Happy in the Kitchen

We are on break now, between quarters. I have accumulated a few new cookbooks along the way since starting school. Curiously enough, I haven't added as many as I would have thought but I really like the collections that are more like a text book, i.e., ones that contain both commentary and photos.

When I started cooking, one of the first cookbooks I used was The Joy of Cooking. My copy is a paperback and it is falling apart. This edition (older than a lot of my classmates) explains some things but, other than a few illustrations, it has no photos. It was my cooking reference for years.

I ended up with two books from our Protein Fabrication class, Lobel's Meat Bible and James Peterson's Fish & Shellfish as part of our reading assignments. Lobel's provides a fair amount of information on a variety of meats but could benefit from some illustrations such as diagrams on primals. The Peterson book is well written and provides a lot of information on cooking techniques which I believe could be another whole level of instruction at school.

All this is leading to some recent acquisitions, one by chance (Momofuku) and the other (Happy in the Kitchen) recommended by my knowledgeable friend, Nichole.

Momofuku is David Chang's New York restaurant group and the book by the same name chronicles the evolution of his noodle bar as well as provides instruction on how to create some of the dishes served at the restaurant. It contains a variety of interesting photos along with the commentary. Curiously enough, we are planning to visit some friends who live near the CIA in upstate New York and they recommended (out of the blue) visiting Momofuku.

Nichole recommended Michel Richard's Happy in the Kitchen last month and I finally got around to getting a copy of it. It typifies exactly what I like in a "cook book" – some history in its commentary, great photos wrapped around some new techniques. The foreword by Thomas Keller echoes what I have learned in school, "Pastry chefs and savory chefs rely on a completely different set of skills and use their intellects in different ways. Pastry chefs are like mathematicians. Savory chefs, we're like free thinkers. . ." which helps explain why I'm neither so to speak.