Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

A prissy reader might be tempted to rename this memoir within the first 50 pages. Something like Food, Drugs and Cusswords would do. Or, buoyed by a highly-developed moral code, one might set it aside in favor of something sweeter on the palette. But that would be like foregoing a spectacular feast of honest food prepared by a famous chef like…well, like Gabrielle Hamilton herself.

Hamilton’s memoir is a delicious account of her arduous journey from adolescence to adulthood, hurdling obstacles and carrying baggage that might have put a lot of us on the sidelines of life. Instead, the author matures into talented writer and chef/restaurant owner, who starts her own unconventional family and begins the balancing act known to legions of hard-working women.

Thinking of glamour? Well, forget that.  Her journey to chefdom didn’t include a lofty chef’s school. It was made on an itinerant apprenticeship of inauspicious greasy spoons, summer camps, catering gigs, and a hungry, sometimes harrowing traipse through Europe as a young adult. None of it paid well, but it did form an unpretentious chef who can simultaneously write and cook the glory and complexity of unfussy, unadulterated food and of life itself.

Keep your dictionary handy. All but the very most sophisticated of foodies will need it to figure out what’s in the oven or on the stovetop and table. Read to the end and take turns shuddering, gasping, salivating and aching your way through a gritty memoir filled with tenderness, honesty, self-reliance and hope.



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A Must Read for Readers

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If, as Mark Twain once said, a person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t, then surely a person who remains unchanged by what they read is just as disadvantaged. In her memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, author Nina Sankovitch proves how much a thoughtful reader can milk out of a good book, sharing her experience of reading one book a day for a whole year.

After the devastating loss of her oldest sister, Sankovitch reads her way out of grief, fear and depression back to hope and promise. I know it sounds like a heavy theme, but her shared experience is must reading that will delight all bibliophiles. For reluctant readers who say they don’t have time to read, Sankovitch’s memoir is like a well-baited hook, demonstrating that a well-read life is a well-lived life, especially when we think about what we read.

This isn’t a work of literary snobbery; Sankovitch finds wisdom in popular mysteries and contemporary authors as well as classics. As you follow her year of reading, you’ll experience her steady recovery, not in psychobabble, but in earnest and profound descriptions of how stories and characters connect with real life.

If you’ve ever felt the loss of a loved one, don’t be surprised to find the pangs of your own heartbreak mingled with the author’s as you read. Her words are a sweet balm for one of life’s most universal experiences. By the end of the book, Sankovitch feels like an intimate friend, having shared in glittering detail what all readers love about books—their ability to transport, comfort, elevate, encourage, befriend, and finally, to chasten us into better people who can deal with all that life has to throw at us.

This one is worth reading again and again, especially as a motivating kick-start for anyone who isn’t setting aside enough time to read. In our achievement-driven world, no one is going to reward us for making time to read and think. But we’ll pay a price for not having done so.


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Finding your way to your next great career

Several weeks ago I listened to a radio segment about a guy fresh out of college, but without a lot of direction for his life. His solution to that problem was to try a lot of different jobs for a short while--a week or a month. After a year of working this way, he wrote a book about his experiences. My first thought was, “Ah, you stole my dream.”

I’ll just go out on a limb and admit it. No matter what I have done for a living, I’ve always had a wandering eye. With the exception of a two exceptionally deep love affairs with work, no job (or career) has ever been enough to hold me. My longest run was 12 years in a single profession, divvied up between two employers and a self-employment stint. I fought hard to get into that profession. After working my way in, I achieved a degree of mastery that was enough to merit interesting assignments, professional credentials, and awards from my peers. But I couldn’t imagine an entire lifetime of the same work. I wanted to know more about what was out there. Was there something else I was really intended to do? Was there someone else I had the potential to become? Doesn’t everyone wonder that?

Whether you share my wanderlust or life has dealt you some cards that force you to think about what‘s next, you may be interested in a new book designed to help you figure stuff out. The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great includes access to an electronic assessment tool that allows you to evaluate how close you are to your sweet spot--the overlap between your passions AND your strengths. According to author Rick Smith, most people won’t be truly satisfied until they fine a career that combines both elements.

