Happy Saturday! I’m off from work today and we plan to spend the afternoon hanging out with Staci and watching videos. (We finally managed to get together with her for lunch the other day– the operation went well and she looks great; then yesterday we stopped over there to drop off a care package and got to see Kathi for a few minutes as well.)
How I Learned To Cook is a collection of forty essays from chefs, some famous some less so, relating a defining moment in their culinary educations. It is a companion to a very similar volume Don’t Try This At Home, which featured essays about each chef’s worst kitchen catastrophe. I suppose it is inevitable that the quality of the various essays would be somewhat uneven, though most seem to have as their theme that it is the most difficult and painful experiences that teach us the most. One chef, however, contributed a long piece about going to college in Hawaii and spending lots of time skipping class and getting monumentally stoned. It wasn’t clear what he learned but certainly did its part to maintain the ‘chefs as wild ass party-ers’ meme that Bourdain introduced back in Kitchen Confidential. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both books, which are recommended if you like reading about life in the commercial kitchen.
on 
on 
Entries (RSS)
July 15th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Gee–I thought you were going to confess how YOU learned to cook! Mine was kind of “throw ‘em in the pool and they’ll sink or swim” approach.
July 15th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
growing up in New Orleans I think I learned by osmosis. I don’t recally being taught yet somehow I know…