The Kitchen Reader: Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

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What is it with chefs living hard lives? Is it simply self selection? I was barely a quarter of the way into the memoir and this woman had already done enough hard living for someone twice her age. I don't even think Anthony Bourdain got in that much trouble by the time he was 17. In fact, the further I read, the more convinced I became that Hamilton is the female Bourdain. Maybe not the most flattering of comparisons, but I hope she goes on to achieve the same kind of success, since i thought her writing was fantastic. Here are a few of my random observations:

• How can the same parents produce uber-successful children at the same time as utterly messed up ones? I have no answer, but the idea fascinates me.
• Her description of Mark Bittman's daughter is so sweet. At the same time, her descriptions of food issues instilled in little girls by their mothers are sad and a disturbing commentary on our culture.
• The "weird" stuff she ate growing up reminds me of my upbringing, where foreign foods/cultures were not widely accepted (cultural assimilation is the norm!). I'm glad it's not that way anymore, though it's not like we have children who would be subject to any mocking.
• Her graphic account of cleaning the outside of her restaurant because of poop and a rat really grossed me out. It's the side of NYC that I just don't want to think about.
• Her stories of her annual trip to Italy reinforced my view that you can't really get to know a country unless you spend the time with locals.

Reviews that I read only after I finished the book seemed to be very critical of her lack of explanation for certain decisions in her life - for example, why she stopped speaking to her mother and why her Michigan girlfriend was the love of her life. It seemed to me that her ability to self-reflect and convey those thoughts in paper was not as well developed in the first part of her life since she seems to open up more in the latter parts of the memoir. She may also just be more comfortable being a descriptive writer, evoking vivid images of the environment around her.

Reviews also criticized the lack of explanation behind her decision to marry, have kids, and stay in the relationship despite it being so profoundly unsatisfying. Oddly enough, I didn't find her lifestyle to be all the strange, probably because I had seen an unusual arrangement of this nature before. When I lived in Montreal, my hairdresser was a fabulously tiny Asian man who could rock stripper platform shoes better that I could ever imagine. He was so openly gay, yet he talked about his wife and 4 kids, much to my confusion. A friend of mine who had initially referred me to his salon explained that he was married to a lesbian, that they had a big family together but they were both free to live their preferred lifestyle. I would have loved to know the why behind this arrangement, but obviously I couldn't figure out a way to politely ask such personal questions while getting my hair done. So Hamilton's marital situation, while unusual on the surface, may not be all that unique.

In our many trips to NYC, we have yet to eat at Prune, but having enjoyed her memoir, I am now eager to try her food - I hope it lives up to expectations.

The Kitchen Reader: My Life from Scratch

This month's selection is "My Life from Scratch - A Sweet Journey of Starting Over, One Cake at a Time" by Gesine Bullock-Prado, chosen by Shelley from My Little Chickadees.

I'll say this right off the bat: I loved this book. It's light, charming and entertaining, which is all that I ask for in a memoir. Now if only the "Language of Baklava", a recent The Kitchen Reader pick, were this well written.  While I think the book's current title accurately reflects its contents, I really prefer its first title, "Confections of a Closet Master Baker" because I think it more genuinely reflects Bullock-Prado's delightful sense of sarcastic humor.

I finally figured out that the reality shows that suck me in and turn my brain into mush all have one thing in common - they depict a lifestyle I will never hope to emulate and a day-to-day existence so foreign to my own that I find it utterly fascinating. That's how I got sucked into this book. After all, this is Sandra Bullock's sister who ran her production company for many years before she threw in the towel and ran away to rural Vermont to open up a bakery, without any formal culinary or pastry training. The Hollywood angle to Bullock-Prado's life is captivating to me, from the time Sandra became famous and the description of the creepy fans/stalkers, to the vivid recollections of the emptiness of the movie industry. The rural Vermont, running a bakery, chapter in her life-story is equally fascinating and puzzling to me, since I couldn't contemplate being covered in chocolate and flour all the time, unless I was eating it.

