Tag: LCCBC

November 21, 2023 – Review: Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal is the November selection of the Left Coast Culinary Book Club. I have to say that I didn’t have high hopes for this book but it ended better than I had expected. The reason that I say that is because one of Stradal other works, The Lager Queens of New York was a book read by my wife’s other book club that also reads romance books with shirtless firemen and lumberjacks.

The story is a bit disjointed and it took most of the book to weave together. Each chapter has a culinary experience loosely happening with or around the main character Eva Thorvald. Some chapters she is the focus while others she just makes an appearance. I don’t think I have ever read a book that had the main character portrayed in this style.

Ultimately, this is a rags to riches story. Eva suffers personal tragedy and social trauma throughout her young life. As the chapters progress, so does her age and the book covers roughly 25 years in just over 300 pages. Many of the supporting characters vary from gritty to psychotic and the all the while Eva keeps on moving forward.

I was listening to a podcast recently about the structure of SEAL training. What the former instructor was saying was that the premise was pretty simple. It wasn’t necessarily what they testing but how. They wanted to wash out people that were going to give up when the circumstances were not fair. He said many people could handle the physical part, it was the seemingly ruthless and unwarranted punishment that they couldn’t take. I think that it is fair to say that Eva Thorvald is a SEAL of the culinary world.

The story was interesting because it wasn’t a feelgood one. There were self-absorbed, idiot chefs as well a characters getting addicted to pain pills. I found myself asking ‘what is going to be this fool’s malady’? Fortunately, we only had to put up with the bad characters for a chapter. The good ones seemed to make cameo appearances throughout the book.

My overall opinion of this book is really clouded by one thing and that was the over the top extravagance of Eva’s career and life as the book moves on. Honestly, I think that this book would have been better and more believable if they would have toned down her success a little. I will give an example, Eva hosted a dinner where all the diners had to repel down a cliff to get to the table.

Maybe I am just a fuddy duddy but this sounds like cheesy, Mission Impossible stuff. I realize that most people don’t buy into that, but it definitely kind of soured the book for me. I am already kind of on the fence with haute cuisine the ostentatious descriptions but add James Bond to it and it is too much.

I think that you will like this book if you like food and fantasy. I don’t mean the Game of Thrones kind but more like the Cinderella kind. It’s hard to tell if Eva is a exotic beauty or a sasquatch by the different character’s descriptions. I will say that after all of the heartache, it is nice to know that perseverance and humility is rewarded, even if it is unbelievable.

End Your Programming Routine: It’s nice to step away from cookbooks and ‘chef-y’ memoirs, even if they are not necessarily my cup of tea. I am willing to give Stradal another chance because of his approach to stories. I can’t say that I knew where this story was going based on the disjointedness of the book. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t like it.

November 14, 2023 – Review: Delicious!

I am running behind on things. “Delicious!” by Ruth Reichl was actually the August Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. I think I found out about the book in late August and we had two books that month. I scanned through the cookbook in September and started reading this book about mid-October. I remember packing it with me on my hunting trip but didn’t make any progress.

What is different than the other work that I have read from Reichl is that this is her first attempt at fiction. To date, I have been a fan of her non-fiction as it is almost larger than life. I will remind you the Reichl was a food critic for the New York Times and dressed up as characters for restaurant evaluation so that she wouldn’t be outed.

This book has the same light, readability and feels in the same style as Reichl but is different. To me, the story meanders a lot without much of a point. I am trying to describe it without being too harsh. Characters kind of jump in and jump out and almost seems fluffy, like there was a lot of unnecessary plot line. Let’s go to the plot line first.

The book opens with the main character ‘Billie’ and her sister baking a gingerbread cake for her father’s birthday. This gingerbread is a theme throughout the whole book where she uses it to empress her potential employer in a job interview, her colleagues when they were down and anytime she wants to butter up someone for getting what she wants.

Billie is hired by the fictitious magazine Delicious! as a personal assistant to the general manager. After a short time, the magazine is closed but she is the only person kept on staff presumably because she was the cheapest. At this point, she has run of the office and the locked library where she serendipitously discovers some hidden letters to James Beard (a former Delicious employee).

The story goes on a wild goose chase of secret codes and tracking down people, meanwhile she is battling personal demons and falling in love. The whole point of all this is that Billie wants to see the whole picture so that an article can be written about this correspondence between a character Lulu and James Beard.

Maybe it is a writer’s thing, but I wonder what article she is going to write when the magazine is closed? I suppose that it could be a freelance piece, but throughout the book there is no mention of networking with other publishers. That seems a bit of a fantasy.

