Book #68: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

My mom's going to be so proud of me for reading this. She read it over the summer and kept telling me about it, and I kept meaning to read it but never got around to it, until I FINALLY remembered to request it from the library. I picked it up yesterday and was so into it that I plowed through it and just finished it--and then ordered a copy of it for myself on Amazon. I NEED to own it so that I can remember everything in here!

Flinn is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, and she works as a food writer (or something like that) since she graduated. But one day in the grocery store she saw a woman with a cart full of what she called "antinourishment" or non-food--only processed food like boxes of Hamburger Helper and canned soup. So she followed her around and started telling her how to make real food and replace all those boxes in her cart--and that encounter opened up a whole new project for Flinn. She recruited nine women who were terrified of cooking and taught them a (free) weekly cooking class to give them the fundamentals and build their confidence in themselves as cooks. She visited each of their kitchens before beginning to see where they each were in their skills, and many of them were in horrible food situations (only eating fast food and frozen meals, for example). But by the end of the class series, many of them were roasting chickens and making their own stock and making soups from scratch! I'm pretty jealous because I want to take a class like that--but Flinn's book is basically set up to BE a class like that for you to read. She narrates each chapter as though she's just telling you what happened in each class, but she's really passing on the information to you as much as to the nine students in her class. The classes covered things like knife skills, roasting a whole chicken, making vinaigrettes, different ways to prepare vegetables, meat, and fish, easy bread recipes, and how to use the leftovers you have in your fridge. So, you can see why I would want a copy of my own--I want to remember all the different skills she taught.

This book is just one more motivation for me to continue our recent push towards eating more whole foods. We have been SO good lately at eating lots of fruits and vegetables (a lot of it for me is because I'm breastfeeding--and trying to lose the baby weight in a healthy way) but there are plenty more ways to do things in the kitchen and make things (like vegetables) more interesting. I'm excited to try!