Bullock-Prado is a great storyteller, and it feels that after the superficiality of Hollywood, she really found her niche in writing this memoir. Her family stories come alive when linked via a specific dessert and ties in beautifully with her tales of the daily hardships in running a bakery. Throw in the unusual twist of a famous sister who wants to help out but probably causes more havoc than anything else and you have a thoroughly entertaining read. It could just be that I really appreciate her sense of humour. Some of my favourite quotes of the book that cracked me up include:

• "Contemplate your average grocery store loaf of bread. The wheat is most likely genetically modified and doused with a payload of pesticides. Then it's processed, stripped of nutrients and pulverized into oblivion. It's mixed with preservatives to allow for an abnormally long shelf life. And then it's cut into slices of fascist uniformity."
• "Come spring, I keep my eyes peeled for the naked guys. Now and again some local young folk saunter down the streets in their birthday finest in celebration of spring's awakening, taking full-frontal advantage of our liberal laws regarding public nudity. (State law allows for public nudity, just not in state parks. Window-shopping au naturel is fine, but the law stipulates that you may not draw undue attention to your genitalia while doing so.)
• "What I don't expect is to find a close-up of a prospective employee's lady parts. Posted not by some evil ex-boyfriend who took the pictures unbeknownst to the poor girl, but by the proud owner of the coochie herself."

As for the bakery, boy do I regret not knowing about her retail store before it closed at the end of 2008. I'm kicking myself in hindsight because in our trips back to the homeland starting in the fall of 2004 (Montreal and Ottawa, specifically), we would drive through Montpelier, Vermont and often stop in the quaint town for a quick break. We never saw any naked guys (though we will keep our eyes open the next time we drive through the town), though the husband once came across a group of Tibetan monks (a flock? tribe? gang?) with their translator in a coffee shop. I guess I have to settle for mail-order, and otherwise drool over her beautiful blog. I may even try some of the recipes from the book or her website. I think I found my new pastry crush - move over David Lebovitz, it's time to try some German pastries!

The Kitchen Reader: Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

This month's selection for the Kitchen Reader was chosen by yours truly.

I will start by saying that I'm an unabashed Anthony Bourdain fan. I've always been drawn to the blunt, abrasive types (which is why I think I gravitated to the investment banking industry), and the reason why I liked Bourdain from the moment he burst onto the celebrity chef scene 10ish years ago (my how time flies). I like him even more now that he's evolved into what seems to be a fully formed emotional individual, without losing his crass sarcastic sense of humor. However, I'm the first to admit that he's obnoxious, and if you can't get past that, then you're not going to like this book.

Medium Raw is the best example of Bourdain's writing since his breakthrough memoir, Kitchen Confidential. I would even go as far to say that it's better than the first, since he's lost the ignorant cockiness that permeated Kitchen Confidential. In a recent Forbes interview (found here), Bourdain discusses his transformation (though it may be better termed an evolution) and I found his latest book to be full of examples of this change.

The reason why I liked Medium Raw so much is that it felt, well, raw. It seems to be a predictor of the direction his Travel Channel show No Reservations has taken in the current season, where he doesn't shy away from the harsh reality in the countries that he visits. It's the same tone that he took in chapter 5 "So you want to be a chef", where he somewhat cruelly but truthfully points out that age, health and weight can put you at a serious disadvantage in the pursuit of a culinary career. This chapter is reflective of the best parts of the book for me, which consist of the stories that were deeply personal (breakup of his first marriage, desire to become a parent, selling out) or the most opinionated (industrial meat production, Alan Richman, tasting menus). The sections that I found to be the least interesting was his travel descriptions, simply because it felt like a repeat of his TV show. However I did find the descriptive chapter on Justo Thomas, the "fish guy" from Le Bernandin, to be an increadibly beautiful tribute to such a skilled and dedicated employee.

