HaHaHaHaHaHa! So self-conscious. And the recipes are terrible- uninspired and full of errors or adapted from elsewhere. If you have an interest in the kitchen you’ve probably tackled variations of most. Pretty photography, but no one with a kitchen that sees heavy use would fill it with dead flowers and open shelves full exposed crockery and glassware. You’d be forever cleaning. And the contributors? So serious! Such an obsession with sweet potatoes! So much chambray! So many dead eyes! I walked away with only two recipes: Tea smoked eggs and Sarah Britton’s Spiced raw chocolate mousse. The first is a variation of soy cured eggs, I guess. But the title is a misnomer because you neither use tea nor smoke in this recipe. And the recipe is TOTALLY wrong. Don’t simmer the damn things for 45 minutes. Treat it as a marinade. Well, I guess the only thing I took away was adding star anise and a cinnamon stick to the cured eggs I already make. So, uh. Yeah. I really like what Britton does and I highly recommend her blog: My New Roots. I am neither vegan nor a raw eater but I venture there from time to time and her recipes are elegant and successful.But really, the book is useless. Caveat: I could not look at these gentle, bland people with their heavily curated lives in front of their carefully rugged abodes without thinking: clean your gutters! Don't you know water damage when you see it! I could never drink sparkling water out of their cut glass decanters without fear of how dirty they probably were. Such obsession with surface undermines basic functionality. The recipes in this book are pedestrian at best and wildly, flagrantly uninteresting at worst. The design here has the downtown Portland hipster crowd in mind, which, in and of itself, is not such a bad thing, but if you're looking for a dish with a unique flavor profile, look elsewhere. (There's a recipe for making coffee, folks. The ingredients? Ground coffee beans and hot water.) Moreover, the photography is so unrelentingly pretentious it leans toward irony. A noteworthy mention: two chefs hiding in a wall of vines, staring stoically, away from one another, into the distance. So much metaphorical meaning, so little time to unpack it. Don't waste your money.
What do You think about The Kinfolk Table (2013)?
a handful of good recipes for simple summer cooking. worth checking out from the library.
—Sardemp
I didn't realize that the (kin)folks behind Portlandia had published a cookbook...
—patrick
By reading this I will automatically become someone who "picnics".
—Sally
