I’m in the midst of reading for my Fall Composition class, and when I heard about Ava Chin’s Eating Wildly, I was intrigued by the concept of foraging. Would it be a survival skills book? A how-to in wild plants, herbs, fruits, and lore? Or would it be more dystopian in nature—a sort of book that explains how someone like Katniss Everdeen could eke out a living in a ruined landscape? As it turns out, no. Chin’s book is a memoir in food. Eating Wildly […]
Jefferey Steingarten Becomes Jeremy Clarkson For A While
I want to start out by saying I remember really liking Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book The Man Who Ate Everything. I was looking forward finally to getting to his second. As with the first book, It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything is a collection of Steingarten’s essays on the subject of food, spanning the 90s into the early 200s. Again, as with the first collection, many of the essays in It Must Have Been Something I […]
Constantly movin while makin millions
I sometimes have trouble writing reviews of autobiographies. Especially when the author is still very much alive and active and online. I feel like I can’t be honest. I don’t have that problem with writing about Eddie Huang’s “Fresh Off the Boat” though because he seems like the kind of guy who appreciates honesty over careful wording. There were times when this book was incomprehensible to me. I’m not up on basketball or hip-hop so I was grateful for the footnotes that show up occasionally. […]
For the Love of Food!
I’d like to start out by saying first and foremost, I love food. Not the cooking of it; just the eating. If the food comes to me mouth-ready, I will eat just about anything. Until I read this book….one of Lovegren’s best qualities is really driving home the “gourmet” atrocities committed throughout most of the 20th Century. Seriously….someone in the 1920s thought combining peas, pickles, peanuts, and mayonnaise served in a piece of iceburg lettuce was the height of domestic sophistication. Oh and also presenting […]
Tasty memories
Relish is this awesome graphic novel + recipe book hybrid by Lucy Knisley. She details her love for food with illustrated stories from her childhood. Her mom is a chef while her dad’s a gourmet foodie. Together, they expose her to culinary delights from birth as she tags along to restaurant kitchens and gatherings of her mom’s food scene pals. Even though her parents divorce, they continue to impart their own culinary wisdom to their daughter.Each chapter ends with a personal recipe from that particular era of her life. Her […]
Get Read to Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.
As previously evidenced, I really love Anthony Bourdain. I think he’s an excellent TV personality, a good writer, and by all accounts a decent cook. I read his books out of order, but that didn’t seem to take away from anything. Kitchen Confidential was everything I wanted it to be. Straight-forward (as much as any memoir is, I suppose), lurid, profane, and yet somehow elegant. Bourdain has such a distinctive voice, be in in television or writing, and there’s no question of ghostwriters other autobiographies may raise. […]