Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks Through Many a Conundrum

Eskin collects ten years of columns on food and life written for the Chicago Tribune in this cookbook-cum-memoir. Each of the more than 200 recipes is introduced with a short story in a format that feels like a printed blog. Her essays and recipes strive to balance a conversational tone with poetic candor. Eskin's topics range from the mundane, such as carpooling, to the devastating, such as cancer, while her recipes sometimes take on paragraph format, rather than rigid steps, which may not suit all readers. None of the recipes have been photographed, so cooks who need a little more visual support will not find any. The book is organized in unrelated chapters that seem to run in chronological order, leaving the index as the only way to find a recipe. The recipes are an eclectic assortment, covering a variety of cuisines, categories, and difficulty levels, with an almond layer cake given in several parts and requiring one of the components to bake for seven hours on one end and a one-sentence mango lassi recipe on the other.