This event has passed.

Book Group: Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters

Name: Book Group: Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters
Start: 2017-12-07T19:00:00-08:00
End: 2017-12-07T21:00:00-08:00

December 7, 2017 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

The Slow Food Russian River Book Group will be discussing Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters, with Cristina Mueller & Bob Carrau. (Clarkson Potter, 2017)

About Alice Waters

Alice Waters was born on April, 28, 1944, in Chatham, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies before training at the International Montessori School in London. Her daughter, Fanny, was born in 1983.Chez Panisse Restaurant opened in 1971, serving a single fixed-price menu that changed daily. The set menu format remains at the heart of Alice’s’ philosophy of serving the most delicious organic products only when they are in season. Over the course of three decades, Chez Panisse has developed a network of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures Chez Panisse a steady supply of pure and fresh ingredients.In 1996, in celebration of the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Alice created the Chez Panisse Foundation. The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr Middle School is the foundation’s primary beneficiary. More…

The Book Group is open to anyone who can read, loves cooking a dish, and likes a good conversation.The Book Group meets the first Thursday of the month, 7 – 9pm in Sebastopol. It’s a convivial dinner. Please bring a dish for four and a beverage.

To RSVP email the Book Group at sfrrbookgroup@gmail.com. You will receive the address of the private location in Sebastopol Town.

Membership

To be a member of the Book Group you don’t need to be a member of Slow Food, although – of course – we hope that with time you will become one.

Summary of Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook

Provided by publisher:

The long-awaited memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America’s most influential restaurant.When Alice Waters opened the doors of her “little French restaurant” in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity. Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman’s evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.