I have an insatiable appetite for food memoirs, collections of food essays, food magazines, anything related to food. Recent reads - The Invention of Curried Sausage (see this post for thoughts), Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (requires no explanation for the food set), and Garlic and Sapphires (Ruth Reichl's story about her years as the food critic for the New York Times). 

Actually, I enjoy reading - period. I always have a half dozen "in progress" books stacked on the night stand. I majored in English; one doesn't recover from that. But even when reading non-food related work, I'm searching for interesting passages about food.  

I recently read Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz, a novel about a young American man navigating his way through the Toyko business world. The story itself wasn't memorable, but Schwartz' descriptions of Japanese noodle houses, steaming bowls of soba, and Japanese tea ceremonies were.

On the flight to Vegas, I ripped through Jeannette Wells' The Glass Castle, a memoir about the neglect she and her siblings endured at the hands of their eccentric and nomadic parents. Fascinating story that will stay with you long after you close the cover. It too contained interesting food scenes and details (most of them about what they weren't eating as they often went days without food). Here's my favorite ... 

"Girl," Ginne Sue said, "in all my days, I have never seen no one pick a chicken like you."

I held up the spear-shaped cartilage in the breast bone, which most people don't eat, and bit down with a satisfying crunch.

Ginnie Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two pieces of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder and passed them to us. "Birds in a blanket," she said. They tasted great.

How awful ... but don't you want to try it?! Maybe late at night with the blinds drawn so no one can see how much you're actually enjoying it?