A gem of a cookbook packed with fantastic recipes and tips from a master—the closest most readers will come to eating with...
A deliciously dynamic yet approachable cookbook from arguably the world’s greatest chef.
Adrià (A Day at elBulli, 2010, etc.), head chef and owner of Spain's world-renowned elBulli restaurant (which closed in July 2011 but will reopen as a creativity center in 2014), is well known as a mad gastronomical scientist. However, his new cookbook does not require special gelatin processes or any of the laboratory techniques with which he is associated. Instead, this cookbook focuses on the simple but delicious meals Adrià shared with his restaurant staff before any guests arrived each evening. Examples of the three-course menus include: a potato chip omelet, pork loin with peppers and coconut macaroons; grilled lettuce hearts, veal with red wine and mustard and chocolate mousse. The most extravagant tool is a kitchen blowtorch, which is not actually required. Adrià does recommend a soda siphon to make his caramel foam, but ice cream will do. The majority of the ingredients can be found at the local market, with the exception of a few spices, and the author’s easy-to-follow directions will help any home cook prepare base sauces and stocks. Each recipe includes photos of each step, a photograph of what the countertop should look like with all of the ingredients for that day's menu, a helpful organizing timeline to correctly time the preparations, measurements for two, six, 20 or 75 servings, possible substitute ingredients and a guide to how long sauces and stocks can keep in your refrigerator.
A gem of a cookbook packed with fantastic recipes and tips from a master—the closest most readers will come to eating with him.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7148-6253-8
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Phaidon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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