Review: Slow Fires by Justin Smillie

Well, I am the worst. It's been a hellacious year of ups and downs. But that's a whole other blog post. This one.. is about: Slow Fires: Mastering New Ways to Braise, Roast, and Grill.

This one, again, was chosen for the Chef Hubs, because I am nice like that. From both our perspectives, it's quite beautiful, like most cookbooks, but it's more than pretty pictures.

The layout is clean, separating Braising, Roasting, Grilling into their own specific sections, ending with Foundations and Finishes. Each section starts with preparation and technique, giving you the fundamentals before diving into the recipes.

That being said, this isn't really the easiest cookbook for the layman. (Read: me). However, Chef liked it just enough. It highlights more unique flavor pairing, ingredients, and concepts while keeping the foundation in place, because a good roast chicken is a good roast chicken.

This presents some really fun ideas beyond the backyard BBQ bash where dad wears a 'Kiss The Cook' apron and overcooks the steaks. 

If you've got some time, and are willing to dive in and give yourself a challenge, especially if you are a home cook, this is a delicious way to try.

Note: This book was received for free from Blogging for Books.

The Gap of Time: A Review: By Jeanette Winterson

This book is a beautiful re-telling of 'The Winter's Tale.' Jeanette Winterson's beautiful voice and style shine through. I adore most of her books, so I was excited to receive this.

It's raw, highly emotional, highly sexually charged. It's choppy and disjointed, full of small beautiful things, bits and pieces of words that phrases that stick out in your mind. I haven't had a lot of time to read these days, but this was a great book to read during my limited free moments. The cyclical nature of our existence, the ebb and flow of time, love and passion and desire and anger. It’s all so human and so removed from reality. It’s really, quite beautiful and brings out all the feels.

I enjoyed the 'primer' in the beginning, giving you a little bit of feedback if you happen to not be familiar with the classic Shakespeare tale. I'm interested to see where the Hogarth Shakespeare series goes, because this is a helluva start.

To the boy with the knives at 2 AM, smoking a cigarette by the arborvitae and dreaming big dreams.

It takes a helluva lot of inner fortitude to stay driven and motivated to succeed when the person who unequivocally is supposed to have your back thinks what you are doing is a waste of time.
I allow myself one night of feeling sorry and sad.
Now, I push back harder, work harder, do more.
I will not allow grasping at straws to stop me, simply because what I am passionate about, what I have chosen, doesn't fit his schema.
This world we build together must make us both happy andh satisfied.
No, I don't think you or they are roadblocks.
Yes, I think we, both, can have it all.
But you don't get to dictate what that means for me, simply because you don't understand it.
I never took you for such a misogynist.
I never thought I'd feel so lost and saddened by your silly, stupid words.
I hope you see the bigger picture, and not the short term.
You cannot stop me from growing, learning, giving myself some strength and attention towards my goals, when all I ever did was support yours, no matter my frustrations or feelings.
I kept silent, and made it work.
Now, maybe you can do the same.

Olympia Provisions: Cured Meats and Tales from an American Charcuterie: A Review

Well, since work has been kicking my butt, I put Chef down for reviewing this one. I did a quick run-through, but he explored it in depth.

Here's what he relayed to me:
Confits, charcuterie, pâtés, and sausages are some of his favorite things, right up there with raindrops on roses or whatever. As a chef in a mostly bar-centric restaurant, he doesn't often get to practice these arts, but sneaks them in whenever he can. So when I saw this one, I knew it was right up his alley.

From a professional perspective, he says that the book is very thorough, and the recipes are detailed enough to provide the layman some direction on processes. He would be hesitant to have anyone who doesn't have some background try their hand at cured meats all by their lonesome, mainly because what this book is describing requires a HAACP plan in an actual restaurant setting, to prevent illness, etc.

He says the book is a good history and vibe of the restaurant itself, makes it intriguing, calls to you to come and visit or seek out their products. The images in the book, which are just foodie eye-candy, capture the essence of the food and the place. Totally worth the space they take up (in my opinion-I don't cook, haha), but chef says the book would be a whole lot smaller w/o them. He can take them or leave them, but totally understands their value as images and making the book complete. He's after the technical stuff, and has done enough sasuage making that the images are needed for him to get the directions.

However, they are gorgeous.

From both of us, this book is well worth the purchase price, for the content and for just as a beautiful piece of art to share at dinner time with friends, even if you end up buying their meats instead of making them yourself. We need more places like this in America, and we need to make this food accessible to everyone, because it's amazing and unappreciated in the vastness of MickyD's and Taco Bell, in quick pre-frozen food wastelands of the midwest and giant doggie bags of crap.

