Welcome to Litsy!

Loved everything about this exploration of food in America. Lee is a fantastic storyteller—curious, engaging, entertaining. Each chapter focuses on a different place & the restaurants that Lee visits there. Yes it‘s about the food but Lee is equally curious about the people and the stories behind the food arguing that‘s what makes a dish truly great. Each chapter also comes with a recipe or two. A wonderful culinary adventure & a great read.

#Two4Tuesday

1. My answer for favorite fruit is somewhat seasonal—watermelon is summer, nectarines in the fall, mandarin oranges in the winter, mango in the spring and pretty much all year round.

2. The tagged book, which I just started, is both cookbook and travelogue in which Lee visits cities across the US describing, in each location, the meals he is having with people and their stories. He‘s a fantastic writer.

@TheSpineView

My husband and I really enjoyed the first season of Culinary Class Wars and Edward Lee was one of the standouts for us—always innovating and producing really creative dishes. His story was really interesting and I wanted to learn more about him and his career so I picked up the tagged book. One chapter in and I can already tell it‘s going to be a good read. Each chapter comes with a recipe which is a definite bonus!

A re-read for me- really good book to listen to just before a trip. I will make it a point to seek out interesting food!

Part travelogue, a smattering of memoir, a handful of recipes, but mostly an immigrant story anthology told through food.
Gorgeous ambience, serious nostalgia, taken through the author's past as we're taken through different people's pasts, different group's and town's histories, and different cuisine. 1/?

👏🏻

I feel attacked! 😩 [It's so true, though]

"the Ikea Rule"
Catchy and concise. ??

Less a 'melting pot' where everything blends together and becomes unrecognizable in its origins, nor the 'salad bowl ' where everything bumps along without integration, but instead a dish where different cultural influences blend, and help bring out the distinct flavours in each, rather than one overwhelming/submitting to the other. Next gen USA: Here's hoping respectful of all food becomes respectful of all people.

Bonus points for food-based analogy. 😁

I love this! I've been a proponent of 'looks terrible, tastes great' since my earliest clumsy baking as a teen.

#12Booksof2021 #9thBookof2021 #September I love to cook, so I really enjoyed reading Chef Edward Lee's book about his travels around the country visiting local restaurants to find out the stories behind why they cook what they cook. There were also some really great recipes in the book! @Andrew65

I loved this book so much! I loved reading about food and local restaurants from Chef Lee's perspective.

📚 Tagged
🍑 Peach
🤩 Under The Whispering Door
💞 My girlfriend has been sick for the last two weeks, but now she's much better. Still got a cough, but all the other flu symptoms are gone.
Thanks for the tag @TheSpineView @DarkMina
#Two4Tuesday
Wanna play? @audraelizabeth @Buechersuechtling @ReadingIsMyHobby @Onceuponatime @TheBookDream @Daisey @Bookishlie @Sharpeipup @Cuilin @ReadingFeedsTheSoul @Lucy_Anywhere @Onepageatatime88

A perfect Saturday morning- coffee and a book about food! I'm loving this book so much, I've written tons of notes in the book, and I'm thinking about making beignets from his recipe today.

Thanks Misty for the coffee and mug!! @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

My July #bookspin is an enthusiastic pick. This was a love letter to the food & people of the United States. The nuance he used when looking at cuisine, culture, the immigrant experience, tradition, cultural appropriation, and life was masterful. After finishing, I promptly went out and bought his cookbook just to read more.

Part road trip, part gastronomic adventure, part memoir - Buttermilk Graffiti isn‘t really about the recipes (at least not for me) but is instead a great way to write about (and explore) matters of politics, regionalism, identity, and the ways in which foods speak of our history. 16 fascinating essays that examine questions of how food speaks of class, culture, and social climate.

I ended up with a travel theme with my #bookspin & #doublespin picks - just in time for vacation! 🚘🗺

I enjoyed this travelogue from a chef who went around the country eating all sorts of delicious food. I did audio but want to find a print copy as a reference for random road trips.

