Review by Deb Czajkowski
“Be
careful what you wish for.” Why? Because you just might get it! You’ve heard this quote. Sometimes we wish for something in the moment
and then, when it comes to fruition, we realize we really hadn’t thought it
through.
Anneke
Stroudt, a successful architect and home builder, often wishes she didn’t have
to deal with difficult ─and, using her word, stupid─ people. And she also wishes she had more time to spend
working on the restoration of the beautiful historic property that she had
speculatively purchased. But her job
demands many hours of her day, and the rest of her day she gladly shares with
her chef fiancé.
Until
one fateful day when Anneke both loses her job and her fiancé, and she is
forced to move into the gutted house. Now
what? Anneke no longer has a source of
income. And the century old house will
take both many months of intense labor and megabucks to restore before she can
put it on the market. Hence, she is now
property rich but cash poor. What was
she thinking?
Thinking before speaking has never been
Anneke’s strong suit. But doing is ─ beginning with demolishing
the basement, which leads to the discovery of a mysterious and very old
leather-bound book. The book belonged to
Gemma, the cook for the house’s original owners, and is filled with intriguing
and tempting recipes as well as sage commentary and advice. For someone in desperate need of both, can
Gemma provide Anneke with the right ingredients for sustenance and life lessons?
If
you value historic homes, or if the thought of renovating one is fascinating or
enticing to you, you’ll love Stacey Ballis’ Recipe
for Disaster. It is filled with significant detail on, well,
the details involved in the
step-by-step renovating process. As
someone whose carpentry skills are pretty much limited to using a hammer to
hang a picture on the wall, I’m just going to take her word for its accuracy! I love the idea of a turn-of-the-century (the
twentieth century!) home, of the family that lived there a hundred years ago,
what their lives were like, and what foods they ate. I loved Gemma’s book, her diary; her thoughts
and her recipes. I’m definitely going to
try some of them!
Reading
Gemma’s words of wisdom and experience often made me think of another familiar
quote: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Still true today, good recipes and good
advice are always in fashion.
Purchase
the book at:
About the Author:
Stacey Ballis is the author of several novels, incuding
Inappropriate Men, Sleeping Over, Room for Improvement, The Spinster Sisters,
Good Enough to Eat, Off the Menu and Out to Lunch, and the upcoming Recipe for
Disaster currently available for pre-order, being released March 3, 2013. Her
first cookbook, Big Delicious Life is out now in a digital edition, and she is
at work co-authoring a new cookbook called Cooking for You: Wellness in the
Kitchen with Dr. Francis Ardito, which will be released in 2015. She is also a
contributing author to the anthologies Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, and
Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume, and
Living Jewishly. She is currently at work on a new work of full-length fiction
called for Berkeley/Penguin, which will be out in 2016.
Connect with the
author at:
Berkley Books
is giving one lucky winner a print copy of
Recipe For
Disaster by Stacey Ballis
US only
a Rafflecopter giveaway
