Removes much of the guesswork and stress—and the possibility of unpleasant surprises—from cooking.
A detailed guide to sourcing recipes, shopping for ingredients, and preparing to cook for novice home chefs.
The experience of growing up with a mother who relied upon what LeJeune calls the “B-A-R-F” method—boil, assemble, reheat, fry—made the author determined to make delicious, well-crafted meals for her own kids. But, as a working mom, she totally understands why people feel like they don’t have time to cook. As an IT professional, she excels at turning complex projects into simple systems, and with this book, she describes how she does just that in the kitchen. The process begins with a color-coded key for marking up recipes. For example, she uses a black pen to draw a circle or a box around all the ingredients and a yellow highlighter to mark these ingredients as they appear in the recipe instructions. After introducing the first step in her system, LeJeune launches into cranky commentary about kids who won’t learn to cook and the young adults who rely on Instant Pots. This feels unnecessary; she does have a point, though, when she suggests that no beginner is going to learn how to cook a meal from a three-minute video. Her list of favorite sources for great recipes is useful, and her suggestions of sources to avoid is interesting (she is no fan of The Joy of Cooking). When she circles back to the system that is the basic premise of this book, she describes her approach to shopping for food and preparing to cook. The annotated recipes she’s collected streamline the weekly trip to the grocery store; they help ensure she knows how much she needs of every ingredient and the precise nature of each ingredient—for example, if she simply adds “spinach” to her list, it could be fresh or frozen. The mise in the title refers to mise en place, the French technique of having all ingredients prepped and portioned before cooking begins. Anyone who has ever watched a cooking demo has an idea of what this looks like, but LeJeune ends her book by providing extremely detailed, step-by-step examples of how she “mises it” as she prepares several dishes, including Butter Chicken and Apple Pie.
Removes much of the guesswork and stress—and the possibility of unpleasant surprises—from cooking.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-914152-0
Page Count: 140
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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