A Celebration of Chefs and Others

When you enter the door at the Beverly Hills Cheese Store - the greatest cheese store in the U.S. of A. (419 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210), the first friendly face and voice you see and hear on your left will always be that of Cheese Wiz Sebastian Robin Craig working behind the counter like a whirling dervish -  unless he is jetting off to the cheese caves of Roquefort, France for a tasting; or Stockholm, Sweden to compose more jazz (go to iTunes for his latest CD “Volition”); or just kicking back and learning Russian.

A few years ago I became a head chef flunky at the Culinary Stage of the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. It was a way to keep up my prep cook skills, meet some heroes (Suzanne Goin, Lidia Bastianich, Martin Yan, Mary Sue Milliken & Susan Feniger, Govind Armstrong, Nancy Silverton) and TV star chefs (Giada DeLaurentiis, Tyler Florence, Dave Lieberman, Cat Cora). The stage’s consulting producer, Michael Weisberg, took a leap of faith and allowed me to bring along Patricia Zarate and a few of her girls from the Homegirl Cafe to assist the celebrity chefs. This will be their third year at the Culinary Stage.

Although my commute is a short one, traffic puts me in a bad mood. I’m impatient and irritated, not qualities that make for a tranquil drive.  My commuter’s grumpiness was recently soothed by none other than Jacques Pepin himself, master chef, teacher, and internet star along with the beloved Julia Child and others.  He didn’t actually sit next to me flipping crepes in the passenger seat, but he did write the wonderful book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and I borrowed the audio book from the equally wonderful public library. 

Pepin does not do the narrating on the audio book himself, and I suspect his accent may have been one of the reasons.  The lack of his own voice is perhaps the only issue I have with the audiobook.  The narrator speaks with just a smidge of a French accent, so he is easy to understand, but he is not a skilled reader and sometimes lets the natural drama in some of Jacques’s stories fall flat.  If you’ve ever seen Jacques Pepin on one of his television cooking shows, you know he has personality, and his energy and humor would have made the audio version of a wonderful read soar.  Stories of childhood summers spent on farms during World War II and then years in his mother’s restaurant followed by grueling apprenticeships in classical French restaurants often made me wish my drive home was longer.

Cooking and travel shows make me angry. That's right, I said angry. For a very irrational reason. They make me hungry, which leads me to snacking which is making me fat. I usually have pretty good self-control, mainly because I don't stock snacks in my home to begin with; however, after watching Anthony Bourdain traveling the globe eating across country after country, Mario Batali delivering another delicious Italian dish and the Top Chef contestants turning vending machine food into gourmet treats, I want to enjoy what they're eating/making right at that moment and I can't.

Thus I get angry and find myself rummaging through my kitchen looking for anything to ease my phantom hunger pains. I'm not really hungry, they've just made me think that I am and when all I can conjure up is stale nuts or microwave popcorn, I get miffed. Sure, I could have more selections on hand, but that would not be helpful to my waistline. Nor would they be as delicious as what I'm seeing on the screen. Getting enough exercise when you work in front of a computer all day is hard enough without these talented kitchen wizards making it worse.