I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence

Title: I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence
Author: Amy Sedaris
Genre: Non-fiction, cookbook
Published: 2006

Recommendation: A good collection of advice and recipes to get if you like snarky humour and lots of butter in your cooking.
Rating: 6/10

Reactions: I read very little non-fiction in book form. In fact this is probably the very first cookbook I've read from cover to cover. I've been reading it on and off for several month now and I finally finished. Phew.

Starting the book, it was a pretty fun read. This is not so much a cookbook as a manual to housekeeping & entertaining guests with recipes interspersed in between. At first the tongue-in-cheek commentary keeps things pretty fun. For example, Amy Sedaris lists the suggests the following topics for a blind date:

• Does the sun make noise?
• Do you tip a cobbler?
• How do you tech hope?
• When can we see each other again?

These fairly random lists permeate the book from cover to cover and range from funny to somewhat tasteless. A lot of time is spent on dealing with drunk people and making money off of the guests. By about mid-book I was started to wince at all the mentions of the tip jar for your house.

There is a lot more discourse in the beginning of the book, whereas the last third is pretty much just recipes. I am somewhat tempted to try out the cheese balls recipe mentioned quite a few times, but the fat content of the recipe is more than a little scary.

The recipes are somewhat balanced, there are some very simple ones (i.e. mashed potatoes or baked chicken) and some slightly more elaborate cakes and dishes. For myself I didn't find that many interesting new things to cook. Many of the items just didn't seem that interesting from cooking viewpoint and were targeted towards casual cooking. Perhaps I should give them more of a chance, but I felt disappointed that recipes were not that tempting. Though I suppose that's more practical than a fancy cookbook where you don't have ingredients to prepare half the meals. Somehow I find the latter a more interesting reading though.

Overall the book was decent, but didn't sweep me off the feet. You might enjoy her humour more than me, so if the date conversations list made you laugh and you are looking to expand your recipe pool, perhaps it's a good book for you.