Weekend Cooking is a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Click here to check out Weekend Cooking posts from other bloggers.
Kitchen Round Table is an excellent example of the audio gems that AudioGO comes out with – small, sparkling, and a little out of the ordinary. (I love AudioGO! It’s a local, New England audiobook publisher.)
Last weekend, on a bus ride to New York, I spent an enjoyable hour listening to Kitchen Round Table, a delightful audio program that has Marja Samsom, owner of the iconic Kitchen Club restaurant, talking with five popular home cooks about food memories, frugal cooking , cooking habits, family meals, and the personal stories behind the way each one cooks.
All women, Marja Samsom’s guests are “tastemakers at work in the food world today”: Lidia Bastianich, Betty Fussell, Madhur Jaffrey, Judith Jones, and Deb Perelman, blogger and author of the bestselling cookbook, The Smitten Kitchen.
Recorded live in various locations around New York City, the chats are brief but revealing. They are organized into themes, tied together by Marja Samsom (who has a pleasant Dutch-inflected voice) describing her mother’s recipe for linzertorte. Each part of the recipe introduces the theme for the next section of conversations.
Here’s an excerpt from the audio program’s introduction by Marja Samsom, who, as it turns out, posts beautiful photos of her own cooking on her blog, The Dumpling Diva:
We are a nation of curious consumers. We want the latest gadgets, sub-zero refrigerators, even blowtorches for the perfect carmelized crust, but in the rush to serve the perfect meal, have we lost sight of the forces that bind us together? A quote I once heard comes to mind, “It’s not just the food, it’s the bringing of the food.”
Also from the introduction:
It might surprise you that none of the people we spoke to were formally trained as chefs, but all are known for their culinary wisdom. Might that be because some of the best meals we have are prepared at home?
I wish Kitchen Round Table had been longer because I would have especially liked to hear more from Deb Perelman, whose Smitten Kitchen blog is so good, but maybe other Kitchen Round Table programs are planned. I hope so!
The Kitchen Round Table download is a bargain from AudioGO at $2.99, or on CD at $4.95.
Disclosure: I received a free download of Kitchen Round Table for review from the publisher through Audiobook Jukebox, a great source for reviews from AudioGO and other audiobook publishers.