Culinary Mentors

This week on the show, we put that question to Elissa Altman, author of the beautiful new memoir Poor Man’s Feast and a James Beard Award-winning blog by the same name. Elissa grew up in a New York suburb where the hair was big, the housewives were busy, and the lamb chops were often ablaze.

Teach a kid to cook a pork chop and you feed him for a lifetime. That’s the thinking behind a pretty innovative mentoring program run by the restaurant chain Tender Greens. It’s a hand up — getting a food industry job — rather than a hand-out.

KCRW Producer Evan George has this report.

Like many of us, I’m a champ in the kitchen as long as I stay in my preferred wheelhouse of Italian + other Mediterranean cuisines. OK, maybe I can dabble in Indian food, but take me to Asia and I feel all wrong handed and left footed.  I end up reading simple instructions over and over, thinking the whole time “this just feels so …

We are losing our living touchstones to a post-war pre-industrial food past.  That’s the first thought that came to mind when I heard of Marion Cunningham’s passing.  Journalist Kim Severson has written a lovely obit about Mrs. Cunningham for the New York Times.
She was a cookbook author, teacher, mother hen to a generation of fighters for real food that’s cooked at home.  I wasn’t …