DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I often intend to assemble a summer reading list, for any of you who have travels planned and appreciate recommendations for worthy books. But then I spend my summer reading, and I never get around to writing up my reviews until too late in the year.

This is happening again. Watch for a whole mess of reviews in about six weeks’ time, just after you return from boring airplane rides and lonely ocean crossings. But don’t blame me if you end up reading some schlock grabbed in haste from the bestseller rack at the airport news concession — I have more than a year’s worth of older reviews archived on this site. (See the “Media Reviews” section of the navigation area.)

Also, I have managed to write up some recent thoughts on two excellent works of non-fiction. The stories are entertaining enough to be untrue, so don’t let the genre bother you; both these books are a lot of fun:

• In Search of Captain Zero (Allan C. Weisbecker)
• Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

I’m a sucker for high-tech thrillers. This is a solid example of the genre. I recommend it.

The reviews at Amazon (links below) contain plot summaries, so rather than recap the story here, I’ll just mention two aspects of this book that make it memorable.

One, the characters are great: they’re believable, complex, and quirky.

Two, Deaver executes a couple of 180-degree plot twists that would have been inconceivable a few pages earlier. I won’t spoil any details… but if you like this sort of writing, Deaver delivers.

If you are technically literate, you may be bothered by some of the skills attributed to the two hacker characters, and by some of the technical explanations. I’m probably the worst sort of audience for these writers. Suspension of disbelief is a typical requirement for escapist fiction, though. The less believable moments did not hinder my enjoyment of the story; in fact, I found that Deaver’s work is among the more plausible I’ve read.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

Billed as an exposé of the restaurant business, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential indeed lifts the skirt to reveal the disturbing support hose of the food-service industry: the cast of unsavory line cooks preparing the food, the self-deluded owners, the chefs with ninja fantasies.

But it’s as much an autobiography as well, as Bourdain recalls a lifetime spent on the other side of the saute pan. It’s tough to say how many of the frightening things he describes really apply to your neighborhood bistro, and how many are only true in New York’s hypercompetitive restaurant scene, but it’s a heck of a read anyway.

In one entertaining and enlightening chapter, Bourdain dissects the various delusions suffered by would-be restauranteurs, handily explaining why 80% of new such enterprises fail. This is required reading for anyone who has ever heard, and begun to believe the exclamation, “You’re a great cook! You should open a restaurant.” Bourdain’s implicit advice: no, you shouldn’t.

He explains why he never orders steak well-done or “discount sushi.” Some of his anecdotes on the horrors of commercial food prep are repulsive, among them this visual gem: “Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified and strained to get out all the bread crumbs and cigarette butts.”

The lifestyle of an executive chef requires an inhuman dedication — or, perhaps, it seems this way to me because I’d be poorly suited to the task. Bourdain recounts a representative “day in the life,” which seems fueled by stress, aspirin, cigarettes, caffeine, and threats. It is fascinating to learn how the chef juggles suppliers, personnel, reputation, and diners’ expectations to come up with a nightly menu of specials that not only meet all these disparate and contradictory needs, but also accomodate the limitations of the kitchen: who on the line will have enough hands and burners free to prepare these dishes?

I enjoyed this book so much that after I read it I kept it handy for another week, rereading favorite passages. A copy of this book belongs on every foodie’s bookshelf.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)
• Amazon (hardback)

I have to confess to an occasional weakness for convenience foods. Sometimes I feel like if I eat one more leaf, I’m going to sprout three more stomachs and a real long neck. You know how it goes.

So I picked up a pallet of BocaBurgers at Costco. A BocaBurger is a vegan faux meat patty. Writing that here, it just does not sound appetizing, I admit. But when served on a fresh homemade bagel with about 6 oz of ketchup (hey, it’s an antioxidant!), it makes a passable meal substitute, injecting variety and healthy soy protein into my diet. The soy really helps with my menstrual cramping too.

But I have to wonder, what the heck are those grill marks from?! Best guess: they’re using a faux grill on their faux meat. I bet they’re painting the stripes with miniature roller brushes.

My other problem with BocaBurgers is that they look and taste an awful lot like meat. You might think these are entirely right and good things for a fake burger to do, but for anyone familiar with GardenBurgers, expecting a variation on the wholegrain-food-disk theme, it’s an unpleasant surprise.

So, anyway, if you want to buy most of a pallet of BocaBurgers, let me know. Maybe they’ll see you through the latest tainted-beef recall.

Well, at least I know who I’m not selling my house to.

It was Saturday, prime-time for showing properties. We’d endured so many showings during the week that we figured we’d just leave for the afternoon, and let the realtors fight amongst themselves for the lockbox hanging at the front door. Between 10am and 5pm, they’d be crawling about the place like maggots on a porkchop.

So we drove to the beach, visited a few bookstores, wandered around, killed time, and by 5pm, we were ready to be done. We came home, tossed the fresh business cards into the stack, and then discovered an unwanted message on the answering machine: “Hi, I was in earlier to preview your house. I’ll be back just after 5:00 with my clients. I hope that’s OK.” The realtor left a number, which I’d have called to cancel his visit if it wasn’t already so late that they’d be pulling into the driveway any second.

So we sucked it up. Never mind that we’d abandoned the place for hours specifically to not have to deal with all these people… never mind that 5:00 PM is the magic “come again tomorrow” hour… Maybe the client had a lot of money, after all. I’d heard Martha Stewart was buying a house in Marin — maybe after the recent insider-trading scandal she’s decided to look for something a bit more modest.

I regretted my decision as soon as the people arrived. The realtor would have been a plantation owner, had be been born 150 years ago: unpleasant, swaggering, and oily. The first words out of his mouth, spoken with a good-old-boy drawl, were “Have you ever looked into putting a stove and toilet into that studio building?” He didn’t ask about installing a shower. Presumably this is not a fixture he attributed much value to.

I smiled tightly. “No, never thought about it,” I said, “so please shoehorn your greasy bad intentions back into your Lincoln Town Car and drive the hell off my property,” I should have added, along with “Better never than late!” and a cheerful if sarcastic wave. But I let them wander around anyway, even though I could guarantee that they ultimately would not be buying my house.