The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn is the Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection for September 2022. In many ways, this is a follow up to The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. It picks up where that book left off in Kathleen Flinn’s timeline.

I have found this book very interesting because I identify very much with Kathleen’s psyche. Here she goes to Le Cordon Bleu kind of on a whim, gets her credentials and then immediately writes a book. She is interested in food and cooking but really doesn’t want to put those skills to work traditionally. She even says it herself that she doesn’t know what she want’s to do. Sounds like someone I know.

I don’t want to spoil the book, but Kathleen has an epiphany while grocery shopping. She observes how much junk people are loading into their carts and begins asking the question of why. The most pervasive answer is that people don’t know how to cook. This book describes a social experiment, bringing in nine people that had little to no skills to see what happens. I will let you read the book to find out the methods and how it went.

This made me think about our current society. We live in a world that is surrounded by information. We take in the information as entertainment and so my analysis here is that whatever happens on the screen is not reality. Therefore, we have programmed our brains to say ‘that all happened in fantasy land, I will now operate in the real world’. What I am trying to say is that we cannot make the link between what I can do and what I see. Channels such as Food Channel, HGTV and MotorTrend can be entertaining and informative. But, I feel like their best disposition is really as inspiration.

Couple that with product marketing and misinformation. Unless people really study the information and use critical thinking, of course they are misguided. I hate to take this back to the tired old Covid analogy, but here we go. We are entering the ‘flu season’ of 2022. Pretty much what I see now is that everything is back to the way things were pre-Covid with the exception that masks are now permitted in banks, schools, etc. I just heard the commercial to get your fourth booster.

How do we rectify the crisis that was with the ambivalence of today? In my opinion, what we thought we knew in 2020 was wrong. Notice, no one is talking about why we are behaving differently today then we were two years ago. This is what brings us back to food. Even the supposed experts on health were wrong with Covid. What make us think that they are right about die?

Kathleen Flinn is not getting her due from my side trip. But, she did inspire it and she is right that the vast majority of people don’t know how to cook. Some of it is their fault and some of it is not. For instance, even I have heard numerous chefs recommend soup base as a starter. To me, that is fine for a restaurant because their number one priority is profit whereas a home cook’s number one priority is nourishment; and that ain’t in soup base.

I want to be careful, I am not denigrating anyone’s choices. I sometimes use shortcuts too. But, I know how to cook and my choices are made by circumstances like I don’t have time to defrost stock so I use soup base, not by lack of skills. It’s like I wrote about salad dressing in the past. Back when I was a child, buying salad dressing was a convenience but now it is a lost skill.

This is a book that is an easy read. To get the full impact, you have to be ready for it. It’s like watering dry ground, it is just going to run off. But, if your soil is a little bit moist, then it is going to soak that water deep to the roots.

End Your Programming Routine: This is the last scheduled book of the year. I have to say that I was really not excited about any of the selections, surprisingly I have warmed up to all of them. I am really glad that this was how we finished the year because this is the kind of stuff that I am really into. I love a good dinner, but I really enjoy changing the status quo, even if it is for nine people.