Away from the Kitchen: Untold Stories, Private Menus, Guarded Recipes, and Insider Tips

If you enjoy reality TV food shows, you may like this book, though reading whole chapters about celebrity chefs is not the same. Away from the Kitchen is exactly that, featuring twelve chefs in twelve chapters. Dawn Blume Hawkes interviews successful, well-known chefs, and writes about their life stories, their roads to success, their dreams, confessions and revelations in detail, including bits and pieces of their likes and dislikes, their tools and tips. Each chapter ends with about half a dozen of their recipes. Photos, both thumbnail snapshots and professional food photos illustrate this book throughout. The chapters (and chefs) fall into four parts: breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. These are not recipes most home cooks would tackle—they are mostly complex professional recipes that did not translate well into home kitchens. For some you have several preparations to make (five for scrambled eggs, e.g.) before cooking and assembly, and you may need serious kitchen time to complete. Layout for many is poor; you’ll be turning pages back and forth preparing these. The book ends with additional bios for the chefs and a recipe list (not alphabetized) according to the courses of the meal and an index.