So if you find yourself in the camp of really liking this book, I would highly recommend following both @NoReservations and @OttaviaBourdain on Twitter, if only because their back and forth banter is hysterical but also because it provides another peek into the personal life of such a public figure.

The Kitchen Reader: The Language of Baklava

This month, the Kitchen Reader read "The Language of Baklava" by Diana Abu-Jaber, as chosen by Lisa from The Fork on the Road.

via Diana Abu-Jaber's official website

The book is a memoir of the Jordanian-American author growing up in both the US and Jordan. The memories are told almost exclusively through food and include a number of what are probably tasty Arab food. Every review I read of this book was glowingly positive, so I feel like a real outlier to say that the book bored me, almost to the point of me hating it.

My reaction has to do with the fact that I'm a second-generation immigrant - my parents immigrated to North America from Asia back in the 60s, so Abu-Jaber's memoir shares a lot of similarities to my own upbringing. I question whether she truly embraced her Jordanian heritage as much as she describes when growing up in the US, as this was a period of time where uniqueness was not openly embraced and respect for other cultures wasn't at the same level it is now (at least in multi-cultural cities). I also didn't understand the longing that her father Bud and his numerous brothers/cousins/uncles (I couldn't keep track of them all) had for the "old country" - I had grown up with the attitude that the new world held all the prosperity, and that there was no looking back. Add on top of all this that I couldn't keep track of all the relatives in the story, nor was the writing compelling enough to make me care about the characters, so it made for a disappointing read.

The Kitchen Reader: Memories Around the Holiday Table

The Kitchen Reader group is taking the month off - instead of reading, we're posting a memorable holiday recipe. 


Christmas to me isn't turkey. We never developed the taste for turkey, so my mother always roasted a goose or a duck for our holiday meal. Both are definitely rich (aka fatty), but both are so much more flavourful in our view. 


Fast forward to 2010, where the husband and I spending our first Christmas at home in Boston with my sister joining us from Toronto. The only goose I found to roast was at Savenor's, but at $130 for the bird, I couldn't bring myself to buy it in the event that we screwed it up. They didn't have a whole duck either, so I bought two of these:

That is a poussin, otherwise known as a young chicken. This baby was a pound, which I thought would be fine for one person. It looked like a small supermarket chicken in the package, but when we pulled it out of the wrapping, we found it had both its head and feet attached. My sister isn't particularly squeamish, so she hacked off the head and feet in short order and continued preparing the birds as per a Thomas Keller recipe from his Ad Hoc cookbook. I now have 2 chicken heads and 4 chicken feet sitting in a ziploc bag in the freezer, ready to be used to make stock. 


Incidentally, the poussins were delicious - it's hard to go wrong when they're coated in butter!

The Kitchen Reader: Hungry Monkey

By the time you read this, I will be at the end of my 10-day trip to Italy, probably returning from the Umbria region back to Rome in order to catch our flight back to the States via Montreal. If you're reading this, then I successfully posted the entry while on the road. I read the book well in advance and wrote the review before I left on vacation since I didn't expect I would have time or the inclination to do it while away.

This month's selection was "Hungry Monkey" by Matthew Amster-Burton, chosen by Meryl of My Bit of Earth.

This was a delightful read, particularly in comparison to the more serious tomes from the past two months. I finished it in a day and found it to be thoroughly amusing. My primary two thoughts were:

1. Damn you Seattle for being so foodie-friendly as compared to Boston, and
2. Raising kids is hard.

Not particularly deep thoughts, I realize, but they were the best I could muster on a long weekend lounging in the sun.

More seriously, the book is about a foodie couple (the father Matthew is a professional food writer) raising their daughter and trying to ensure (hoping?) that she'll be an adventurous eater. Not having kids myself, I can't say I have extensive knowledge in this area, but I do have a couple of first-hand experiences. The first is with my now 2 year old nephew, seeing him go from an indiscriminate human vacuum at age 1 to an oddly selective 2 year old who likes things like fried calamari, salmon skin, and noodles so spicy he needed to take sips of milk between each bite. The second and more lasting impression is with the husband's first nephew who came to stay with us for a week a couple of summers ago when he was 9.

