Hello, my beautiful readers. I was hoping to be able to share a drool-worthy restaurant review with you today, but my camera has been experiencing some serious issues. In fact, this is the third time in the past month that technical difficulties have foiled my plans to share something insanely delicious with you. The camera struggle is real.
So today, instead of sharing a food review, I'm reviewing a book about food.
When I was in Miami over the holidays in December I visited my favorite book store, Books & Books in Coral Gables. I had done almost a full lap around the space when I spotted a book cover decorated with a fluffy, buttery stack of pancakes. Naturally I had to pick it up.
The book was an autographed copy of Kate Christensen's memoir called "Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography Of My Appetites." I read the first few pages there in the store and decided it would make a great commute book.
Over the course of these 353 pages, Kate shares the details of her transient life. As a child (and later as an adult) she was constantly moving, often across states lines. Her mother was married and divorced multiples times, as were some of her siblings. Her own dating life was tumultuous and only calmed once she reached her 40s. The amount of uprooting and upheaval in her life gave a control freak like me severe heart palpitations.
No matter what was happening with work, her mother, her sisters or her boyfriend, Kate always found comfort and distraction in great food. And let me tell you, boy can she write about it. In one passage, she describes the Italian sub she used to order from her neighborhood deli in New York:
"On a foot-long Italian loaf, soft and white and spongy, he slathered about half a jar each of mustard and mayo and then piled a mound of shredded iceberg, greasy rounds of salami and ham, hot green pepperoncini, and rectangular slabs of provolone. At the end, he squirted oil and vinegar from plastic bottles, sprinkled it with black pepper and salt, folded it closed, rolled it in white paper and taped it shut and cut it in half, then slid it into a paper sack between the beer and the chips. I took my dinner straight home. In the warm months, I sat outside on my bare tar roof deck, staring at the sky. I always ate and drank every drop and scrap."
She can even make a cardboard cup of chicken noodle soup sound five star:
"I spent my lunch hours inside at my desk, writing my novel on a borrowed word processor I brought every day from home, and eating chicken noodle soup with packets of saltines from the deli on Lexington Avenue. It was the only thing I ever ate for lunch on workdays - the broth, salty and rich and golden, the noodles, slippery and filling and warm, the tender chunks of chicken and carrot that gave pleasantly between my teeth, and the saltines, the perfect accompaniment, crunchy and as as salty as the broth. I enjoyed this lunch as much as a medieval lord might have enjoyed a plate of perfectly roasted pheasant or duck. And indeed I felt lordly, eating my cardboard vat of hot, savory soup, letting the noodles slide luxuriantly down my gullet, slurping the broth, opening a fifth packet of crackers."
It was her delectable descriptions of her favorite dishes that reeled me in every time. Sometimes I could feel my mouth started to water as I would read sentence after sentence about her favorite Italian restaurant or the meal she, her husband and their guests shared at her wedding reception.
While the food writing in each chapter is top notch, the personal narrative is tough. Kate endures a lot of hardship and makes herself completely raw and vulnerable with the reader.
After finishing this book, I needed something a bit lighter. A friend loaned me her copy of "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" by Sloane Crosley, which I'm about a third of the way through. I expect to finish it on my flight tonight (I'm headed to Miami for the weekend) so I'm also packing Andy Cohen's latest book "The Andy Cohen Diaries."
What are you reading?
