The Commonsense Kitchen: A Cookbook Review

I was so excited to receive a review copy of The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes Plus Lessons for a Hand-Crafted Life; I couldn’t wait to dive in.

From the publisher’s description:

Every once in a while a cookbook comes along that is at once so useful and so spirited you can imagine it becoming a kitchen staple. The Commonsense Kitchen is such a book. And it’s from an unusual source: one of the toughest colleges to get into in the United States, Deep Springs is an organic farm, school, and working cattle ranch in the high desert of the Sierra Nevada. This general cookbook has more than 500 recipes for delicious, honest staples and sassy regional specialties such as Red Chile Enchiladas and Mama Nell’s Kentucky Bourbon Balls. What’s more, this book features amazing food as well as lessons in life skills, from the proper way to wash dishes to how to make homemade soap. The Commonsense Kitchen is equally at home on the shelf of an urban foodie or a rural home cook.

After reading the description, I anticipated a quaint book of simple recipes with lots of homesteading tips. I was a wee bit disappointed to discover that the “lessons in life skills” are pretty much limited to the dish washing and homemade soap making. However the recipes are a nice reference and it does provide very clear instructions for cooking. The ingredients used are basic and things a from-scratch cook would most likely have on hand. I would feel comfortable giving this to a beginner level cook, although more advanced cooks will enjoy the variations and ideas as well.

Some may miss the photos, but the paper is of good quality and invites you to sit down and read it.

Overall, it’s a beautiful book and I find myself referencing it often when looking up simple things like pancakes, steel cut oats, etc. Best of all, it is indexed on eatyourbooks.com, so I’m sure I’ll be using it a lot in the future.