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A review by moltourbach
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn
3.0
After the intro where Flinn describes herself stalking a mom and daughter in the grocery store after observing her processed-food laden cart I was pretty intent on disliking this book. I could sense impending condescension and unchecked privilege. While there was definitely some of that, truthfully, once I reconciled with the fact that this book was indeed published nine years ago and a lot has changed in that time I realized this would've been a total 5-star review for 2011-Molly.
2020 Molly is quite comfortable cooking, grocery shopping, and meal planning, nor does she feel the need to defend her use of processed convenience foods and thus 2020-Molly is not really this book's target reader. The target reader might be someone who aspires to up their cooking game but maybe feels intimidated. Intimidation and fatigue seemed to be two big themes amongst the participants in Flinn's project.
I thought that there were a few out-of-place memoir-style snippets that seemed a little shoe horned into what was otherwise a really compelling narrative about her experience teaching nine women how to be great home cooks.
Some aspects that maybe didn't age as well as revered Parmigiano-Reggiano:
-no men amongst her project participants
-utter vitriol for iodized salt and MSG
-the good food vs bad food concept
-a few pretty pointed health assumptions based on appearance
Overall though, I enjoyed this. I got to give myself a few self-congratulatory pats on the back, learned a few things here and there, and was inspired to dig back into my collection of vinegars.
2020 Molly is quite comfortable cooking, grocery shopping, and meal planning, nor does she feel the need to defend her use of processed convenience foods and thus 2020-Molly is not really this book's target reader. The target reader might be someone who aspires to up their cooking game but maybe feels intimidated. Intimidation and fatigue seemed to be two big themes amongst the participants in Flinn's project.
I thought that there were a few out-of-place memoir-style snippets that seemed a little shoe horned into what was otherwise a really compelling narrative about her experience teaching nine women how to be great home cooks.
Some aspects that maybe didn't age as well as revered Parmigiano-Reggiano:
-no men amongst her project participants
-utter vitriol for iodized salt and MSG
-the good food vs bad food concept
-a few pretty pointed health assumptions based on appearance
Overall though, I enjoyed this. I got to give myself a few self-congratulatory pats on the back, learned a few things here and there, and was inspired to dig back into my collection of vinegars.