Laughing with My Mouth Full opens with a wish list called “Pie in the Sky” that begins, “I wish that I’d wake up one day to find the whole world coated in chocolate” and ends, predictably, “I really wish there was pie in the sky.” It’s a list destined to make its way onto housewives’ refrigerator doors across the country. Pam Freir, food columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist, has a breezy, folksy voice that earns easy chuckles, but this collection of columns from the past eight years proves that you can’t be served the same thing over and over again without getting bored.

Freir’s loosely grouped pieces recount how, as a middle-aged Toronto advertising queen, she traded careerism for the simple, laid-back lifestyle afforded by Galiano Island in B.C. There, among the other kooky, transplanted island inhabitants, she discovered the pleasures of foraging for exotic mushrooms in the rainforest, neighbourly potluck suppers, and shopping at bounteous farmers’ markets. She was reborn from a harried and resentful cook into a West Coast neophyte foodie, occasionally betraying a smug pride in her supermarketless world.

Readers looking for a new addition to the food canon are likely to be disappointed. Freir is a lively but unsophisticated writer who takes an uncomplicated, nostalgic pleasure in eating. But a good eater does not a good cook make. Freir declares Julia Child as her patron saint, not as a cook – “I’m still working on lump-free gravy,” she admits – but because, like Julia, she’s a klutz. Freir casts herself as a screwball heroine in the kitchen, more foodie-wannabe than domestic goddess. Struggling to braid garlic and peel cow tongues, and accidentally spraying Windex on bread loaves, Frier enjoys having a laugh at her own expense.

But cooks and comics alike know that crack timing is key to success, and this too often eludes Freir as she delivers predictable titters instead of sharp observation. Moreover, the book is padded with commentary on such familiar material as haggis, airplane meals, and why men like to barbecue, well-worn subjects that have little to do with the Gulf Islands and could be clipped from any local newspaper.