Before we officially set off to Greece with Johanna and Harlot’s Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece, by Patricia Volonakis Davis, it is time to announce our reading list for the next six months. We have three very different books to read, share, and inspire us to cook delightful dishes.
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December-January 2012
Rachel, The Crispy Cook, picks the best books to start during busy December and entertain us in dull January. Her pick is Outlaw Cook, by John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne (NY: Farrar, Straux, Giroux, 1992) Rachel says: “Thorne and his wife have written a very opinionated, very interesting collection of essays (with recipes) about edible ingredients, cooking, cookbooks, fellow food writers and traditional foods that I look forward to sharing with my CTB buddies. Outlaw Cook is the couple’s second book and covers such intriguingly titled subjects as Meatball Metaphysics, My Paula Wolfert Problem, Forty Cloves of Garlic, Russians & Mushrooms, Plowman’s Lunch and An Artisanal Loaf. The Thorne-y food philosophy rejects standardized cookbook stylizing with brief, honed down lists of ingredients and cooking instructions and instead, believes in much more elaborate research and discussion of how to approach various dishes and cuisines. I think there are chapters there that will delight, infuriate and captivate us. The Thornes also publish a culinary newsletter, Simple Cooking, which you can sample at www.outlawcook.com before diving in”
The deadline for your entry for Outlaw Cook is Monday, January 23.
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February-March 2012
At Kahakai Kitchen, I wanted us to get in touch with our inner children, so I selected the classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Originally published in 1964, (According to Wikipedia) “The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl’s experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products. At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree’s were England’s two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other’s factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story” The book was a favorite of my childhood and both movies (The Gene Wilder and the Johnny Depp version) are in my DVD collection and I wanted to revisit the book with my CTB friends. Consider this your golden ticket to come up with the most scrumdiddlyumptious dish you can imagine.
The deadline for your entry for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Monday, March 26.
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April-May 2012
Jo from Food Junkie Not Junk Food will wind up our spring with her foodie history pick ofUnited States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution by David Kamp. From the author’s site: United States of Arugula is a book about one of the happiest developments of our time: the quantum leap forward in food choice, food quality, and culinary sophistication in America in the last sixty years or so. The book examines not only the social forces that effected this transformation, but the visionaries who changed American food for the better: among them James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Alice Waters.” We should all find plenty of inspiration to cook from this fun look at the world of food.
The deadline for your entry for United States of Arugula is Monday, May 28th.
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So beg, buy or borrow these picks and kick of 2012 with some terrific new books.
Happy cooking and reading!
Deb, Rachel and Jo
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