If you make any of your meals at home, or have gotten at sucked into the urban homesteading movement (backyard chickens, gardening, or composting?), you may have found yourself making something extraordinarily time-consuming from scratch and wondering if it was worth it. I know I have.

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn’t Cook from Scratch, by Jennifer Reese of tipsybaker.com is part cookbook, part journal, and although I hate both of these words, utterly delightful. My sister recommended it to me.

You can use this book as a cookbook, or you can read it like a novel. I read it straight through, thinking from time to time that I should mark the recipes I wanted to try, but knowing I’d have to return it to the library before I got a chance to make anything out of it. I’m seriously considering buying a copy so that I make some of the recipes. Homemade vanilla extract,  Vadouvan Mac ‘n’ Cheese, and hotdog buns from scratch all piqued my curiosity.

I donated all but two of my cookbooks when I konmarie’d my house. Of those, I never use one, and rarely use the other, which I treasure because it’s a hand-me-down from my grandmother. I have a recipe bookmark list on my iPad with recipes our family loves (Indian dal, roti, the lasagna we have on Christmas Eve, etc.) and there is a well-loved binder full of family recipes that my mom put together.

I’m a vegetarian, although I cheat occasionally (the fattier, saltier, and more disgusting the meat, as a rule, the better), and Reese most certainly was not when she authored this book. There is a section on basically every type of food, and plenty of animal husbandry and detailed information about preserving meat. I read with interest.

While I doubt I’ll ever hang a side of pork in my crawl space, as one recipe describes, it was fascinating to imagine someone else doing it. Reese has a wonderful way with words, making you feel like you’re in the kitchen with her, smelling the smells, feeling the textures, and experiencing the successes and failures at her side.

Reese clearly spent a lot of time figuring out the best recipes to include in the book. Her sharp sense of humor and the way she tells the story of raising livestock in suburbia, her attempts to replicate store bought food, and her adventures finding the best recipes for her favorite foods, are fun and interesting to read.

She’s up front about the labor involved: At the top of each recipe, along with her advice as to whether to make or buy the item in question and the cost comparison with store bought, she includes “Hassle.” Then she tells you what you’re in for if you make the recipe. Under some headings there’s no recipe at all, just a funny story and the advice to buy the food in question.

There were some recipes I knew I’d never want to make: I haven’t been a ketchup fan in a long time, nor do I care for smoked salmon. But even when I thought I might want to skip a recipe, I ended up reading it anyway, lest I miss some hilarious tidbit.

The only thing she mentioned in the book that made me like her a tiny bit less was that strawberry jam isn’t worth making. She’s right, making it is IS more expensive, but I disagree that it tastes the same as store bought jam. Mine is way better than store bought, which is why I slave over the hot stove to make another batch of freezer jam almost every year.

I’m willing to overlook what Reese had to say about strawberry jam, because her book is fantastic. It is at once witty and useful, an entertaining read.