\nAnyway, for my first post of the year, I thought I’d start with two short introductions of two books about food which I read last year. I figured it’d be good to begin with something food-related. \ud83d\ude42
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<\/a><\/br>\nLike the many twenty-something year olds that hit a quarter-life crisis, Katherine Darling quits her job at a book publisher and decides to enrol in culinary school to pursue her love for cooking. Under the Table: Saucy Tales from Culinary School<\/b> is a memoir of her six months spent learning to become a professional chef in the student kitchens of New York’s French Culinary Institute.
\nDarling soon realises that professional cooking is vastly different from home cooking, even though she started off thinking she was a very competent chef. For example, she learns that cooking an omelette isn’t as simple as she thought. Just mastering the skill of tossing an omelette onto a plate alone was no easy feat.
\nApart from giving lovely descriptions of food, like freshly baked baguettes and buttery croissants, Darling also writes about her fellow classmates and lecturers. Those who were her pals got flattering write-ups while others were portrayed as being utterly clumsy, lazy or bitchy. I’m not sure if they truly deserve the criticisms ‘cos Darling comes across as rather bitchy herself, especially when she dishes the dirt on two of her lecturers having a go at it in some food storage room or when she portrays her classmate, Mimi, as a mean and vindictive woman when she doesn’t invite her to dinner at a posh restaurant where she has invited other classmates. The photo of her on the book’s inside back cover with the rather haughty look and slight turn of the nose in the air makes her come across as someone I wouldn’t really like.
\nWhile I didn’t particularly like the protagonist’s voice because she didn’t come across as someone I could be friends with, I would say the book is still entertaining enough for anyone who enjoys reading a book filled with descriptions of food and what goes on in culinary school. Best for a lazy Sunday read or to kill time on the bus or train.
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<\/a><\/br>\nAh, to live in Paris and sit at cafes all day and take an evening stroll by the River Seine every day! The perfect life, non??? In The Sweet Life In Paris: A Recipe for Living in the World’s Most Delicious City<\/b>, famed pastry chef, food writer and blogger David Lebovitz debunks often-held fallacies about life in Paris after he fulfills his life-long dream of moving there.
\nWith his characteristic tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating humour, Lebovitz lets us in on the quirks of Parisiens and how to survive in this city that is both delightful and annoying at the same time. His anecdotes tell of how he has learnt to cut queues like all true Parisiens do and how everyone becomes willing to do him a favour by him just bribing them with some of his homemade brownies. The boys at the fish market, whom he says all are incredibly good-looking and have rippling muscles (I’m heading there next time I’m in Paris), all looked forward to his visits when he fed them with ice cream ever so often when he was experimenting with ice cream flavours and had to make way in his freezer for new flavours.
\nAlso containing recipes for sweet and savoury dishes such as Lemon-Glazed Madeleines and Pork Loin with Brown Sugar-Bourbon Glaze, the book is a humorous and easy read that I’d recommend – a great one to bring along to the beach as you sun yourself!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"