By Lydia Ellison

The first meeting of the Silverlake Cookbook club was a few weeks ago over at Anjali’s hip, sunny apartment. What is a cookbook club you ask? Well it’s self explanatory, just choose a cookbook, read it and cook from it for a month and then meet with other ladies in the club to discuss your experience of the book and it’s dishes. The best part, everyone brings their favorite dish from the book to share in a potluck feast!

The shared spread from A Homemade Life

The book we chose for our inaugural meeting was A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, the creator of the wonderful food blog Orangette. Many of the girls in the club have food blogs themselves so we thought it fitting to support Molly, our contemporary and a mascot of success in the food writing world (she now has a column in Bon Appetit.)

pickles, potatoes and pound cake

I enjoyed this book immensely, I love the memoir style of the writing and the recipe at the end of every chapter. My favorite dish hands down is the cabbage salad with lemon, parm-reg and black pepper. It’s what I brought to the club meeting to share and everyone loved it! I’ve been making it once a week all winter and spring and will probably carry with me into summer or as long as I can find small red cabbage heads at the Farmer’s Market.

Cabbage Salad with lemon and parm-reg

I also enjoyed the Berry Pound Cake, soft and subtly sweet cake studded with ruby berries….

Raspberry Pound Cake

and the Bouchons au Thon (we renamed them tuna muffins) are savory, moist and luscious…

Bouchons au Thon aka Tuna Muffins

…both of which I tried for the first time at the club meeting but will make again soon. For a much more thorough, witty and well photographed summary of the meeting please visit Angali’s amazing blog Delicious Comma.

Homemade treats