If you view your prospective career change as a slam-dunk effort where you figure everything out quickly and march through a series of chronological steps, you may be disappointed by Smith’s encouragement to experiment and iterate. Nevertheless, I have to say that this approach worked well for me. I volunteered and part-timed my way into both new careers. That gave me a chance to try before buying and allowed me to get experience in a low-risk way.

Evidently, I share a common denominator with other career changers: we don’t think of our changes as reinventions. With each change, I found I became a little more like myself. After I announced my most recent career change, my husband tried to make me promise that this would be the last one. I wouldn’t do it because I knew part of my life’s work would be allowing things to unfold, discovering how past experiences might fit together in ways I just couldn’t anticipate. For some of us, it’s the journey and not the outcomes that are going to matter most when we are laying on our deathbed. There are tradeoffs and compromises, especially if you choose something more than just what you are good at.

Perhaps the most important tip The Leap offers for fulfillment in work is to set your own standard for success--don’t just follow along. Without that standard, you may wake up one day with a life that someone else wanted--not yours.

Learning to be still

Is there anything like sitting down with someone, expecting to receive the death sentence for something you’ve done wrong and having them bless you instead? When you get a blessing like that, you want to understand the anatomy of it. What special trait allows people to offer this kind of heaven-on-earth? I can’t help but believe that such gifts are really suffering transformed into something beautiful. It doesn’t matter who we are or how fortunate we are in life, we’re all bound to suffer from our cravings, our aversions or things we just can’t seem to accept or forgive in ourselves or others. One of the best known but least understood ways of coping is prayer and meditation.

If you, like me, look to books to improve your life, read Be the Change: How Meditation Can Transform You and the World. Although it is filled with a lot of eastern thought that won’t jibe with a Christian’s perspective on the world, it elaborates on a process that’s biblical in its origin: transformation of the mind through meditation.

You can read this book in stages, a few pages a night. What you’ll get is a careful dissection of meditation from a wide variety of people, from the famous to the ordinary. It is loaded with short descriptions of how people view meditation and practical advice for making it part of your life. This book is an in-depth study of how inward changes really do change the world around us. If you’re a practicing Christian and you often find yourself rushing through your prayers, you’ll find it a useful tool for learning to be still, which is really the beginning of transforming your suffering into something beautiful.

Bonus Book for Kids: Don't miss this adorable picture book to share with kids on the joys of practicing yoga, Stretch, by Doreen Cronin and Scott Menchin.

Yoga Medicine for Your New Year’s Resolution Hangover

Are you suffering from a New Year’s resolution hangover? After binge-writing a list of the many and assorted improvements and experiences I want in 2010, I do feel your pain. For self-improvement junkies like me, the prospect of mapping out a life that will be perfect at some future point in time is like cocaine to a crack-head. I realize this, yet I still engage in the insanity.

Here’s how we think: After I give up sugar, grow my own vegetables, purge and organize every closet in my house, make slipcovers for my office furniture, limit the amount of time I spend online, quit judging other people, make cases for my yoga mats, make eye pillows for my students and classmates, read several books each week, play golf this summer, commit 30 minutes a day to prayer and meditation, make a purse out of some old neckties, clean the laundry room and garage, make roman shades for my patio doors, e-mail at least one friend a day and see at least two lifeline friends each month, make 15 minutes a day to pick up the house, make 10 minutes a day to file incoming paperwork, do at least one thing each day in service to others, deepen my knowledge of online marketing, take a class on teaching yoga for kids, finish the taxes by February 15, organize all my loose recipes into notebooks, purge and label all the files in our file cabinets, do a little housework at least two evening a week, continue my fitness schedule of four workouts each week—AFTER I do all this (while holding down two—no wait a minute—three part-time jobs) my life will, of course be perfect, worthwhile, satisfying. I’ll be 95-years-old. But I’ll be—well—satisfied. You get the drift.

