Category Archives: Book

Have you ever wanted to be able to cook without thinking about it? Do you have trouble piecing together a meal from the contents of your refrigerator? Do you feel that you don’t understand the basics of cooking or even some rudimentary skills like chopping, dicing or julienning? Well, that’s how I always felt about cooking – I was great at following a recipe (to the letter), but could not improvise anything. I also did not know much about basic kitchen skills.

Then I read “Kitchen Counter Cooking School” by Kathleen Flinn. This book is not a how-to book but rather a chronicle of how a professionally trained chef (Flinn is a graduate of Paris’ Le Cordon Bleu) took nine culinary novices and transformed them into perfectly serviceable cooks. Flinn’s journey is prompted by a random encounter with a woman loading processed food into her supermarket cart. After talking to the woman, Flinn finds out that the woman buys the processed food because they are “easy” and “always come out right.” It was this lack of knowledge and confidence that sparked Flinn to create a series of classes which would take ordinary folks and teach them to become more than proficient in the kitchen.  Read more... (462 words and 1 image, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)