Today is Independent Bookstore Day! So I, once again, blew my #pennyperpage budget (I was almost in the green!) and bought a few books. I guess it was worth it to support the two Indies here in Omaha. It just wouldn‘t have been fair if I only went to one! Oh yeah, and I bought stuff on Libro.fm. Had to get that free book! 🤓🤷🏼‍♀️

I don't relate to food the way the author relates to food. (Food is food. Stories are stories. An interesting chef doesn't make things taste better. He'd disagree. See the quote) Also, not that into food memoirs. So to me, the book was boring and self indulgent. A few recipes I might try. But it's not bad, just not for me at all.
#ReadHarder #ReadHarder2021-food memoir by an author of color

Reading this made me hungry even when I was full. It made me want ALL THE FOOD! Edward Lee is a really good writer and seems like a cool person, this is a very good food memoir.

Happy to report that my goal for #dashingdecember is off to a great start... Reading at least an hour a day so far ❤️ Loved this food memoir in essays and was glad to discover that this author has another book too.

The premise of this book is fantastic. Lee travels to different pockets of the US to highlight immigrant communities & their food. Large portions of the writing are beautiful & insightful. But I struggled sometimes with how he talks about women. An interesting but at times frustrating read.

As the non-cooking adult in my household, I don't read many food books, so this item on the Read Harder Challenge gave me pause: "Read a food book about a cuisine you‘ve never tried before." Book Riot does a great job offering recommendations for each of its challenge categories, so I took their suggestion and picked up Edward Lee's Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine and . . . LOVED IT.

Reading this and getting hungry

Today's Virtual Books and Brews.
While the great majority of the recipes are for meat eaters; I'm putting it on my cookbook shelf for the Roast Butternut Squash Schnitzel with Squash Kraut recipe. I've been looking for a vegetarian Oktoberfest recipe for ages. #booksandbrewsclub 🍻

What a great story about cusine that often gets over looked cambodian, german, soul food are cusines that are often taken out of context and changed in order to make "American Cusine". Immigrant's who come to the US adapt and change their food as they work with new ingredients that don't match up exactly with what they had in their home country.

Beautifully told, made me want to grab a cook book.and make a new recipe. NFN20 @NeedsMoreBooks

Next up on my list of books to reading during #NFN20.
This book was recommend to me @NeedsMoreBooks for our book swap a element that is included in our podcast.

Listening to this Audiobook this morning, discussing NOLA and their food culture.

March stats: 23 books, 21 by women, 6 by #ownvoice authors. Tagged my favorite, though I liked many of them, 3 other faves in the photo. 😄 Good month for reading!

Absolutely amazing! One of the best books I‘ve read this year and in my top 3 food memoirs of all time! Intriguing, engaging, surprising, challenging. I haven‘t tried any of the recipes yet, but I will! If this one is on your #TBR , move it up! #ReadHarderchallenge #13 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Guys, if you love to cook, eat, or learn about the cultural roots of a community as they relate to food, this is the book for you! It is so good, beautifully written, hard to put down and bonus, has recipes! Nearly done, but I don‘t want it to end. This has been a great balm over the last few days. #currentread #foodie

🎧 I‘m still laughing ... not Edward Lee the horror writer. A lot of fun food talk & stories that revolve around food 😁 It was noticeably repetitive a few times. He includes his family which brings a level of personalization that‘s nice. A fun trek across America ⭐️⭐️⭐️3/4

Very well written.

