2020 Tastee-Reads Resolution: Ti Adelaide Martin and Jamie Shannon's Commander's Kitchen

Last month, I told you about one of my reading resolutions for 2020: to fully read one cookbook, cover to cover, and cook at least three recipes from it, every single month. January's trip down taste memory lane with Christina Tosi's Milk Bar Life went pretty well, but that was with a cookbook I've read before.

It makes sense that in the month that included both Valentine's Day and Mardi Gras, I read Commander's Kitchen, and I fell in love. Hard.

Here's how it all went down:

reviewing the cookbook

At the end of January, I started looking for a cookbook to embrace for the coming month, but after searching the local library branches for a decent selection, I eventually just threw up my hands, and asked my mom if she had any ideas, instead. She directed me towards the cabinet, and told me to grab the "teal one": Commander's Kitchen.

As soon as I picked it off the shelf, a few loose leaf pages slipped out of the cover, onto the floor - a printed recipe for "Louisiana Pecan-Crusted Fish," typed out on Commander's Palace letterhead - and when I went to put them back in their place, I noticed that the front endpages were all scrawled over with Sharpie, courtesy of the manager, captain, and two chefs on staff. "Here's to good food!" one signer wrote.

"Mom, what is this?" I asked her.

"The product of one of the greatest restaurants in the world," she replied.

As it turns out, what had started as an act of desperation - there was no way I was celebrating the month of Mardi Gras (a perennial big deal in my family) without Gumbo, Etouffee, or Jambalaya alongside my Zapp's chips and King's Cake on the table - had turned into the ultimate discovery. Not only had I found a focus for my monthly challenge... but a real conduit for some kitchen magic.

What I found in its pages was a full who's-who of the Brennan family tree, instruction on kitchen organization and staffing, details on housekeeping and hosting, and profiles on some of the kitchen's most prolific chefs. Imbued with not only welcoming homeyness and southern hospitality, but an old school flair and charm, reading every recipe - and those intercessions in between, "lagniappes", that gave additional cultural content - felt like gaining entrance into a new way of thinking.

Commander's Kitchens' philosophy - cook only using fresh, local ingredients, and revitalize old favorites by playing by new rules - may feel a little more expected in the culinary sphere now, but it was achieved at Commander's Palace by Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse before every major city had it's own go-to "farm to table" restaurant. Utilizing local star seafood and produce to breathe new life into classic dishes was a fresh take, and the recipes still feel an exciting and new because of it.

Whereas last month, I tackled about 5 recipes, this month, it was 10... and I couldn't stop making them! I returned my mom's cookbook with the addition of approximately 20 page flags of things I still want to try later on.

You can bet that this cookbook will be one I'll find plenty of space for in my future culinary endeavors. Unfortunately for me, the month has ended, and it's on to a new cookbook... for now.

the recipes

Due to the extraordinary amount of inspiration I took from this remarkable cookbook, I was very deliberate when it came to actually figuring out how to work all of these recipes into my schedule...  including entire themed dinners, about once a week. I still didn't tackle all the ones I wanted to try!

Here's house I fared with some of the ones I did attempt:

Cauliflower-Brie Soup
Truly a revelation, and the first clue I got to how different and remarkable this cookbook was going to be. Shockingly light, with an easy mouthfeel and a rich flavor; the perfect accompaniment to a light dinner or lunch, as it doesn't require all that much by way of ingredients or time. Think of it like a Broccoli-Cheddar Soup, but way fancier!

Tangy Shrimp Dip
At first, I was just excited than an appetizer that feels a little more high-end required so few ingredients. However, after realizing that I had barely come up for air after beginning to snack, I recognized that there  more to this dish than what I had originally thought. While it certainly won't win over any true seafood haters, most complaints over its fishy contents disappear sometime around the fifth or sixth Ritz cracker. Will definitely use this as a party recipe in the future.

