At Bodega Bay, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood, thought by my dining partner, the lovely Colleen, to be better than the esteemed Slanted Door in the Ferry Building
Enjoying garlic noodles, crab
and, a book. Reading Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child. It's part of a series about a retired cop (or maybe she said Marine) who travels the world with nothing but the clothes on his back, a toothbrush and a credit card.
If she were to write her own book, it'd be a cookbook. There is Lee Child, and then there is Julia Child. In her book, though, it wouldn't just be food--there'd be memories, too. Like the blue crabs they have on the East Coast. You'd boil them in beer and seasonings and lay newspaper out on the table.
(sorry the picture turned out so dark.... )
What's your favorite food memory, either personal or something you've read in a book? I liked Babette's Feast. I saw the movie in French class in junior high and I can still remember the looks on the faces of the humble islanders when they were biting into the French cuisine and getting, for the first time, tipsy on wine. It was like, wow, food can do great things. My friend Colleen, with whom I was dining, creates this effect with food, too. I think I've salivated on her table cloth.
6 Comments:
Reading Laura Ingalls Wilders book about her husband growing up (I forget the title). That whole book is just filled with stories about food! I think she must have had food deprivation while growing up and then compensated by writing about it in that book.
I drool every time I read it (and I read it often!)
Giorgio Locatelli's 'Made in Italy' will change any foodies life. I promise.
There's a book by a San Francisco baker called "Bread and Chocolate" that changed the way I look at food and food writing. It was the author's love of food, and path to learning about food, that got me hooked on that book.
Chocolat, by Joanne Harris, incites cravings for coffee, chocolate and pastry. I am already quite addicted to coffee and chocolate, and I probably doubled my consumption of them while reading this book!
I think that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, made me have similar cravings....though for even just basic things like bread and cabbage soup, maybe not cabbage soup, maybe just some sort of soup.
My favorite food memories aren't about eating food, it's about making or cooking food. In my family, it's where people gather ... my family makes these cheese buns called ensemada with butter and sugar dusted on top. It takes an assembly line ... and so we all gather in the kitchen on cold winter nights to make these for christmas ... those are my favorite food memories!
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