The Queens Night Market has become a beloved summertime institution since its founding by Texas native John Wang, who modeled it on the night markets he discovered as a child while visiting family in Taiwan during the summers. Up to 100 vendors (historically from over 90 countries) gather from 5 pm to midnight at the... Continue Reading →
Recent Foodie Reads: Food as Philosophy, Healing Technique, and Revolution
Great British Bake Off contestant and Guardian columnist Ruby Tandoh's book melding food, memoir, and life philosophy, Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want, has been a UK bestseller since its 2018 release, and apparently is getting a US release next month, although the Queens Public Library already had it. I read it... Continue Reading →
Ruth Reichl On Her Gourmet Days
Book review: Save Me the Plums, by Ruth Reichl (Amazon / Book Depository) Chef and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl was surprised to find herself being offered the position of editor-in-chief at the storied Gourmet magazine, tastemakers in the foodie world. She felt like an unlikely candidate for a number of reasons, including that as a... Continue Reading →
Two New Foodoirs: A Restaurant Critic’s Tales of the Trade and Writers On Their Comfort Foods
The Book of Eating, by Adam Platt Eat Joy: Stories of Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett I don't know what it is about this time of year, maybe just because it's when we tend to spend more time at home cooking or ordering comfort-food takeout, but there are always so... Continue Reading →
Ruth Reichl’s Beginnings in the Kitchen
Book review: Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl (Amazon / Book Depository) Food writer, magazine editor, and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl's first memoir, Tender at the Bone, is a significant one in the "foodoir" genre, blending recipes into stories and scenes from a life. It covers the connections she made in her early life... Continue Reading →
How Cooking Made Living Seem Possible
Book review: Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger (Amazon / Book Depository) There is a German word, kummerspeck, that translates literally as 'grief-bacon,' and metaphorically as 'comfort eating'. This book is the grief-bacon book...This is the book I wanted to read when I was sad, but it's also a book for good days. I'm not going... Continue Reading →
Julia Child Remembers France
Book review: My Life in France, by Julia Child & Alex Prud'homme (Amazon / Book Depository) In Paris in the 1950s, I had the supreme good fortune to study with a remarkably able group of chefs. From them I learned why good French food is an art, and why it makes such sublime eating: nothing... Continue Reading →
“A Young Black Chef” Finds His Place in Fine Dining
Book review: Notes from a Young Black Chef, by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein (Amazon / Book Depository) A groove had formed in the linoleum in front of the stove where Mom spent hours cooking. Next to that were four indentations from the little wooden step stool on which I often stood to watch... Continue Reading →
Culinary and Travel Stories, from Al Dente to Zucchini Blossoms
Book review: The Bread and the Knife, by Dawn Drzal (Amazon / Book Depository) Former cookbook editor Dawn Drzal's memoir is structured around 26 dishes or ingredients of significance in her life, matched up to the letters of the alphabet. Although the alphabet theme is a bit gimmicky, the writing is anything but. Drzal draws... Continue Reading →
Family Stories and Recipes, From Belarus to Brooklyn
Book review: Savage Feast, by Boris Fishman (Amazon / Book Depository) Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency—and it was how you showed love. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what... Continue Reading →
Warm, Funny Kitchen Stories from the Heart
Book review: More Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin (Amazon / Book Depository) Despite falling in love with Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen last year, I forced myself to wait before reading its followup volume, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. I wanted to save the joy for a time when I knew I'd need... Continue Reading →
Stories of Comfort Food For Cancer
Book review: All the Wild Hungers by Karen Babine (Amazon / Book Depository) Cancer divides - as its very premise, its cells divide, maniacally, so that one rogue cell becomes two becomes a three-pound cabbage-sized tumor. Yet the same is happening inside my sister in a different way, as her child who was once one cell became... Continue Reading →