The story also contained some real non-sequitur parts as well. Billie meets an Italian butcher and family where she works all of her weekends. A lot of the book is devoted to this interaction that really doesn’t go anywhere in the storyline. Also, her father shows up out of the blue near the end of the book. He has been trying to get Billie to come home for the holidays for several years and yet she has refused to leave New York. All of a sudden they meet up at the same mid-western hotel when Billie is tracking information about Lulu.

It is not that I didn’t enjoy the story, it was fine but uninteresting. If I saw a book about letters from James Beard to some unknown person, I would skip it without a second thought. I certainly respect what Beard did for the culinary world, but it would seem like only a true groupy would be interested in this affair. The whole thing seemed a little forced to me.

One thing that I can say about the book (at least my version) has a section after the story about a suggested dinner party menu to go with the book. I wish that I would have known this when we had our book club meeting in August. We could have played on that theme a little bit when it came to making food.

I think that you will like this book if you find yourself turning on the Hallmark channel and getting vested with those types or movies. Or, the other type of person would be the one that fanaticizes about James Beard. You won’t like the book if you are into We or Anthem like I am currently reading. The story buttons up nicely with a few twists when you are vested in the characters.

End Your Programming Routine: Despite my opinion, I still highly recommend both Garlic and Sapphires as well as Save me the Plums by Reichl. It is not the author or the subject matter but this particular story for me. This is partially why it took me a month to get through this book, I just couldn’t get into it. That being said, it is nice to get out of the world of heavy fiction or cookbooks sometimes. That I can appreciate in this case.

June 7, 2023 – 32 Yolks

This book took me a while to get through. It was most definitely too long at about six weeks. It wasn’t that boring, long or hard to read, it was me trying to squeeze it in with everything else going on. It went to a lot of tennis matches, a number of appointments and mostly nights before bed.

32 Yolks is the May selection of the Left Coast Culinary Book Club. It is a memoir about the early life of Chef Eric Ripert. His name may not be at the front of your brain, but he was a dear friend of Anthony Bourdain and appeared in many episodes of No Reservations. In fact, he was the one who found his body.

I say early life because Ripert has become a world renowned chef at his restaurant called Le Bernadin. This book really only covers his life into the mid 1980s, before he came to the USA. As you can probably guess, there is a lot of life between then and now (almost forty years). While it was published in 2017, I think that it was an attempt to explain the why’s and how’s of his success.

At our meeting, we talked about the book. I was only half way through at that point. One of the members said that compared to other memoirs, this was highly focused on a couple experiences. It was her opinion that by comparison, it was a little single tracked.

I liken this book to one we read about five years ago called Cork Dork (that was pre AltF4.co so I haven’t talked extensively about it). But, becoming a sommelier is a tough experience. It takes a sickening amount of effort (literally) to become an expert in wine. Your personal habits can even effect you senses like your typical diet and scents that you wear.

I personally found it fascinating that the preparation staff would hide ingredients from the chef because the job was so demanding that they could not keep up serving 40 diners a night and working 18 hours a day. The chef demanded that everything be prepared that day and you only got one chance to do it. Some of the employees were suicidal even but they couldn’t resist the opportunity to work for the the absolute best.

I think that you can read this book and understand the real difference between fine dining and everywhere else. There certainly is an element of pretentiousness in fine dining but it is more about precision. It has to look and taste a certain way. I have known this a long time, but it is the main reason that I have a difficult time being satisfied going out to eat. For the most part, the preparation staff does not care or they don’t know what they are doing or they don’t taste the food.

This has happened to me a number of times. Go to a new restaurant, then go back in six months and then go back in two years. The first time is really good and it gets progressively worse each time. Why is that? The owner/creator/chef backs off after things get established and the care about the inspiration or the quality does as well. There is some human nature there, 99% of humans don’t want to kill themselves every day to perform

To be fair, not everything I make is a success either. That is largely because I take risks and I do things once in a while. I also care much less about how things look and I may substitute ingredients which has different effects. But, in my mind there is no excuse to make a bland, breakfast burrito. It’s not that hard especially when the ingredients are so limited.

I enjoyed the book. I say the same things I always say. Read it if you are into cooking, chefs, food and character building experiences. I am not sure that you will learn a lot other than it is hard to be in a Michelin 3-star kitchen but I think that is the part that I found most interesting. Don’t read the book if you are not into those things or you want a light, fairy tale story.

End Your Programming Routine: I think I could read or listen to almost anybody’s story and be entertained if they have something personal to say and tell it in an engaging way. I suppose that this says more about my reviews than anything but I am a interested in humanity. It is the reason why I was a National Geographic subscriber even when I was a college student. People doing what they do fascinates me.