Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Smart and sassy, but a little too pretentious, August 30, 2009
Our reviewer had this to say: Pim has a unique voice that is able to explain familiar topics in an enjoyable way, and new topics in an encouraging manner. You can almost imagine her telling you, "Ah, there's nothing to it," and you feel like you actually can. She exhibits these qualities best in her collection of recipes. Without much effort, you can produce impressive results in your kitchen, as long as you use the best ingredients you can manage.
However, the selection of recipes sometimes seems arbitrary. The perfect roast chicken and easy (pan-)roast potatoes are suddenly followed by pad thai for beginners to further illustrate her point about anti-recipes, and with a preface on how popular the recipe is on her blog and how frequently it's linked to and shared. While it is a fantastic recipe, it is a rephrasing of the recipe on her blog, adding to the feeling that the book is at times just a supplement to the Chez Pim website.
The third chapter, "How to drink like a foodie," is of interest because Pim attempts to cover briefly subjects for which whole books have been written. She gives plenty of practical tips on how not to be a slave to wine scores and critics, and instead form your own notes and opinions. There is a curiously lengthy section about how to marry wine and Thai food.
The last section is "How to be a fabulous foodie." Leave alone the fact that lists reduce everything to David-Letterman-like randomness: why fifty? The items themselves are a mixed bag. Several of them have me nodding in agreement: go native, pick your own berries, go on a quest for the best, learn to cook your mum's or dad's best dish. However, the others just serve to confound and contradict her complaint in the introduction- that there are those who admonish us into doing things the most expensive way possible. Sip a perfect espresso at Caffè Mulassano in Turin! Take your lover on a trip to Olivier Roelliner in Cancale, Brittany! Eat a plate of truffe bel humeur at the restaurant l'Ambroisie in Paris! Why? Because it's her story on how she became the fabulous foodie that she is, and somehow it feels like you have to live it in order to be worthy of calling yourself one. It's suddenly not enough that you abandon Starbuck's for the best quaint neighborhood espresso place, eat in your country's most revered French restaurant, or forage your own mushrooms- you have to fly your way to become a fabulous foodie.
She may be that encouraging voice that tells you that you can do it, but it seems like there are a lot of things you don't need to do to become a foodie.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I'm a fan of the blog -- the book? Not so much, October 2, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Pim's blog is pretty fun and interesting. This book is, in parts, pretty fun and interesting. Unfortunately, it comes off as more of a print version of the blog than as a useful or interesting book.
She's an engaging writer and there are some lovely photographs in the book. Some of the recipes are wonderful; all the recipes are well-written and appear to make sense (I didn't try them all).
In the end, however, I think this book isn't really worth it. I just found it too annoying.
One problem with the book is that it's written like a blog, where the various parts have only a thematic connection. Another problem is that there's a bit too much self-aggrandizement for my taste. I don't need to know how amazingly popular the Pad Thai recipe on her blog is, especially when that popularity is illustrated with the number of links to it. Who cares? It's either a good recipe (which it is) or it's not. You got the book contract, honey, stop trying to sell us on your credibility.
Another problem is that there's an awful lot of generalization from her own experience to what other people should do. As others have pointed out, this last problem is well-illustrated with the "50 Things" list. First off, lists of 50 things (or 10 or 23) with only a flimsy connection between them work a lot better on blogs than in books. Worse, after assuring us throughout the previous part of the book that every "foodie" gets there in his or her own way, and admonishing us not to think that we have to do specific things to be a "foodie", she tops the book off with a list of specific ideas. Eat this dish at that restaurant! Return this food item even if in its out-of-seasonality, it sings to you of memories of another season, just because she said it's out of season!
All she had to do, really, was relabel that list as "The Top 50 Experiences That Made Me A Foodie" and she'd be home free. But turning that into a prescription for the rest of us at the end of a book telling us that prescriptions can't make a foodie is just self-indulgent and ridiculous.
Finally, although the recipes seem solid (and in a couple cases, even brilliant), they fall short of her goal. She starts out "How To Cook Like A Foodie" by asserting that there it's better not to cook from a recipe, and then launches into a series of recipes. I agree with her premise, but that doesn't mean I never read or use recipes. It means I know how to take a recipe and twist it to make it my own. If that's what she wanted to teach people to do, she went about it wrong. For instance, she talks about how she learned to make a roast chicken, and then she says that her way is the one, the only way. Seems like she's contradicting herself. If she'd said it was the one, the only way for her, fine. But her point started out being that the idea is to find what works for you and then hone it.
