourishes the appetite and the soul. Emily found that she wasn't the only one who had been hurt, and she discovered the resilience to face her life head-on.

The most moving part of the story was when Emily and Elaine went to see their long-estranged father. He was suffering from dementia, lonely and living amid squalor . He had left the family when Emily was a young girl after her mother had taken up with another man and he moved out. It was heartbreaking to hear his story.

There are so many fabulous recipes in this book that I want to try- Toni's Tomato Sauce, Great-grandmother's Mean Lemon Cake,  Bea's Magic Salad Dressing, Aunt Mariah's Pot Roast, Magnificient Sour Cream Corn Muffins- it is a nice mix of traditional family, and more modern restaurant fare.

If you like memoirs about families and food, The Comfort Food Diaries is a good read for you. I recommend it.

The Welcome Home Diner by Peggy Lampman

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

The Welcome Home Diner by Peggy Lampman
Published by Lake Union Publishing ISBN 978-1542047821
Trade paperback, $14.95, 352 pages

Peggy Lampman previously owned a specialty food store, The Back Alley Gourmet, in her college town of Ann Arbor before writing a weekly food column for the Ann Arbor News. Now she writes a food blog, dinnerfeed.com and all this led her to write two novels- The Promise Kitchen (2016) and this year's The Welcome Home Diner.

Addie and Samantha open a diner in Detroit. Detroit has been through some rough times, and the cousins hope to help resusitate an area of Detroit with their neighborhood diner.

They got their love of cooking from their Babcia, their Polish grandmother. She inspired them, and her photo hangs up in a corner of the diner to remind them of how they got here. Addie and Sam share a two-story house- Addie lives upstairs with her boyfriend David and they seem very happy and well-suited to each other.

Addie is the organizer and planner, she handles the ordering, and the paperwork, along with the front of the house issues. She sees a future for her and David, marriage and children, but David is happy with things the way they are.

Sam runs the kitchen, she is beautiful and a great cook and after getting out of a bad relationship in New York, she is trying to find her footing again with men. Meanwhile, she has Hero, her dog who watches over her.

The Welcome Home Diner has money issues, as most new businesses do. They don't have much money leftover after payroll and food costs, but Addie and Sam are committed to making the diner work, sacrificing much to make it successful.

They draw a decent crowd from the young professionals in the area, but they are perplexed as to why the neighborhood residents do not eat at the diner. Their prices are reasonable, the food is delicious, and there isn't another comparable restaurant in the neighborhood.

In addition, there is a person giving them bad and inaccurate Yelp reviews, a next door neighbor who is openly hostile to them, and a business vendor who is menacing them.

I loved the characters in The Welcome Home Diner. Along with Addie and Sam, they have an interesting staff- Braydon, who started with them on day one and has worked his way up to floor manager, Quiche, a cook who brings her smart young daughter Sun Beam to work with her, and Sylvia, a young woman rescued from sex traffickers whom Addie and Sam take under their wing.

Having owned a restaurant with my husband, I found The Welcome Home Diner fascinating. Lampman gets so much right, such as the stress, the hard, physical work and the comraderie of the team effort. You get a great look at the day-to-day grind of running a restaurant.

The setting of Detroit is a character as well. We get a real feel for what a once-vibrant city is now going through, the struggles of the residents to get back on their feet. Some people appreciate the efforts of newcomers investing in their city, others fear the gentrification and the strangers moving into their neighborhoods.

I recommend The Welcome Home Diner for those who like foodie fiction, and family stories mixed with serious issues and there are even some recipes at the end, like Lamb Burger Sliders with Tzatziki and Beetroot Relish,  and Sylvia's Heartbreakers, which are similiar to the amazing Levain's Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies, famous in NYC (and my guilty pleasure).

Peggy Lampman's website is here.

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Peggy Lampman's tour. The rest of her tour stops are here:

Peggy Lampman’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, October 16th: Books and Bindings

Tuesday, October 17th: A Thousand Books to Read

Wednesday, October 18th: Books a la Mode – author guest post

Thursday, October 19th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Friday, October 20th: Katy’s Library blog and Instagram

Saturday, October 21st: Beth Fish Reads

Monday, October 23rd: The Sketchy Reader

Tuesday, October 24th: Savvy Verse & Wit

Wednesday, October 25th: Kahakai Kitchen

Thursday, October 26th: A Chick Who Reads

Friday, October 27th: The Book Diva’s Reads

Monday, October 30th: All Roads Lead to the Kitchen

Wednesday, November 1st: Why Girls are Weird

Thursday, November 2nd: Bookchickdi

Friday, November 3rd: BookNAround

Monday, November 6th: Read Write Repeat

Tuesday, November 7th: Booksie’s Blog

Wednesday, November 8th: Bibliotica

Friday, November 10th: What is That Book About

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan
Published by William Morrow ISBN 9780062699589
Trade paperback, $14.99, 336 pages

I've become a big fan of Jenny Colgan, having read The Cafe By The Sea and The Bookshop on the Corner, both set in Scotland. (I've talked so much about her books that I've gained her a few more readers at the Book Cellar where I volunteer.)

