Heat

I recently finished Bill Buford's book, Heat. He talks about his unpaid internship at Babbo, food network superstar Mario Batali's restaurant in NYC. Later he goes to Italy and learns to make pasta in a restaurant that Mario interned at, and meat under an eccentric butcher. Very entertaining read.

I stopped watching food network a while ago because of a nagging feeling that I am contributing to some sort of fetishization of food. When I started this book, I got that same feeling. Is this food porn? I was happy to find out it isn't. The book is all about a man's tantric journey into an obsession and the self-understanding he arrives at. The reader also becomes familiar with cuts of meat and pasta-making techniques and huge egos and revolting excess and the weirdly stressful world of a restaurant kitchen. Read the book. You can thank me later.

Went to see "Ratatouille" on Friday. Amazing animation and well-developed characters. A rat is a master chef at a French restaurant. Good bookend to 'heat'. Buford indicated towards the end that his next foray would be into French cooking.