Stephen Cope’s book, The Wisdom of Yoga, sheds yogic light on this crazy cycle. It involves three afflictions of the human mind that are the source of nearly all suffering.

1. Cravings. Our tendency to lean forward into the next fantasized moment in the future is called rãga (clinging, attachment, attraction, hunger, ambition).
2. Aversions. Some resolutions are about stopping things we know are bad for us. Yoga masters might have classified this as dvesha —aversion to the experience. This is what tells us to stop, leave, or look backward to a previous state of comfort.
3. Delusions. Finally, we may completely disappear from the moment by creating a delusion, a mind state known as moha. We do this by creating a false picture of reality based on how life should be (which is always different than the way it actually is) or through complete avoidance. (e.g. Don’t make me look!)

Cope’s book is drawn from the Yoga Sutras, a brilliant piece of writing that explores man’s spiritual and psychological nature. He says we crave accomplishments and experiences (rãga), run away from things (dvesha), or create delusions for ourselves (moha) because we don’t fully experience our lives as they already are (avidyã).

Is all longing afflicted? All aversion afflicted? All delusion afflicted? Of course not! There are times that these things serve us well. Cope’s book maps the territory between the healthy and the afflicted state of mind. What makes a mindset afflictive?

1. Afflicted mindsets are disturbing. We feel uncomfortable and unbalanced in our very being.
2. Afflicted mindsets are obscuring.  This state makes things worse or better than they really are. Either way, our perceptions aren’t true or accurate. We overrate some things. Or we fail to notice the bad effects of others.
3. Afflicted mindsets are separative. Something is separating us from our happiness—love, material things, success, achievements. Once we have those things, we’ll feel complete. This is reflected in the life of King Solomon who pursued pleasure, success, love, purity, peace, wisdom--everything known to man. In the end, he said the whole purpose of man was to keep God’s commandments—to commune with God.

Yogis believe that we penetrate these layers of afflicted mindsets through meditation. In meditation, we access a more luminous part of our mind that is already acquainted with happiness as a natural state. Having freed ourselves from these afflictions, we make truly conscious choices—not patterned ones that are made less out of choice than conditioning.


Although this blog does not usually cover matters of religion, as a practicing Christian, I feel duty bound to say this much: If you want a book that teaches you how to live a more peaceful life on earth, study the Yoga Sutras. If you want a book that teaches you how to live a more peaceful life on earth and for all eternity, study the Bible.

In my opinion, the Yoga Sutras echo God’s wisdom in many ways, but you might find a few errors and omissions when it comes to peace that leads to heaven. To the Christian, happiness on earth is far less important than eternal peace with God. Christians believe that meditation, prayer, and godly actions give everyone a shot at the real prize--eternal peace.

If there’s a comparison to be made between the two books, here’s my best (but oversimplified) shot at it: the Bible tells us exactly what God wants us to do to be truly at peace with Him—not just at peace with ourselves. (We’ve already acknowledged that the latter isn’t quite enough because we sometimes lie to ourselves.) The Yoga Sutras reveal some manmade techniques we can use to work our way through some of the more difficult aspects of living to that standard.

If you binged on making resolutions for 2010, Cope’s book might encourage you to look more realistically at your aspirations as insight about yourself. The real value of New Year’s resolutions may be what they reveal about our motivations and our state of mind. The Wisdom of Yoga provides an accessible way to see the Sutras applied in everyday life.

A sizzling book of inspiration for anyone who cares about kids

During my sophomore year of college I had a professor who shared this mantra with his students: be one on whom nothing is lost or wasted.  Use every experience to learn, grow, and become the best that you can. Although its meaning was somewhat lost on me at the time, I understand it completely now. I was reminded of Dr. Backes’ passion for teaching and learning as I read Rafe Esquith’s book, Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World.

This book is a thoughtful discourse on how we can and must do a better job of raising and educating kids today. It’s a must read for any educator, parent, or youth-centered professional, especially if your enthusiasm has waned or you’re beginning to believe that your effort is similar to rowing a boat upstream. The author has been there himself and acknowledges the cultural inertia that leads to this sort of discouragement.

