Calling Armchair Chefs!

Hello!

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)

Need Non-Fiction? Books to Try!

Hi everyone - Sarah, here!

Not everyone who comes to the beach wants to loose themselves in the latest Janet Evanovich or Tom Clancy paperback. Many (like me!) are more inclined to delve into a biography, true-life adventure, or weird science story.

Here are just a few to consider (in no particular order)!

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
2. Salt: A World History (Mark Kurlansky)
3. And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (Wayne Curtis)
4. Team of Rivals (Doris Kearns Goodwin)
5. Marie Antoinette (Antonia Fraser)
6. Mayflower (Nathaniel Philbrick)
7. The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey (Linda Greenlaw)
8. Hatteras Blues: A Story from the Edge of America (Tom Carlson)
   
9. The Audacity of Hope (Barak Obama)
   
10. One Soldier's Story: A Memoir (Bob Dole)
11. Flags of Our Fathers (James Bradley/Ron Powers)
12. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Trip Into the Heart of Fan Mania (Warren St. John)
13. Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd (Richard Zacks)
14. Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs)
15. Marley & Me (John Grogan)
16. Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer)
17. Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battel of Thermopylae (Steven Pressfield)
18. How the Irish Saved Civilization (Thomas Cahill)
    
19. Helter Skelter (Vincent Bugliosi)
20. The Secret (Rhonda Byrne)

Top 10 Summer Reads!

(Finn’s curled up in the back room for his morning nap, so he asked me to take over this part of his blog. Enjoy! –Sarah)

These are the Top 10 books that are most likely to be full of sand and water-logged from the hot tub!

Read below to see if your “Corolla classic” made the cut. Then add any other favorites and personal reviews in the “comments” section!

Adult
1. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Kim Edwards)
2. Marley and Me (John Grogan)
3. My Sister’s Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
4. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
5. Running With Scissors (Augusten Burroughs)
6. Goodnight Nobody (Jennifer Weiner)
7. Something Borrowed (Emily Giffin)
8. Velocity (Dean Koontz)
9. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
10. Skinny Dip (Carl Hiaasen)

Young Adult
1. Gossip Girl series (Cecily Von Ziegesar)
2. The Clique (Lisi Harrison)
3. Summer Boys (Hailey Abbott)
4. Twilight (Stephanie Meyer)
5. Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment (James Patterson)
6. Nightmare Academy (Frank Peretti)
7. Small Steps (Louis Sachar)
8. Eragon (Christopher Paolini)
9. Good Omens (Terry Pratchett/ Neil Gaiman)
10. Hoops (Walter Dean Meyer)

Grades 3–6
1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling)
2. Peter and the Starcatchers (Dave Barry)
3. Inkheart (Cordelia Funke)
4. How to be a Pirate (Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III)
5. The Mystery of Blackbeard the Pirate (Carole Marsh)
6. Pirateology (Dugald Steer)
7. The Lightening Thief (Rick Riordan)
8. The City of Ember (Jeanne Duprau)
9. Stormbreaker (Anthony Horowitz)
10. Thunder from the Sea (Joan Harlow Hiatt)

Early Readers
1. Rani in the Mermaid Lagoon (Lisa Papademetriou)
2. The Magic Treehouse (Mary Pope Osborne)
3. Junie B. Jones (Barbara Park)
4. Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag (Marjorie Weinman Sharmat)
5. A to Z Mysteries (Ron Roy)
6. Sky the Blue Fairy (Daisy Meadows)
7. Little Bear (Else Holmelund Minarik)
8. Frog and Toad are Friends (Arnold Lobel)
9. Oliver Pig and the Best Fort Ever (Jean Van Leeuwen)
10. The Dog That Pitched a No-Hitter (Matt Christopher)

Picture
1. Bats at the Beach (Brian Lies)
2. Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs (Giles Andreae)
3. How I Became a Pirate (Melinda Long)
4. Do Pirates Take Baths? (Kathy Tucker)
5. Beach Day! (Patricia Lakin)
6. Punctuation Takes a Vacation (Robin Pulver)
7. T is for Tar Heel (Carol Crane)
8. Arnold the Smiling Horse (Karine Nguyen-Tuong)
9. Curious George Goes to the Beach (Margret Rey)
10. Clifford and the Missing Beach Ball (Norman Bridwell)