Comfort Food

'Simply from Scratch'
By Alicia Bessette


Format: Hardback
Published: Dutton Adult; Aug. 2010
Pages: 313


Synopsis: Bessette's debut features a young widow's profoundly quirky quest to move on after her husband's death. A year after Zell's husband dies in New Orleans while on a post-Katrina relief mission, Zell, who frequently talks to her dog in pirate-speak, is still a mess. Next door, amazingly precocious nine-year-old Ingrid believes TV celebrity chef Polly Pinch is her mother. Coincidentally, Zell won't go near her kitchen, as it's just too full of painful memories. But after Zell and Ingrid form an unlikely friendship, they enter a Polly Pinch baking contest so Ingrid can meet Polly and Zell can win the $20,000 prize and donate it to Katrina relief. What follows is the requisite learning of lessons about how to cope with grief and loss. 


My Take: If a novel involves cooking I generally want to read it. And Uggs aside, this cover attracted me. When I read the theme of the book I was even more intrigued, it was dealing with getting over grief, and well, I get that. I wanted to know more so I took the plunge and read more and overall I really liked it and was glad I read it.


Our lead, Zell is pretty easy to fall in line with. Her husband recently passed away. We don't learn how he passed away until pretty far into the book so I won't give it away but she didn't get to say goodbye and they were a young couple who still had a lot of hopes and dreams ahead of them. You really feel for her. The book begins a year after her husband's death and everyone is starting to think it's time for Zell to have moved on a little but Zell is still reeling. They live in a small, Northern town where they know everyone I think she just kind of wanted to escape reality for a bit, which totally makes sense given the circumstances.


Zell's husband was the cook in the household but she sees that there is a contest where you can win $20,000 if you make a delicious dessert for this famous TV chef's show called Polly Pinch and her husband's last wish was to donate that exact amount of money to the Hurricane Katrina victims so she thinks it is fate for her to come up with a dessert even though Zell is pretty much a disaster in the kitchen.


Her neighbors are a single dad and his nine year old daughter Ingrid who is obsessed with Polly Pinch so when Ingrid learns about Zell's plan a friendship is born. This turns out to be good for Zell because it breaks her out of her shell a bit. Also, Zell and her husband had talked about having children but she wasn't really around them much so it helps her, I think, to deal with her emotions about having children, or not getting to have them with her husband.


Naturally, things don't go smoothly in the kitchen for those two and the healing process continues on quite a rocky journey for Zell but it's a pretty good story and I would recommend it. My one fault in the story, and it ended up being a big one for me, was the incongruity in Zell's choice of swear words. Don't get me wrong, I am not a prude and don't have a problem with foul language in books with pink covers or otherwise, but this woman says 'Balls' every chance she gets. I am not here to nit pick, but that's your swear word of choice? Testicles? Seriously? Like every other paragraph? It'd be fine if it was every now and again but this woman was shouting the word balls in her head and out of it non-stop and I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday so I know she's not referring to tennis balls or something. Yet she would abbreviate the word g.d. for God dam*. It bugged me. That's my piece.


If you can get past that though it's a pretty cute read.

(Thank you to Crazy Book Tours for sending me this book)