America’s education problem, Esquith says, stems from being overly concerned with giving kids the material things they need to be educated (e.g. laptops and textbooks) and insufficiently concerned with providing tools and processes that will make a substantive, lasting difference in their lives, giving them the ability to think. He enumerates the ways in which we betray kids, sometimes with the best of intentions and sadly, sometimes with no intention at all.

Although he writes passionately about the changes we need to make at home and in the classroom, the book is salted with humility. That helps the whole thing go down a little easier. Especially when you realize that the bedrock values he believe kids need to reach their full potential are probably antidotes for what ails many of us grownups today—arrogance, selfishness and a host of other character defects. For how can we equip kids with these skills and traits when we lack them ourselves?

Throughout the book, Esquith cites literature and films that reinforce lessons extraordinary kids must learn. As a practicing children’s librarian, I just love that. There is nothing quick, formulaic or simple about his approach to raising kids who succeed in life. Esquith admits it takes a complex mix of prolonged and seemingly small acts among the adults who steer them through childhood and adolescence. Even when kids learn discipline, perseverance, humility, discernment, time management, generosity, delayed gratification, gratitude, personal responsibility and courage, they can still slip up and make poor choices.  Toward the end of the book, there is a wonderful section to help parents and kids evaluate colleges and universities.

Although the author isn’t a parent, he is an award-winning teacher who knows whereof he speaks. His former students, many from underprivileged families in Los Angeles, have graduated from some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He has received numerous awards including the president’s National Medal of the Arts, the American Teacher Award, Parent magazine’s As You Grow Award, People magazine’s Heroes Among Us Award, and Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life Award—not that the outward trappings of success mean anything to him. A thing worth doing should be done for its own sake—not to impress others. Getting that wrong is just one of the many ways Esquith says we can warp kids into doing the right things for all the wrong reasons. Esquith’s wisdom can do more than help kids be successful. It can help develop the habits and character that make for a happy and fulfilled life. Read it and you’ll vow to do better by the kids you’re responsible for teaching or raising.

Yesterday the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” as the top new word of 2009. Unfriend: to boot someone out of your life, either virtually, in real life, or both. The fact that we need a common word for this act may underscore a growing problem we’re having with loyalty these days.

How loyal are you? To your friends, family, employer, customers, colleagues? If you’re like most people who answer that question, you believe that you’re giving way more loyalty than you get. That’s just one of the surprising conclusions of a study done by two experts on the subject of loyalty. In their book Why Loyalty Matters, Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy explore every dimension of loyalty and how basic it is to lasting happiness and success in our life and work. The book is an exhaustive study of loyalty that begins with the authors’ research in business marketing and extends to just about every kind of relationship you can imagine.

While most of us are keen to notice when loyalty isn’t flowing our way, the authors say we tend to miss our own role in building loyal relationships. We’ve trained ourselves to shop for the best possible deal. So we scour the earth for the lowest price, but mourn the demise of a business we loved, yet didn’t patronize, never realizing that our behavior was part of its death. It’s this sort of disconnect that has the potential to undermine a virtue that’s the bedrock of humanity and personal character. Without loyalty, all bonds fall apart because we have no reason to hang together.

A certain amount of self-sacrifice and self-examination is a key part of building lasting relationships. “If we always see ourselves as more loyal than everyone around us, the problem will continue,” Aksoy says. “To improve we have to examine what we’re focusing on and recognize how we connect with others.”

Why should I be loyal when others haven’t reciprocated? Aksoy answers the question by comparing loyalty to love. “You don’t give up on love when your heart is broken,” she said. “To get more, you have to give more.”

Sooner or later everyone we know will disappoint us in some way. How we handle those disappointments is a predictor of our satisfaction and fulfillment in relationships at work and in our personal lives.

