Medium Raw

Life really derailed my blogging these past couple of months - both figuratively and literally.  Reading Keith Richard's book slowed me down and work and life just kind of kept getting in the way of me sitting down to write some reviews.

So, on to it.  After Keith, I continued on the memoir theme and picked up chef Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw.  I'm a Tony Bourdain groupie.  I loved Kitchen Confidential for bringing to the light of day, the counterculture of the food scene, the real food scene: behind the curtain and focusing on the people who actually work the food scene.  But my infatuation really started with his short lived show "A Cook's Tour," where Bourdain went around the world looking for truly authentic and crazy food experiences.

There is Only One Julia

I'll give Julie Powell full credit.  Yes, Julie Powell of the "Julie/Julia Project".  Julie Powell, the one who proved writing a cute blog doesn't make you an author.  Yes, I liked her first book well enough as you can see here. However I absolutely despised her second memoir Cleaving.  It was so bad.  That's all I'm going to say about it. I'm not even reviewing it.

Anyway...back to Julia.  The real and powerful, one and only Julia Child.  In the movie adaptation of Julie/Julia, Julia is given more time (yay) and Meryl Street portrays her with humour and aplomb.  So I picked up My Life in France, Julia Child's memoir of her time, primarily in Paris, with her husband Paul and learning how to cook.

New Year's Resolution

I made a New Year's Resolution to blog more regularly. I didn't realize how long it had been since I posted until I actually went on my blog to reconnect with it. Wow. I read in a magazine that when making New Year's resolutions, the way to increase your chances of success is not to start on January 1st. Clearly, I took that to heart. So here I am.

I didn't travel much at all in the fall. In fact the last post I did was from my last trip in 2007. Unlike past Christmas holidays, I didn't read very much at all - just one book, a gift from Doug - Tony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.

Tony Bourdain is completely irreverent, arrogant, fearless and I love him. For those of you who don't know him, Bourdain is a New York chef who had a popular show on the Food Network called "A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal" where he traveled to popular and exotic locales to eat anything and everything that was put in front him (including a still beating cobra's heart in a particularly harrowing episode in Vietnam). This man gets off on food. Seriously gets off on it.

Kitchen Confidential kind of put Bourdain on the map from a writing perspective. The book is a memoir of his adventures and development into a chef (dropping out of Vassar, going to the Culinary Institute of America) including summer jobs cooking in kitchens in the Hamptons and then massive leaps to executive chef's jobs in various New York city restaurants. All this while partying like a mad man. The "underbelly" of the restaurant world comes alive with Bourdain's brash and bawdy style. Excessive drug use, sexual exploits, dealing with the mafia - in some ways it sounds like a Harold Robbins novel. No matter the particular foibles of the various characters: waiters, line cooks, pastry chefs, sous chefs or even Bourdain himself, the one thing that comes shining through is the passion for the food. Pure, unadulterated, passion.

I will definitely read more of Bourdain's stuff - some may find his style a little over bearing but I quite enjoyed it and found it highly entertaining. I may even go to his restaurant the next time I'm in New York, but if it's a Monday, I won't order the fish.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain
Bloomsbury

Cooking with Fire...or not

My friend Michelle dropped off a book for me a few weeks ago that proves that a book can be read in the span of two 1.5 hour flights. I read Girl Cook a couple of weeks ago travelling to and from Washington D.C. Michelle let me know that it was light and fluffy but because we both share a love of cooking, thought I would enjoy it.

Girl Cook is what it is: a very superficial, chick lit piece of fluff. There is little to no character development, a smattering of chef language to give it some authenticity, and the requisite girl meets boy who she initially doesn't like and then starts to get interested in (see my post on chick lit).

This time though, it wasn't for me. I was pretty annoyed with it actually. Mostly because I thought that this had so much potential. It was sort of positioned as a "Bridget Jones" but with cooking. I didn't think that at all. The first Bridget Jones novel was fresh and funny and had good character development and paid more than a fleeting tribute to Jane Austen. Girl Cook missed a huge opportunity. The restaurant world is incredibly mysoginistic. Girl Cook glosses over it with the heroine becoming more of a whiner than a champion. The disastrous, love life, the mother who doesn't understand her....whatever.

That being said, it passed the time for me as I was sitting on a plane that was delayed on the tarmac at Reagan International Airport in Washington D.C. I think that was the best thing about this book in my opinion: it was a quick read.

Girl Cook: A Novel
Hannah McCouch