Chicken Etouffee with Rice
Truly, hands-down, one of my favorite - if not THE favorite - recipe out of the whole month. And my brother's, too! It really doesn't take that many ingredients, just time... time to sear, time to build a roux, time to braise with vegetables and stock until it's practically falling off the bone and into your rice. Thick and hearty, with a vegetable percentage that will surprise you once they've all cooked down melded together into a glorious sauce. Very happy to have added this one to the repertoire!

Remoulade Sauce (with Shrimp Boil)
Okay, so the shrimp boil was Zatarain's, but the sauce was definitely from scratch... and it was all the better because of it! Whereas everything else on the list so far would be a five out of five stars, this one gets docked a point just because it would be unseemly for me to eat a entire bowl of condiments all on its own. But while it didn't attain that degree of accolades, it did a marvelous job making all seafood it touched exponentially better, from boiled shrimp to crab cakes!

Maque Choux
Why anyone would ever want to serve boring old corn with butter is absolutely beyond me... not when you can do what you do here, which is saute it in bacon fat, add in some peppers and onion, and top it with the actual bacon mixed in, too. Oh, and green onions, to top! Truly, the best way to work in your recommended daily servings of veggies.

Cajun-Stuffed Peppers
This particular recipe gained rave reviews from Mom, Dad, and my brother. In a lot of ways, they tasted like your average stuffed pepper recipe, but with the inclusion of extra peppers, jalapeno, and Cajun spices. However, perhaps it was because they were served at the same meal as the Maque Choux and the Boiled Shrimp with Remoulade Sauce, these were far from the most interesting or enchanting thing on my plate that night... as I was too busy shoveling shrimp in my mouth.

Gumbo Ya-Ya
Again, maybe this is comparison busy being the thief of joy over here. But this Gumbo - though highly anticipated - didn't steal the show for me. It was our main course for Mardi Gras, but it was not the star. (Then again, the day I made it, I had been in Seattle at 7 am, only got back to Tacoma by 2 pm, and was also busy whipping up a homemade King's Cake and Crab Cakes at the same time as I was making it.) While I really loved the depth of flavor - thanks to cooking the roux to a "milk chocolate" color before adding any veggies - it allows the chicken to get a little too broken-down for my textural preferences. So stir lightly!

Crab Cakes with Corn and Jalapeno
Okay, so I did have to doctor them a little... as it turns out, this "binder-less" crab cake really benefited from the addition of a cup or so of panko breadcrumbs! What resulted was a crispy, delicious, fishy crab cake, on that really made the grade when paired with the Remoulade sauce. Dad even did away with the ring mold entirely, and just ended up cooking a serving free-form in a small stove top pan!

the outcome

Last month, with Tosi and Milk Bar Life, I spent a lot of time emphasizing a cookbook's ability to translate a personality; this month, Commander's Kitchen, from Ti Adelaide Martin and Jamie Shannon, translated a place... and it's a place I really want to be! 

Between pouring Dark & Stormys for random Wednesday dinner, to spending hours braising down veggies and stock into deep and flavorful sauces, and even investing a later Monday night picking crab out of its shell for use the next evening, cooking from Commander's Kitchen made even the most sedate of weeknights feel like a special occasion. Due to its focus on local ingredients and fresh cooking, not much was all that expensive, and when it came down to it, even the pieces that cost the most were well worth the price... and still less costly than if we had gone out to eat!

Ti Adelaide Martin and Jamie Shannon brought not only the spirit of New Orleans into my kitchen, but they made it an easy and happy exploration, too. I'm so glad I took a chance on this cookbook.

What do you think of February's choice? What foods do you think of when you consider New Orleans' culinary legacy? Let me know, in the comments below!

What I Read for NaNo: Food Memoirs Galore!

As you might have seen in my recent blog post, I beat my NaNoWriMo 2019 challenge! Sure, it wasn't without a little heartache, a little struggle - or, you know, a lot of heartache and undue amounts of struggle - but I made it out on the other side, only a little worse for wear.

It's taken half a month to recover enough mental ground to talk about all of it, but there you go.

If you did, in fact, read that blog post, you'd also see that I kind of broke one of my typical NaNo rules this year, and decided to read books during the time I was writing. Instead of taking my standard sabbatical from non-NaNo material, I allowed myself to dive deep into the world of Food Memoirs, in the hopes that it might spur on my own creative process, too. 