The authors acknowledge the fact that all loyalty isn’t good. In situations that are toxic or destructive, for example, sometimes the most loyal thing you can do is disconnect. In any context, we have to know where our loyalties are and whether our patterns are constructive. To help readers to appraise their own loyalty behaviors and satisfaction, Why Loyalty Matters includes access to a very useful online tool called the Loyalty Advisor. Using a password that’s published in the back of the book, you can seek 360 degree feedback by inviting up to 10 colleagues and friends to anonymously assess how you present yourself. One week after completing the assessment and submitting the e-mail addresses of your friends, family, or colleagues, you’ll receive a copy of your assessment report.

If you don’t buy the book and take the assessment, here’s a simple, but profound exercise the authors suggest to assess whether your actions are building loyalty where it matters most: 

• Ask yourself how much time you spend at work, with family, with friends, for causes you believe in, or doing nothing. 
• How much time goes to things that inevitably hurt you, worsen your perspective, or ruin your day? 
• How much of what you do with your time actually leaves you feeling uplifted and strong? 
• When it comes to your important loyalties, are you allocating time for them?

Living a greener lifestyle

People who cook outside and go to the bathroom inside baffled my grandfather. He had a contrarian’s view on many things, including progress: when you’ve come so far that you have to go out of the way to seem natural, something’s wrong, he figured.

I can’t think about the green movement without wondering where he’d stand if he were alive today. As a lifelong farmer and outdoorsman who grew his own food and, yes, killed his own meat, would he be glad to see people interested in protecting the earth? Or would he be among the chorus of conservative contrarians who deny the environmental impact of the past four generations?

At every turn, I find myself surrounded by global warming mockers. They catch a whiff of environmental hypocrisy in people like me: we cling to destructive consumer habits and justify creature comforts, sucking up resources unconsciously for most of our lives. When we realize our yoga mats are decidedly unfriendly to the environment, we suddenly become evangelists for the green movement. Some are truly committed. Others are still so clueless that we’d probably trash our old mats and buy a new “eco-friendly” mat upon learning the bad news. We deserve to be embarrassed.

If you’re among the recent converts who are sincere about reducing your own environmental hypocrisy, read Ecoholic (when you’re addicted to the planet): Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services. This book is loaded with realistic, eco-friendly tips on clothing, food, cosmetics, transportation, and money. Written by Adria Vasil, a Canadian author and journalist who writes a regular Ecoholic column for NOW magazine, this tomb suggests hundreds of micro-decisions you can make to live a greener lifestyle. You can check it out at your local library, but it’s an exhaustive reference book, so you’ll eventually want to buy a copy for your bookshelf. It’s organized in an approachable way with informative sidebars and suggested electronic resources to check products you use.

Two detractions:
1) There’s no bibliography to support the science that’s cited within. That’s unfortunate because it probably weakens the book’s validity, especially with our global-warming-mocker friends.
2) The designers of the book have done a wonderful job of making the book accessible—except for the solid green sidebars, underscoring the book’s green theme in a literal way. Anyone who is familiar with printing processes knows that black type on a solid background decreases readability—a lot.

Those factors aside, I’d still recommend the book as a first step for people who aspire to be an ecoholic. If you’re not already there, this book may be your guide. Beware: you might need to join Ecoholics Anonymous after reading the book!

Know more about your food

The way Americans eat is killing us. It’s cheaper and easier by far to eat junk than it is to choose a healthy diet. We gotta change that, according to Michael Pollan, author of three important works about food:

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer, And What You Can Do About It

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

If you want a real education on our food chain and how your diet choices impact the world, start reading! Pollan makes a strong argument for how better diet choices could make a serious dent in other problems like energy consumption and pollution.

Why would a blog that’s all about personal development would take on this subject? Two reasons: 1) Food is a powerful representation of how we view ourselves in relationship to the world. 2) It’s tough to be effective when you aren’t healthy.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how to make a serious change in the way you eat, here are two resources:
SlowFoodIndy.com is an Indianapolis organization with all kinds of resources and events designed to support a healthier take on food. New chapters of this international organization are popping up in cities all over the world as people become aware of how they can contribute to more sustainable lifestyles. If you aren’t in Indianapolis or Cincinnati, you can search for one in your area at SlowFoodUSA.org.

