Lady T

Go figure...my Wusthof has been giving me superb service since 1985. Bread, tomatoes, Virginia ham, anything: I get fine clean slices without much musclework at all. Full disclosure: I do get all my knives professionally honed once a year, and use a steel religiously to maintain edges in between. There are, as noted, commercially available gizmos for serrated knives. I just don't trust 'em.

I've been cooking ever since teen years; I still have a desperately old, dogeared copy of a Betty Crocker paperback in my library. It was in my twenties that I first ran across a book by James Beard ("Delights and Prejudices", in a used-book store), and realized that cooking taken seriously, cooking considered as an art form, was another thing entirely. After that, I grabbed a copy of the 1975 edition of "Joy of Cooking" and acquired considerable trial-and-error technical practice. "Beard on Food", a collection of Beard's syndicated columns over the years, charmed the daylights out of me and got me using more and more fresh produce and herbs, and cooking from scratch. "Laurel's Kitchen" and the Tassajara cooking series made up a more detailed consideration of vegetarianism than I'd ever seen before (and I still occasionally use Laurel and Company's ratatouille recipe), but it left me with a raging allergy to doctrinaire vegans-on-a-mission-to-convert-me which persists to this day. Then Robertson et al. produced the "Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book", which was one of the most useful volumes I'd ever seen on bread baking, back then. The best part of all was the point at which I got my hands on the far more joyous Anna Thomas "Vegetarian Epicure" books and started playing with wine-and-food pairings, building on the basics my dad -- a bartender and wine steward -- had taught me before his death. M. F. K. Fisher is a constant delight. So is Laurie Colwin ("Home Cooking", just for a start). The Silver Palate volumes work well for me. They seem to me to be unified by instructions which insist, basically, on not screwing up the best and freshest ingredients available. Nowadays, my kitchen companions-by-proxy-through-their-books include both John Thorne (of "Simple Cooking" fame) and -- as far as you can GET from simple -- Charlie Trotter, whose recipes hold the same fascination for me as really tough crossword puzzles: problems to solve, on the way to some damn fine-tasting food. A side note, Cabrales: I found Trotter's "Gourmet Cooking for Dummies" to be a LOT of fun. I use one of the recipes for risotto on a regular basis (doubt CT would recognize his own work, though; I've morphed it into several other risotto recipes, depending on the season and the available produce, that work better for me), and refer to the list of ingredient sources occasionally...usually falling out laughing at what they want me to pay. On top of all of that I go to restaurants as often as I can, and steal any ideas on the plates that I like and can afford. Does this help at all?

Webster's advises us: AVERSIVE: ..."tending to avoid or causing avoidance of a noxious or punishing stimulus."

There are too many "Sue's too tired/distracted/drunk to safely hold a knife/vegetable peeler/set of kitchen scissors/meat fork" moments for me to bore you with them...however, I do have a coffee story of my own: I'd just moved into my very first on-my-own apartment, and owned a cheap no-brainer (ha!) Melitta coffeemaker. The phone rang one evening, and as I picked it up I flipped on what I thought was the gas burner for the big pot full of water, ready to make some pasta. I turned my back, engrossed in the conversation, until a truly nasty stench and the blare of my apartment's smoke alarm turned me back around: the burner I'd turned on (full power) was underneath the empty Melitta glass carafe, which I'd set up with its plastic funnel and paper filter. The plastic was melting directly into the carafe...and the filter was on fire. Nothing for it but to move fast: I slammed the stopper into my kitchen sink, turned on the cold water full blast, and used two potholders to grab the whole coffeemaker assembly off the stove and slam-dunk it into the rising water while diving for cover. The carafe didn't explode as I'd thought it would, hot as it was, but cleaning up the wretched mess (and going without my cherished Kona the next morning!) was one of the most emphatic "pay ATTENTION, idiot!" experiences I ever got through without injury.

My dad was head bartender for the Wrigley Building Restaurant in Chicago, and during my undergrad years he often took me with him (I attended the U of Illinois, at the campus just west of downtown) on mornings when I had classes. He left the house at 6:15 a.m., in order to arrive at the restaurant in time to do the regular beverage orders for the following day, attend to personnel matters and paperwork, and review/do orders as necessary for the restaurant's wine cellar, which he also oversaw. What I remember most fondly was sitting in the restaurant's huge professional kitchen with Dad, already in his bartender's uniform, eating breakfast with him (and many others of the Wrigley's morning staff) as fixed by the morning-shift cooks. It might be that my memory is too rosy in retrospect, but nobody ever seemed too rushed or overloaded to pour some juice and fix a plate of eggs and toast, and often they came up with a pan of cinnamon rolls or some French toast; I'm pretty sure my first experience with huevos rancheros happened in that 7 a.m. kitchen as well. My dad died of cancer not long after I graduated, but that series of early-morning memories is a treasure of mine for all time.

That settles it for me, anyway: I'm buying that book the minute it hits the street!

Wow. Interesting! I've put a reminder in my calendar for June 10th: I've got to get my mitts on this book. Clearly I need to see the straight text from the volume, then I need to reread this review.