This whole section would have worked better if she'd offered recipes and then talked about how that process of twisting a recipe to make it your own. So here is a method that makes a basic roasted chicken. Here are some ways that you could personalize it. Try it, try some of the variations, see how they affect the outcome. Over time, you will discover your own "best roasted chicken". Then do it again -- here is a recipe for a basic fruit tart. Here are some ways to fiddle with it. Here are some things you might find handy to know when fiddling with baking recipes. Try some of the variations, keep the limitation in mind, and eventually, you will have a "best fruit tart" approach of your own.
Overall, I think that this book proves Pim is a great blog writer but not a very good book writer. Faults that are charming in a blog weigh down the book and make it not very good in the end.
Personally, I'd skip the book and stick to the blog. It's a great blog.
P.S. The word "Foodie" is so stupid that I almost couldn't open the book at all. The most passionate eaters and cooks I know despise that word, for a reason. This review is not very good, but it's quite frankly far more positive than I would ever have expected to write about a book with that title.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
First, become fabulously wealthy, October 21, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
That is the main item missing from author Pim Techamuanvivit's list of "Fifty Things Every Foodie Should Do, or at least try, once is his (her) life." Or maybe Pim didn't bother to mention it since the "wealthy" part is so obviously implied by the rest of her list, such as "Rent a house with a kitchen in Italy or France for a week" or "Eat a whole roasted turbot on the Basque coast in Spain" and "Dine at a Parisian 3-Star Restaurant." Or perhaps you could take Pim's "secret" advice on how to choose wine to go with your meal, by staying in the "middle" range of $75-$100 a bottle? Readers of Upscale - Living the Affluent Lifestyle or Conde Nast Traveler might find themselves nodding along at her sage advice.
I suppose wealth is all relative, but for me a hundred dollar bottle of wine would be more of a once-in-a-lifetime type of splurge for a special event, and not something that I would casually order a couple of (one red, one white at all times!) when I am trying out a new restaurant with friends. Pim's perspective is that of an upper-class San Francisco city-dweller who spends as much time out of the country as in it, and her name-dropping of thousand-dollar-a-meal restaurants (which, Pim assures us, you should visit several times in order to ingratiate yourself as a customer) complete with famous chefs being called by their first name comes off as more of a "Look at me! Isn't my life more fabulous than yours?" -type of thing rather than a cool book on food.
This is too bad, because there is almost a cool book on food buried inside "The Foodie Handbook." When Pim isn't glorying in the wonder that is Pim's life, she does have some interesting comments on food and the joy of it all and some decent recipes as well. Like most people reading this book, I love food, I love flavor and cooking and all the different styles and varieties the world has to offer. I watch cooking shows and care about local cuisines and freshness and farmer's markets. There is some great cooking advice here, and my favorite section was on "How to make a perfect roast chicken." But that is only a portion of the book.
Ultimately, this book is more about Pim than about food. In fact, the whole point of the book seems to be posed to launch Pim as some sort of food celebrity, maybe as a ticket to her own food show or something. Almost all of the photographs are of Pim. Pim smiling and laughing. Pim enjoying a glass of wine in a beautiful location. Pim stirring a pot. A close-up of Pim's eyes while she sips a cup of coffee. A veritable Pim pin-up book.
Maybe I am just jealous, but I really don't need or want to read about all of these great food adventures that I will never be able to experience due to financial reasons, and hear them being tossed off as "Things every foodie should try." We would like to try Pim. Trust me. But most of us just can't.
Or maybe this book is exactly why I love food but tend to dislike foodies. Enjoying things doesn't have to come with such snobbery and games of one-upmanship(Pim gives some advice on how you can "out-foodie" people at a table...). I would rather listen to Anthony Bourdain (Or "Tony" as Pim calls him!) talk about great street food and the viberant blend of culture and food, than rave and compare notes over who the new "hot chef" is and swap advice on "How to score a table at elBulli." (Another one on Pim's list.)
On a final note: Yes, as everyone has mentioned the actual design of this book is pretty bad. I have never seen such an unfortunate cover design, which looks cool but is entirely unfunctional for reading. The little cut out box (showing Pim's face, of course!) tore within a few pages. Also, the recipes included inside are all broken up onto two pages, so as a cookbook it is decidedly hard to work from. (Don't worry though, even though Pim includes many of her popular recipes, she also tells us that cooking from a recipe is a bad thing, so we can ignore her recipes...)
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