Jamie's Italy

I have a crush on Jamie Oliver. Also, I'm Italian.

This is not why I chose to review this book and I promise that I'm not being biased about it either.

For me the glue that binds any cookbook to the recipes inside of them are the pictures. Okay, granted the pictures don't tell you how to cook the meals. HOWEVER, the pictures are what makes the recipe look oh so very nom nom nom.

I bought Julia Child's cookbook because it's French cuisine and it's Julia Child. Also, I had just finished watching the movie Julie & Julia and became very inspired. Upon perusing the recipes, it wasn't just the size of the book or the font of the words that scared me off of it ... it was the lack of photos! And those little pencil drawings do not count. Needless to say, I didn't spend hours pouring over each recipe as I did with Jamie Oliver's book. There was just no appeal to me.

I will admit that what drew me to this book is that it was filled with recipes from my motherland (maybe I am being biased). But, look at the cover of this book. Look at how vibrant the colours are ... they just pop right off the page. And that is what you can expect from the entire book. Every photo shows amazing details of not only the prepared dish, but of the individual ingredients that go into making each dish so mouth-watering.

It doesn't get much better than having a homemade glass of wine with a plate of pasta and enjoying it in some rustic town sitting next to a beaten up VW Beetle. Talk about simple pleasures.

Another aspect of this book that I really enjoyed are the stories that it told ... where the recipes came from ... the origins of the towns he visited ... the stories of the people who live there. He not only brought these meals to life, he brought the little towns to life as well. This wasn't just a cookbook, it was a journey.

If you can appreciate good food, a good cook and fantastic stories and photos, this is the next cookbook you need to have in your kitchen. All of your senses will thank you.

The Everything Book of Home Recording

I got this book from the library because I wanted to try to get a bit more sophisticated and polished with my podcasts and wanted to explore ways of using recording equipment to do so.

This book is geared specifically to the musician looking to build a basic recording setup at home and it does a very good job at touching on all of the levels of equipment and how they fit into such a plan.

The text was written very similarly to that of the famous "Dummies" books so it was easy to read and had plenty of illustrations. Where I got lost is on the parts geared specifically toward musicians that used musician lingo that I am not all that up on. However, I did find it useful to learn about microphones, mixers, and the smaller scale multi-track machines out there and felt it was a good primer for jumping into the mix.

If you are a musician who has been itching to record on the cheap and/or learn about how to get started in recording, I definitely would recommend this book. While it did serve my purpose, it was a bit overkill for me but being a geek and someone utterly frustrated at having no real musical ability, I didn't mind so much.