If time is your obstacle to buying and preparing local foods, check out Farm Fresh Delivery, a local service that delivers organic and locally grown foods right to your door. They operate in Indianapolis and Cincinnati. This has been a lifesaver in our busy household. For a minimum $35 delivery, we get a crate loaded with fresh vegetables and fruits every other week. You can set up more frequent delivery and add on a wide variety of products, from meats to dairy and spices. They also allow for substitutions within each standard crate if you have picky eaters in your family. If you live in a major metropolitan area outside Indy or Cincinnati, search for a comparable service in your area.

We love the surprise of opening each crate and seeing what’s for dinner. It forces us to cook new things we might not otherwise try. Rather than wandering the store wondering what to buy, you build meals around each delivery. This expands the variety of foods you consume and reduces the monotony of deciding what’s for dinner. What’s more, you’ll find yourself spending less time at the grocery and taking lunches to work/school more often to make sure what you buy isn’t wasted.

You might think this service would be expensive, but I find it’s no more expensive than shopping the grocery, plus I save time shopping and eat fewer lunches out when I always have fresh produce on hand. Give these things a try and see how they work for you!

Big Bold Moves

During Indianapolis rush hour traffic one night last week, I saw a guy jump out of his truck in the middle of a torrential storm. He parked hastily on the side of an exit ramp in a major road construction project on Indianapolis’ west side. From my rear view mirror, I saw him run across the ramp toward a set of concrete barriers, preparing to hurl himself over the barricades and into a lane of oncoming traffic that had come to a standstill after a construction sign had blown over and slid across the highway into a lane of moving traffic. In an instant, this man recognized that the sign had the potential to kill a lot of people who were forced to come to a complete stop unexpectedly. He placed himself in harm’s way with the faith that he might just save a few lives if he could remove that sign. Talk about a big, bold move. Most barriers in daily life are far less dangerous than that, don’t you think?

Inspirational Book of the Day: If you can get past the nasty language in Hugh MacLeod’s illustrations, his book Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity is a wonderful treatise on living a creative life. It's written with an edgy attitude and contains a lot of truths grownups need to know about creativity. It's just too bad MacLeod didn't leave his offensive language on his now famous Gaping Void blog. They actually subtracted from some very worthwhile wisdom for people who are pursuing dreams of one kind or another. But that's what's in vogue today.

Katherine Applegate's newest novel

It's easy to cherish a friend who allows you to have a good, long cry without being affected by the ugliness of sadness unleashed in its liquid form. Every now and then, a book comes along that offers a similar kindness, immersing and indulging us in its great sadness for our own good.

Home of the Brave, Katherine Applegate's first stand-alone novel for children, has that distinction. In the sparest writing possible, Applegate, who also wrote the enormously popular Animorph series for children, brings forth Kek, a Sudanese boy who comes to America after his country is overrun with violence and chaos. Through Kek's eyes, readers see the incredible abundance of America. Revealing Kek's mind, Home of the Brave turns the American world-perspective upside down, yet remains patriotic and heroic. As an example of a cultural identity that's far from our own, Kek sees advancing age and wrinkles as a badge of honor. Here, he describes a new friend:

"She has many wrinkles
to show her great knowledge
of the world."

I am usually tempted to say that children shouldn't read sad books. In this case, I make an exception. Maybe our kids will be better adults than we are, learning suffering and horror from a gentle child who manages to avoid becoming hateful and angry. Perhaps as adults they'll feel a greater call to action than we have when they read the headlines of some future disaster in a poor and distant country. Kids and adults will walk away from this book more aware of their blessings, more convicted about sharing the world's resources with our brothers and sisters both here and abroad. Add Kek to your list of friends with whom you can have a good cry.

For more information on Katherine Applegate's latest releases, visit her web site, http://www.katherineapplegate.com/nonflash.html