So, in the full month of November, I not only ended up writing 50,000 words of my own food memories, but I sifted through four books worth of material on the same subject! Whether this made my writing better or worse, who's to say? Still, I had quite the enjoyable time doing it... and when I was struggling so hard with my own writing, it was nice to take a mental break by enjoying someone else's hard-won material.

Here's what I read: 


The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart, Emily Nunn

A woman who has undergone a marathon of personal loss - grappling with a sibling's suicide, her fiance's breakup, and her admittance into a psychiatric ward of a hospital for severe alcoholism - decides to embark on a journey to find true comfort in food, as well as come to grips with her difficult upbringing. 

The food Nunn describes did sound delicious, and definitely got me craving some Southern, especially country-style ham and biscuits. And what a variety: there are far over 50 recipes present in the book itself... a feat I find impressive, despite the fact that at least four of them were for various salad dressings (and that's not including the ones that were for actual salad).

I really liked the way the recipes were integrated into the body of the story line, occurring interspersed throughout the surrounding narrative, instead of being bunched up at the end of the chapters, or held separate in an appendixes at the back of the book. It was like the food described was telling a story of its own, and none of it was too overly complicated, or too heavy on ingredients or technique, to seem inaccessible or overly difficult.

However, the rest of the writing seemed to fit that bill.

The style of writing is juvenile, especially evident in how the writer is prone to long, meandering lists, whether describing food or scenery, even when inappropriate for the story. This syntactical choice, as well as the equally wandering and poorly defined timeline of her life, made it very difficult to get a read on what time period various events were taking place in. At first, just from the first few chapters or so, I assumed she was in her mid-30s, because she seemed flighty, prone to humble brags about her ex-fiance's wealth or her career success, and seemed vaguely nervous. When later chapters appeared describing friends with children who'd left for college, or how she hadn't spoken to others in over 20 years, I felt confused.

She also could have been more forthcoming with the unspooling of various family ties. Revelations on her relationships with her mother, father, sisters, and brothers, came spread out and in chunks, with little through-thread to keep them knotted together. Barely anything was outright stated. For instance, her mother - narcissistic and controlling - is off-handedly described as having regular meetings with a psychiatrist, possessing a voracious and destructive tendency to be too dramatic or take things too far, while also swinging into bouts of depression or anxiety that would leave her unable to get out of bed. It is emphatically clear that she suffered from some form of mental disorder, but that is never explicitly stated, nor is it named, but instead, briefly intimated in the vaguest of terms.

Final Verdict: All in all, it was a fairly middle-of-the-road Food Memoir, one whose personal narrative I found frustrating, but whose genuinely friendly culinary content made up for its faults.



Coming to My Senses: The Makings of a Counterculture Cook, Alice Waters

A memoir detailing not only Alice Waters' journey to founding influential California restaurant Chez Panisse, but specifically, of how her youth and adolescence in the '60s and '70s shaped many of her counterculture perspectives on cooking.

This book really was a tell-all, in the sense that Waters is able to traverse a wide swath of her life in candid and unapologetic terms. The stories range from details about her childhood, family, and move to California, to her time at UCSB and Berkeley, trips to Paris and across Europe, and her social sphere back home in California (including notable director Francis Ford Coppola and costume designer Jacqueline "Jacqui" West).

However, because of this wide-spanning subject matter, the memoir really served as more of a foundational perspective rather than a comprehensive or strictly culinary one. On the whole, it becomes a testament to the idea that greatness can come from anywhere and anyone, no formal training required, just a love for food and a willingness to try something a little different.

My favorite parts were hearing about her foundational culinary experiences in her youth and home life, as well as opening night of Chez Panisse. It felt like there was a lot of talk about politics and Waters' experience in alternative movements, but these deviations were hardly non-essential: they laid a distinctive and underlying framework for how her culinary ideas germinated, too.

Final Verdict: This memoir didn't contain recipes, but had plenty of pictures, of not only Waters in her youth, but of her many influences and friends. The true power of this memoir wasn't necessarily the story itself, but how candid and vocal she was about her past.