We need to enjoy our food, really enjoy it. This is a start.

*this book was received for free via Blogging For Books.

Gold, Fame, Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins - A Review

Gold, Fame, Citrus is the apocalypse, imagined in a an eerily real way these days. Drought overtakes Southern CA (sound familiar), but to the point of barren wasteland, scavenging for anything fresh, water rations and abandonment. Most have left for greener pastures, but Luz and her boyfriend Ray hold out, their love enough to deal with the crazy.

Then, they find a little girl. Dirty, scruffy, indeterminable and irresistible, they take her from those whom have her. Ig, she is called, because that’s who she says she is.  A child, even if it’s not yours, makes your mind look towards the future, and they realize they need to leave.

On the way through, things happen. Bad things. Ray is gone and Luz is left with Ig, rescued by other hold outs, in an even more barren, more wasted wasteland were sand dunes constantly shift and grow, threatening to bury everyone at any moment. But there is a leader there, and he seems to have the answers.

This book is written like poetry, short, quip phrases and allusions, metaphors and fragmented thoughts that shift like the desert and sand in this story. It’s not for everyone, but for those people who can look deeper into the text, enjoy flawed characters and gritty wonder. It’s fantastical and realistic, all at once, and the ended leaves you lost and aching. 

Books should end like that sometimes.

(*this book was received for free as an ARC via Shelf Awareness)

Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim - A Review

Without You, There Is No Us offers a glimpse at the most secretive state in the world, North Korea. This is a very real, very powerful look at the sons of the elite in the DPNK, and author Suki Kim manages to give a human face to the faceless mass that is North Korean, sharing the underlying connections between all of us as human, and exploring the very real differences when you live in a place that refuses to let you think for yourself.

I read this book in a night, caught up in the same fascination that led Suki to seek out a way back to Pyongyang after her initial visit in 2002. Disguising herself as a missionary/teacher of English, she manages to land a position at PUST, The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. This is her story of her two semesters teaching there.

My husband lived in South Korea, and I’ve always been fascinated by his description of his time there, and his trips to the DMZ. His father was in the military and the strangeness and sadness of a country quite literally divided has always gripped me, made me think about what we have here, and the simplest things, smallest freedoms, we experience every day and think nothing of.

Kim gives a honest, earnest look at the students she falls in love with, their trials and struggles and the incredible contradiction she sees because of where they were raised and the limits they face. She gives an honest look at the missionary/teachers as well, and the reasons they are really there.

What struck me was the irony of the missionaries, the desire to free these poor oppressed students under the rule and brainwashing of a dictator by planting themselves in North Korea so they can provide another set of dogma for them to eventually live by. Kim, an atheist, realizes this strangeness too. But money talks, and PUST is what it is because of it.

Kim leaves with a little hope, maybe something she said, something she did, in some way reaches her students. But she leaves, of course. 

Read this, and learn a little more about some place we can never really know about, at least not yet. But maybe reading this will offer some humanity and perspective on all we have.

*this book was received for free via Blogging For Books.

Review: Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix

I must say, I am bias towards Bittman. How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian have been my go-to's whenever I cook. By cooking, I mean looking in the fridge and seeing what's about to go bad, throwing it all together and making it work. Bittman's books have allowed me to make it work without it tasting like crap.

So I was excited to receive this book in the mail. First off, I gave it to my Chef husband, so we could dual review it, the thought being that his opinion about cookbooks would differ wildly from mine, but it wasn't as dramatic as I thought.

Him: "I like the layout of this book. It's organized in a way to make it easy for anyone to follow, and the base recipes allow people to expand upon their cooking techniques by providing a foundation. The variations on the recipes are pretty good as well. I do have an issue with some of the directions, for example, cutting meat. It's written, but there are no illustrations, and that's not something everyone would understand with written description only. "

Hrm. Good point, and something I didn't think about. So, that, coming from a Professional Chef. I looked over the book and read a bit, but then he snagged it and hasn't given it back, so it's apparently pretty sweet, regardless of any complaints.

 I appreciate the ease of all of Bittman's books, and this one allows you to be a little more creative, step out of your norm or go-to (which, for me, is something that ends up tasting vaguely Spanish). I also appreciated the 'what the hell to do with holiday leftovers' section, hehe. The photos, of course, are great, beautiful, clean, basically food porn, what I want to see in my cookbooks. 

OH. The cocktail section? That was pretty cool too.

(*this book was received free via bloggingforbooks.com)