The nephew flew clear across the country by himself, and the visit was a first for both him and for us. We'd been warned ahead of time that he was a picky eater, but he seemed more like a typical 9 year old boy - didn't like vegetables, and preferred chips and soda (pop?) to healthier options. He lives in a very small town in interior British Columbia, so we decided we would try to expand his food palate while he stayed with us. We also decided we wouldn't deviate from our normal meals, other than to avoid spicy foods (that would have probably been too much for him), and we asked him up front to try new things that we served him.

Initially that didn't turn out so well - one of the first things we did was take him up to Maine so that he could try a lobster roll. He took a bite with a lot of coaxing and much apprehension, and promptly decided that the shack burger was far better. He got over that quickly because we bribed him with a stop at an ice cream store, which had a make your own sundae bar. At home, he happily ate steak and roast potatoes with a minimal amount of ketchup (we were warned he was a ketchup fiend so we stocked up ahead of time), and did manage to get fresh corn on the cob and beans into him on a few occasions. We took him to a Vietnamese restaurant where he happily ate rice noodles and BBQ pork (and loved boba tea), and he did just fine at a Japanese fast food stall in the Porter Exchange mall (aka Little Tokyo) with the Japanese version of hamburgers and fried chicken with a side of plain rice, though I brought the bottle of ketchup in my purse in preparation for off any meltdowns. By the end of the week, though, we'd gotten a variety of new foods into him so we were satisfied with the outcome.

We're aware that we got off easy - the nephew is a very good-natured, easy going kid who was old enough to reason with. Young kids as in the book (the daughter Iris is 4 at her oldest) aren't in the same category. I will be curious to see how she and other kids of foodies fare as they get older, since this is really the first generation to have hard core foodies as parents. In large numbers, at the least. I know if we were ever to have children, the husband would insist on our child bringing baguettes with brie and ham for lunch. I wonder how they will fare in the face of the food marketers with their incessant lure of packaged foods. A whole chapter on this issue is in Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw, where he and his wife discuss ways to make McDonald's scary and evil for a little three-year old. I did notice that the nephew seemed to have a balanced view on junk food around us - we didn't make the junk food readily available to him at home but if he wanted some, we would give it to him. We noticed he ate what he wanted and then stopped when he had enough. This supported my personal theory that if a food is forbidden (as junk food was in my house growing up), it leads to bingeing behavior, but if it's available without any judgemental connotations attached, then the child will grow up with a healthy attitude towards all foods.

Overall, I commend what the author and his wife are trying to do and hope that his efforts and those of others like him will collectively improve the eating habits of a new generation, leading to an increase in the overall quality of food available to everyone. Hippie wishful thinking? I hope not.

The Kitchen Reader: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

August's pick for The Kitchen Reader was "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver, chosen by Karen at Shortbread South.

I'll admit I was a little worried when I started this book that it would be overly preachy, following so closely on the heels of Michael Pollan's book. What I liked about Barbara Kingsolver's book is that her family put their money where their mouths are and put the local eating philosophy into practice, though this did take the local movement to quite the extreme. I found the family's perspective on their year-long experiment (only eating food that they could raise themselves or purchase locally) to be entertaining, and for some reason I found the section describing the Amish farmers' interest in the hybrid car technology to be extremely funny.

I was probably the most surprised by the maturity level of the two daughters and their willingness to embrace this lifestyle, since oddly enough, I had a similar experience growing up. My parents decided in the early 80's to eschew processed and industrially farmed foods (vegetables and meat). Because there was barely any interest in environmentally conscious practices at the time (may have to do with the fact that I lived in Canada, the land of the few and far between), this decision forced us to move to the countryside where we proceeded to grow all the vegetables and fruit that was necessary to feed a family of 5 on a 4-acre piece of land in a rural subdivision. Luckily we didn't raise animals - there were farmers within the region who followed free-range practices, so I got used to seeing a full cow and 50 chickens in our freezers.