Her latest book, Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery, is set in the little seaside village town of Mount Polbeane in Cornwall, England. It is the third book in the series, (Little Beach Street Bakery and Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery being the first two) and not having read the first two, I feared I may be a little lost.

I needn't have feared, I was able to catch up quickly. Polly is the owner of Little Beach Street Bakery, after her previous life imploded when the fiance company she owned with her boyfriend went under, along with their relationship.

Now she is happy, waking very early each morning in the old lighthouse she lives in with her current boyfriend, Huckle, (an American chap who left his family in Virginia to become a beekeeper and sell honey) to make the pastries and breads that the villagers and tourists adore.

Polly's friend Kerensa is married to Reuben, a blowhard of a millionaire (billionaire?) who has a challenging personality, but loves Kerensa deeply. Kerensa makes a big mistake one night, and this causes a rift between Polly and Huckle, Reuben's best friend.

Polly was raised by single mum Doreen, and never knew her father who abandoned Doreen when she became pregnant. Doreen rarely leaves her home, preferring to watch television. Their relationship is somewhat strained since Doreen had hoped that her daughter would have more financial stability in her life, and Polly is sad that her mother seems so lonely.

I loved the characters in this town- Reuben is a hoot, and could have been a stock rich jerk, but Colgan makes him three-dimensional. His mother Rhonda is a real trip too. And how many books have a puffin as a character? (Yes, Neil is a bird.)

The story revolves around a snow storm that strands everyone at Reuben's mansion on Christmas Eve, where Polly has been talked into making pastries for Reuben's yuge holiday party when she would rather be snuggling with Huckle and Neil and relaxing.

There is a public proposal, snow sculptures, a trip to the hospital and a helicopter ride during the party, but fear not, all is resolved by the story's end.

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery is a perfect palate cleanser of a book. It's a lovely, light read, meant for curling up on the couch under a comfy blanket on a cold or rainy Sunday. It would make a wonderful stocking stuffer for a good friend this upcoming holiday season.

And if you like books with food references in them, this one will have your stomach rumbling, wishing that you lived close enough to the Little Beach Street Bakery so that you could sample some buttery croissants, Christmas twists, and homemade hot chocolate.

I have already gotten myself copies of the first two books in the series, and I can't wait to find out how Polly's story got her to this point.

Jenny Colgan's website is here.

Thanks to TLC Tours for putting me on Jenny Colgan's tour. The rest of her stops are here:

Tour Stops

Tuesday, October 10th: BookExpression

Wednesday, October 11th: BookNAround

Thursday, October 12th: A Chick Who Reads

Friday, October 13th: Bibliotica

Monday, October 16th: Buried Under Books

Tuesday, October 17th: A Bookish Way of Life

Wednesday, October 18th: bookchickdi

Thursday, October 19th: Kahakai Kitchen

Friday, October 20th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Friday, October 20th: Reading Reality

Saturday, October 21st: Girl Who Reads

Monday, October 23rd: Into the Hall of Books

Tuesday, October 24th: StephTheBookworm

Wednesday, October 25th: A Bookworm’s World

Friday, October 27th: Jathan & Heather

Friday, October 27th: Books and Bindings

Weekend Cooking- The Book Cellar

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

Last June, I began volunteering at the Book Cellar, a wonderful used bookstore located in the Webster Library branch of the New York Public Library on the Upper East Side. It is a fantastic place, often called a 'hidden NYC gem' by people when they find it.

The Book Cellar has been open for eleven years, which is such an accomplishment, made even more impressive by the fact that it is operated by the Friends of the Webster Library and staffed completely by a terrific group of dedicated volunteers.

I enjoy spending four days a week at The Book Cellar, and one of the many reasons for that is that I am always finding great books to purchase, most for under $3. It does cause a problem in that, while I frequently donate my books to the Book Cellar after I have read them, I somehow end up bringing home just as many (OK, maybe more) than I donate.

Recently, I found some books that relate to Weekend Cooking. As I was looking through my cookbook collection to see which ones I could donate (not as many I as should have), I discovered that I did not have a copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook, a classic that should be in every kitchen.

I was able to rectify that error by picking up a copy at The Book Cellar for just $3. Does anyone have any favorite recipes from the book that I should try? Let me know in comments below.

Calvin Trillin's book about his lovely wife who passed away way too soon, About Alice, holds a special place on my Favorites Bookshelf, and so when I saw that his book Alice, Let's Eat was at the Book Cellar, I snapped that up too. Trillin is so funny, and I adore Alice, so I can't wait to dig into this one.

The last book I purchased is Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, about a young woman who begins a blog writing about her quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child's classic cookbook Mastering The Art of French Cooking in her tiny kitchen apartment. I can't believe I haven't read this one yet.

Now I'm off to work my shift at the book store where maybe I'll find even more treasures to bring home. (Just don't tell my husband.)

You can like The Book Cellar on Facebook here.