A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg

The author of popular early-adopter food blog The Orangette tells the story of her early life, growing up with foodie parents, falling in love with France and then her husband, and making a life for herself in Seattle, through mouthwatering terms.

You know how it's recently become a popular move to start dissing food blogs for writing long intros to their recipe posts? People claim its a sort of money-grubbing ploy - that it allows for the insert of more ads, that they make more for how far you have to scroll or something - but honestly, while it might be true for some, it is clearly not so for others. This book is a great justification for the practice, for why those intros exist: it allows the blogger to share more of who they are, and what this particular recipe means to them.

In a way, this book is kind of like a bundle of such posts, with a delicious recipe capping off every few pages or so of content. As a result, this book is also fairly easy to read through as the content is chunked into bite-sized pieces you can enjoy fairly quickly.

The only problem with knowing that a memoir has a blog, is that invariably, about halfway through, you decide to start doing some research. Finding out about Wizenberg's divorce from her husband, made reading about falling in love with him a little more difficult. Even though their relationship is still amiable, and they continue to own and operate the restaurant Delancey - in Seattle - together, it makes the words feel less full of meaning, even if it was truly meaningful at the time.

I'm genuinely excited to try some of these recipes, and almost all of them are things I'd be excited to eat. I do wish that this book contained some food pictures, because parts of it really just read like a regular cookbook.

However, I should mention a MAJOR pet peeve: I absolutely cannot stand the word "gulp" - I think it's gross, and somewhat unsettling - but only really got a handle on how much I hated it when Wizenberg used it in THREE CHAPTERS IN A ROW. Again, each of these chapters is only about five pages long. In total, I might have seen it in various places throughout the book about six more times. Pick a new word!

Final Verdict: Lovely stories - complete with engrossing settings and relatable characters - make up Wizenburg's relaxed and personable cookbook-slash-memoir, as a portrait of a particular period of her life. When considered as a framed example of her perspective, it is truly captivating.



Women Who Eat: A New Perspective on the Glory of Food, edited by Leslie Miller

A really fantastic collection of "up and coming" female writers (circa 2003), many focused in the Pacific Northwest, in a celebration of womanhood and food, be it prepared for them, by them, experienced, shared, bought, passed down, cooked themselves, or tasted countless times.

At times personable and impartial, emotionally-laden or distant, stories of attending cooking school, staffing a restaurant, tasting an old favorite again after a long absence, and more, many personalities are fitted neatly within its pages. Not only a reflection on a wide variety of food from a wide variety of perspectives, but shares a wealth of reasons how the food we eat affects our lives, from our friends, to habits and behaviors, to our identities themselves.

From the delicious (Carvel ice cream, in the face of a daunting doctor's visit to ascertain a cancer diagnosis), to the controversial (a woman who, in her post-pregnancy, cooks and craves the taste of her own placenta, as an act of recycling and reclamation), from the funny (a once-waitress tells the story of her favorite post-college restaurant job), to the familial (a California vegan reflects on the vegetables of her farm-raised, meaty Midwestern upbringing), the myriad of perspectives encountered within the pages of this collection truly run the gamut. The guarantee isn't even that you come away hungry, but that you reflect more on your own culinary connections to how your food shapes your life.

With the book being a decade-and-a-half old, naturally one of my first moves, was to scour the list of author names for any that I might still recognize. To my surprise, there she was: Cheryl Strayed, who, in the author's info section, is listed as living in Portland, Oregon, and "working on a book-length memoir." Wonder how that project panned out for her.

Did you take part in NaNo this year? Do you enjoy reading Food Memoirs? Let me know, in the comments below!

HELLO, NANO: NANOWRIMO 2019

To be perfectly, unerringly honest: I never even considered the idea that I wouldn't take part in NaNoWriMo this year... but as of midway through October, I had every intention of kind of phoning it in.

