Every year the holidays unbury my deep-seated desire to cook (and bake!) like a professional chef...it's a hopeless quest, but I do it every year. Lucky for Finnegan, this means he gets to chow down on a lot of failed attempts at various strange dishes :)
But if you'd rather take the smart path and just READ about amazing chefs...and then sensibly go out to eat...try these! :)
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Bill Buford)
That title pretty much says it all...but here's the longer synopsis:
"Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts--and for a number of reasons. First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgeable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star Babbo (Mario Batale's restaurant) provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiliations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the "kitchen awareness" and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook."
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Anthony Bourdain)
"Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase."
(Synopsis and covers courtesy of Amazon.com)
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