#TIL the origin of “fusion“ in cooking: Norman Van Aken made a case for “a permanent cuisine, one that embraced both one‘s own ethnicity and that of one‘s geography. All of a sudden, you didn‘t have to choose. You didn‘t have to live in a culinary solipsism of forced borders. Not about combining or co-opting disparate cultures, finding ways to balance the formal structural cuisine of Europe with the home cooking of the immigrant culture.“ #NFNov

This book chronicles Lee‘s journey into the food culture of different immigrant/refugee groups in the US. He contrasts how chefs work vs how immigrants work. What do different groups lose/gain through generations? What recipes do refuges bring? Do all food revolutions occur because of political turmoil? Lee asks hard questions without easy answers. He describes Irish and the Cambodians in Lowell, MA👇🏼#NFNov #food

I love seeing WV in books & hearing our traditional take on a hot dog (mustard, chili, slaw, and diced onions) described as the “nirvana of hot dogs” made me so dang happy. 😂

This quote really captures the tone and essence of this book about Chef Lee‘s culinary explorations: “This is what I find so infuriating about the impulse to classify food as authentic. It implies that there is a right & a wrong. It implies that a culture can stand still.”

It‘s cold and rainy outside and I‘ve got my first cold of the season, so I‘m curled up with Bo and Kali, a fuzzy blanket, a cup of pumpkin chai tea, and my next #nfnov read. ❤️

Weekend plans. 👏🏼

Why yes, it is Friday at five and I‘m in my soft clothes eating a breakfast bar and drinking iced coffee.

Edward Lee is giving me a new love for food writing.

Buttermilk Graffiti is off to a hell of a start. 👌🏼

I finished all of these in August. It‘s funny, I feel like I barely read anything this month! Probably because I bailed on 5 others 😱. That‘s a lot for me- I‘m not sure why.

My favorites: Little Women, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and RISE. All of these were picks though.

Taking a roadtrip with my friends to #LeakyCon and we're stopping for a late dinner at Lee's Milkwood restaurant. The bone marrow was AMAZING.

For me, the conflict is always the tension between nostalgia and the present. If we live in nostalgia, we will strangle the possibility for a future. But without it, we don‘t have stories; we don‘t have people preserving a culture before it slips away into an elusive memory, a kind of oblivion.

#Top6Reads #MidYearReport
Mahalo to @kspenmoll for the tag. 😘

Here are my 2019 top 6 favorite books I've read so far. Only one non-fiction (surprising), a couple of WWII historicals, a retelling of a favorite classic set in Pakistan, an odd & darkly humorous tale of sisters in Nigeria & a recent funny & light bookish read.

If you haven't done this & want to play along, consider yourself tagged. And thanks to @Cinfhen for starting it off. 🤗

A fan of Edward Lee from Top Chef, The Mind of a Chef & Iron Chef, I found myself even more of one after reading his book for my virtual foodie book club. The man has a English Lit degree & his passion for words, food & the people who cook it shine through. Then there's the fact that he introduced me to my new favorite Pickle Juice Gravy made with the brine from his Pickled Sweet Peppers-so delicious over biscuits.😋Link to my review & recipes👇🏻

It might be high 80s & humid but the cooling Thai flavors in Nigella Lawson's Green Curry Spinach & Coconut Soup (with grilled shrimp) make it great for warmer weather & it goes together so quickly, there was almost no time for #audiosouping today. Link to #soupersundays blog post with recipe is 👇🏻🍲🍤😋

I am about 2/3 through with this one, due for my virtual foodie bookclub next week. Edward Lee is a fave & I am enjoying his essays. 🤗📚

It's finally that time of year again - have moved the chairs out to the reading shed (AKA she-shed) and can sit reading, basking in sunlight. This is just the first of many evenings I plan to spend here.

Edward Lee has long been one of my favorite food personalities. Now he‘s one of my favorite food writers too. In this well-thought travel memoir, he makes the case that American food is both cultural touchstone and national treasure, and also that what we consider American food isn‘t what we think it is. It‘s what‘s being cooked and eaten in America, by Americans, right now.

How I have missed you Avocado Toast!! 🥑🍞💚 A quicker stop than I'd like at my neighborhood coffee shop, but there's an orchid & plant sale going on outside & it's insane here this morning. Buttermilk Graffiti has to go back today & it tells me online it can't be renewed, so just in case I used an audible credit for the audiobook to finish up & I'm taking pics of the recipes I might want to make for my virtual foodie book club. Happy Saturday!☀️