Review: Four Kitchens: My Life Behind the Burner by Lauren Shockey

Four Kitchens: My Life Behind the Burner in New York, Hanoi, Tel Aviv, and Parisby Lauren Shockey

Received ARC from NetGalley

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Grade: B-

Summary: At the French Culinary Institute, Lauren Shockey learned to salt food properly, cook fearlessly over high heat, and knock back beers like a pro. But she also discovered that her real culinary education wouldn't begin until she actually worked in a restaurant. After a somewhat disappointing apprenticeship in the French provinces, Shockey hatched a plan for her dream year: to apprentice in four high-end restaurants around the world. She started in her hometown of New York City under the famed chef Wylie Dufresne at the molecular gastronomy hotspot wd-50, then traveled to Vietnam, Israel, and back to France. From the ribald kitchen humor to fiery-tempered workers to tasks ranging from the mundane (mincing cases of shallots) to the extraordinary (cooking seafood on the line), Shockey shows us what really happens behind the scenes in haute cuisine, and includes original recipes integrating the techniques and flavors she learned along the way. With the dramatic backdrop of restaurant life, readers will be delighted by the adventures of a bright and restless young woman looking for her place in the world.

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Review: A well-written and engaging book, but unfortunately, the writing doesn’t do much to make the writer terribly likable. Ms. Shockey portrays herself as nearly faultless - every restaurant seems to think her the best stage ever to work there, all offer her a job - or comment that she’s obviously going far better places than staying in the kitchen with them. The book would have benefited greatly from a degree of humility about things more than inexperience and a dimming down of the self-satisfaction that fills the writing. It seems apparent that the author is used to writing blog posts and articles - what can pass in a short piece grows grating over the length of a memoir.

However the different cultures - restaurant and country - portrayed are very interesting. I definitely enjoyed seeing how the different kitchens were run and how the different chefs approached their work. As a Top Chef fan, I especially enjoyed the look into Wylie Dufresne’s restaurant.

Review: The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

by Wendy McClure

April 14, 2011

Borrowed from Library 

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Grade: A

Synopsis (from Publisher): For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession.

Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West.

The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones-and find that our old love has only deepened.

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I'm a second generation Laura fan - my mom very nearly named me Laura Elizabeth then introduced me to the series by reading Little House in the Big Woods to me when I was three years old. We read all the books together and then I took over the books, reading them again and again until my old yellow copies fell to pieces and I'd spent hundreds of hours pretending I was Laura as I ran through prairies, made maple syrup candy, and fell in love with historical fashion.

This book is exactly what I was hoping it would be. Absolutely charming, funny, sincere, and sometimes snarky all while examining the our love (and by 'our', I mean the generation of women who grew up reading Laura in the 70s and 80s - long after her passing) of Laura Ingalls Wilder, her world, and her fandom. Without sounding creepy, Ms. McClure writes like someone I wish I was friends with, and her observations are always interesting and usually pretty hilarious. This isn't historical writing. Ms. McClure doesn't make any claims to have new ground-breaking research on the Ingalls or Wilder families, but there are plenty of books already written on that. This is a memoir and examination of the ongoing influences of the Little House books on Ms. McClure's life and our culture as a whole.

After finishing this book, I immediately picked up the Little House books to re-read for the millionth time. I missed Laura and wanted to 'see' her again!