I did become a speedy sheller of peas, and quite proficient at blanching or canning to preserve the produce for the year, but I certainly didn't embrace those skills as a teenager (my parents made the full switch when I was 10). In fact, every opportunity I had as a teenager was one to eat junk food, and when I left for college it got worse to the point where I was almost solely existing on processed foods if not outright fast food. In retrospect, it's funny how I've come full circle - now I cook all my food from scratch, and while I will never attempt what my family still does and what the Kingsolver family did, I have started to seek out local products as much as possible. I credit my husband for the gradual reversal in my habits and preferences, which is in itself strange since he grew up eating vegetables out of a can.

That's where I'm not sure if I fully believe Camille's parts in the book (the older daughter) since she sure doesn't sound like a typical teenager. However, the most meaningful quote to me from the book was written by her, which was "Most of us agree to put away our sandals and bikinis when the leaves start to turn, even if they're our favorite clothes. We can learn to apply similar practicality to our foods." Figures it took a fashion reference to bring the point home for me.

Follow-up to The Kitchen Reader - Michael Pollan's in Defense of Food

Two interesting articles that offer practical solutions on how to achieve Michael Pollan's goals set forth in Defense of Food. The first illustrates the use of Sesame Street to reach out to the "food insecure" in a fun and appealing way to encourage healthier eating in children. The second is a healthcare initiative in the Boston area that provides vouchers to low-income families for use in farmer's markets in order to improve nutrition.

My beef with Pollan's book is the access/affordability angle, so it's nice to see there are some innovative ways to tackle the problem. Definitely not the answer, but it's a start.

Sesame Street

NY Times - Boston Farmer's Market Initiative

The Kitchen Reader - In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" was the July selection for The Kitchen Reader and the first review that I'm posting as part of this group.

It's hard to ignore Michael Pollan's legendary status in the food world, but this was the first of his books that I've read. To be honest, I found the first two sections of the book to be heavy and hard to slog through (it's definitely not a light read!). It was also depressing to be reminded of how much we've been so manipulated by the food industry.

The last part of the book was at least more interesting since he offered some practical advice, instead of just lamenting over where we've gone wrong over the last 30 years. My favorite recommendation was the following: "don't eat anything incapable of rotting". A priceless piece of advice, in my opinion, and the first food item that came to mind was Easter Peeps (I don't know if they're available the rest of the year). We don't have Peeps in Canada so it was truly a foreign concept to me for my first Easter in Boston. In case the not-naturally-occurring yellow color doesn't scare you off, this group of scientific experiments should: Peep Research

I think Pollan offers up a lofty but probably unattainable goal for the majority of the population with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" mantra, simply because it is very hard to live that way. To follow his message means two things: 1) that people have access to fresh and natural foods, and 2) that people can afford said foods. I think it's well documented that in poor urban neighborhoods, there are often only corner stores that supply food basics (mostly the packaged kind) with fast food restaurants supplementing the remaining of the meals. It's also a well known reality that unhealthy food is the cheapest and perhaps the only option that some families can afford. It's all well and done for Pollan to preach the virtues of eating as much produce from farmer's markets, but it is an expensive lifestyle choice that is probably not economically viable for many of those who could benefit the most from an improved diet.

All that being said, I do think his message is important. I feel fortunate that I'm able to eat almost all organic, local as much as possible, free range/grass fed/wild options when it's available. We cook the majority of our meals and always from scratch, and even now that I'm conscious of my cholesterol level I eschew low-fat anything, preferring to indulge in the full-fat option but simply eat less of it or less often. His book is a good reminder that we always need to pay attention to what we eat, and that even following some of his suggestions can improve our health overall.