Culinary Disaster Tour

I spent the last few days laughing, gasping, and saying, "oh no" aloud reading this book.  Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs is edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman and it is a hoot. 

It is a compilation of essays by famous chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, Sara Moulton, and Gabrielle Hamilton (whose restaurant "Prune" was a highlight of our recent trip to New York City!)

Don't worry if the names of the chefs included in this volume aren't familiar to you.  After reading about their disasters you will feel like you have swapped stories with them over coffee.  To make things even more exciting, I read this book with the Zagatsurvey Restaurant Guide to New York City in hand.  That way, after reading the brief bio of the chef at the beginning of each essay, I could look up his or her restaurant and read about it before diving into the disaster.  That's geeky, I know, but it added even more to this hilarious book to get a quick impression of the restaurants being discussed.

One word of warning: after reading this, you may look at your own kitchen in a whole new light.  There are potential catastrophes lurking around every corner.  While I might not ever be in a position to drop a foie gras terrine into a vat of warm chocolate sauce or for buckets of live eels to topple over, casting the slithering things onto the floor, the potential for something spilling, burning, or going "off" is always there in any home kitchen.

The lesson of this book is, when that happens, laugh about it and move on!  A good lesson, indeed.