In the past, I've used NaNo as a means of entering into the realms of Thriller, Satire, Horror shorts, and a YA adaptation. I try to get into new genres every year, and use it as a means of not just forming good writing practices, but utilizing it as an opportunity to try out new voices and perspectives, working on unfamiliar formats and difficult subject matter.

However, this year, I was feeling fairly uninspired. I didn't have any kind of grand project idea, and was pretty much just ready to keep adding to my NaNo from last year, Fighting with the Wind. A  light and hopeful modern-day YA adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden wasn't exactly what I felt like focusing on right now - in the midst of life transitions, trying to find a job, and battling through some rough personal feelings - but it was all I had ready, so I felt prepared to buckle down and tackle the second half of that project, left unfinished.

Instead, I got a little help from my mom... not in any way that she intended, of course. 

We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner, when I brought up that NaNoWriMo was almost upon us. My mother openly scoffed. "You're not doing that this year," she said, somewhat brazenly. "You're too busy."

"Oh really?" I replied. "Because I'm pretty sure I am, in fact, doing it."

She rolled her eyes. "What would you write about right now? It's not like you can just write a cookbook." I'd been spending most of the last week's evenings cooking dinner from the family, including a quite large one for my own 26th birthday celebration.

A lightbulb. Actually, you can totally write a cookbook for NaNo, I thought. I told her as much, and the subject passed. Little did she know, that she had planted a seed... this was now what I fully intended to do.

Really, it's something they should all have seen coming. I take it upon myself to periodically warn my family members that I - a prolific journaler since a very tender age, someone who creates scrapbooks, has filled countless notebooks and planners, and is all around, an passionate documenter - will someday write my memoirs. Whatever is published, will be backed up by years of receipts. Tread softly, lest you get written about.

While I have done absolutely nothing notable or worthy in my life to justify the writing of memoirs just yet, I keep telling myself it's better to start now, rather than wait to do so later, when my inevitable fame and acclaim will no doubt hinder their production. My perspectives on what forms such a work would take have changed around a bit in the past year, thanks to Kathleen Flinn: her book Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good - following the culinary lineage of her grandparents and parents, and food-oriented upbringing - is honestly the genesis piece for my NaNoWriMo project this year.

I was an early adopter of M.F.K. Fisher as a kid, gaining a collection of her works in a large bound copy of The Art of Eating as a freshman in high school. Through high school and college, I would frequently pick up the books of Ruth Reichl, which my mother loved, once she had finished with them. I have collected my own set of cookbooks - especially those of Jamie Oliver - for years, and rarely went a week without flipping through one or another as a child. Food reading has always been a part of my life, for about as long as reading has as a whole, so it was honestly only a matter of time before I hit on the idea of writing a food memoir.

My Mother Hates My Soups: Bites from a Meal I'm Still Eating will follow the traditions, memories, and relationships forged in my childhood kitchen, and beyond. I'm a home chef, and not even a very good one at that - one that is still very much learning, something I'm reminded of every single time I add butter to a pan, or chop a head of broccoli - so this will probably be my most un-publish-able NaNoWriMo project ever. However, to be honest, it's one I've probably been thinking about for longer than any tackled in my past.

Food has actually managed to sneak into multiple other projects I've done for NaNo: one of the horror shorts I wrote, in a continuation of my NaNo project from 2017, was about a chef who endures a strange and unsettling trip to the grocery store, while in my 2018 project, the character of Martha was transformed from Mistlethwaite Manor's maid, into a young and ambitious local line cook. Her mother was old friends with Mrs. Medlock, giving her plenty of reasons to expose the petulant and uncertain Mary to new cuisine, frequently swinging by the brownstone "manor" with new recipes that I'd have found and pinned to my project Pinterest board.

Therefore, with all of this inspiration backing up my passion, I'm ready to get started. Granted, that start may be coming a little late in the game - so far, I've only written 5,504 words - but it's a start I'm proud of nonetheless.

Keep your eyes peeled for more future updates like this, filled with not only status reports from the blank pages of a Word document, but of all the food I've been cooking since then (which, spoiler alert, has kind of been a lot).

Are you tackling NaNoWriMo this year? What's your project about? 

Let me know, in the comments below!