Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!)

by Amelia Morris

Overview

When Amelia Morris saw a towering, beautiful chocolate cake in Bon Appétit and took the recipe home to recreate it for a Christmas day brunch she was hosting, it resulted in a terrible (but tasty) mess that had to be served in an oversize bowl. It was also a revelation. Both delicious and damaged, it seemed a physical metaphor for the many curious and unexpected situations she's found herself in throughout her life, from her brief career as a six-year-old wrestler to her Brady Bunch-style family (minus the housekeeper and the familial harmony) to her ill-fated twenty-something job at the School of Rock in Los Angeles.

As a way to bring order to chaos and in search of a more meaningful lifestyle, she finds herself more and more at home in the kitchen, where she begins to learn that even if the results of her culinary efforts fall well short of the standard set by glossy food magazines, they can still bring satisfaction (and sustenance) to her and her family and friends.

Full of hilarious observations about food, family, unemployment, romance, and the extremes of modern L.A., and featuring recipes as basic as Toasted Cheerios and as advanced as gâteau de crêpes, BON APPÉTEMPT is sure to resonate with anyone who has tried and failed, and been all the better for it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455549368
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Amelia Morris is the creator of Bon Appétempt, which Time magazine named as one of the twenty-five best blogs of 2012. Her work has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Splendid Table, Saveur.com, BonAppetit.com, and McSweeney's. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the recipient of the Margaret Shannon Morton Fellowship.

She currently lives on the east side of Los Angeles with her husband, baby son, and small dog.

Table of Contents

1 How to Toast a Cheerio 1

2 All of Them Had Hair of Gold 10

3 A Tale of Two Cities 17

4 Not So Terrific 26

5 September 34

6 Giving Thanks, Sort of 38

7 The Saturday Boy 43

8 A Major in Creative Writing with a Minor in Tortured Self-Reflection in One's Journal 48

9 The Wrong, Long Path 62

10 Parasites in My Eyes 78

11 The Road to Vons Is Paved with Pavement 85

12 Starting from Scratch 91

13 Learning on the Job 97

14 Call Me Ishmael Mealy 105

15 The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Engagement Ring? 111

16 Food Fight 116

17 Food Fight, Part II 124

18 The Joy of Cooking 134

19 Great Expectations 140

20 A Feast of Failure 155

21 Arising Out of Necessity 169

22 Reconsidering the Oyster 178

23 There's No Cream in Pasta Carbonara 186

24 Enjoying the Process 195

25 Crêpes Are Pronounced Krehps, and If You Make Enough of Them, You'll Get a Gâteau 205

26 Embrace Yourself, Avoid Canola Oil 213

27 Neither Magnificent nor Abominable 224

28 Bringing It All Back Home 232

29 Our Many Lives 243

30 Be Careful When Hammering Your Life into Shape 253

31 Figuring It Out for Yourself 263

32 2013 273

Epilogue 297

Acknowledgments 301

What People are Saying About This

Edan Lepucki

If you like Laurie Colwin and MFK Fisher, you'll love Amelia Morris and Bon Appétempt. It's a charming, thoughtful, and touching memoir about growing up and becoming the person and artist you've always wanted to be--both inside and outside the kitchen. --Edan Lepucki, author of California

Molly Wizenberg

I picked up Bon Appetempt on a flight, planning to read for maybe five minutes before taking a nap, and when I finally came up for air, three hours had passed. (Readers: consider yourselves warned!) Smart, funny, and most of all human, Amelia Morris is a winning storyteller, even when she's losing at everything. I love this book. --Molly Wizenberg, author of Delancey and A Homemade Life

Editorial Reviews

10/20/2014
In a bland look back at her middle American childhood maneuvering between her parents’ joint custody, L.A. journalist and blogger Morris found comfort and control in learning how to simplify elaborate recipes for her own use. The daughter of two doctors in Meadville, Pa.—her father was one of two ob-gyns in town, her mother one of two pediatricians—Morris was five years old when her father had a child by his “mistress.” The divorce and split of households that followed meant that she grew up largely feeling unloved in her father’s new household in Saegertown. By high school, however, she had moved to her mother and stepfather’s place in Pittsburgh, where she was copiously fed and religiously went to church; in Pittsburgh she met her future husband, Matt. She attended Johns Hopkins University and eventually moved with Matt to Hollywood to hustle jobs in film and TV writing. Much of Morris’s chronological memoir relays the young couple’s valiant attempts to pursue their creative endeavors while forced to find temp jobs. Morris earned an M.F.A., planned a wedding despite some opposition in her family to a Jewish husband, and started a blog exploring how recipes from food magazines turn out in the hands of ordinary cooks like her which was “messy, poorly lit, and falling well short of our aspiration.” Unfortunately, Morris’s lackluster prose never elevates the story. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"A winning memoir about youthful befuddlement and finding yourself."—People


"A delicious portrait of love, loss and what I ate . . . I read this book the way I eat a pizza that's really good. I ate the whole thing in one sitting. . . Morris is masterful and funny in stirring the pot . . . Whether Morris is winning or failing in her relationships or mastery of the dishes, she is always human."—The News and Observer (Raleigh)


"A moving, smart, and often hilarious coming-of-age story."—Largehearted Boy


"A refreshing take on growing up and coming to terms with the joys and travails of family, career and navigating the kitchen. . . Whether Morris is deconstructing her failed attempts at finding satisfying work, struggling with rocky family relationships or experiencing a culinary failure, she adroitly blends the ingredients of humor and self-reflection."—Kirkus Reviews

"Morris adopts an interest in cooking as an adult, grabbing food glossies at grocery checkouts and trying to re-create the meals they picture. The impetus for the blog she starts, with which this book shares its name, was a growing realization that if words failed her, food wouldn't: cooking, as opposed to writing, became a place to lightheartedly attempt great things, and not feel personally hurt if she failed. . . Some recipes are described in the text, too, like the toasted cheerios Morris makes, immediately summoning childhood memories. Sure to appeal to fans of her personable blog, and to round up new ones."
—Booklist

"I picked up Bon Appetempt on a flight, planning to read for maybe five minutes before taking a nap, and when I finally came up for air, three hours had passed. (Readers: consider yourselves warned!) Smart, funny, and most of all human, Amelia Morris is a winning storyteller, even when she's losing at everything. I love this book."—Molly Wizenberg, author of Delancey and A Homemade Life


"Amelia Morris uses her trademark humor and fierce honesty to tell a wry and touching coming-of-age story. It made me laugh, wrenched my heart and gave me an instant craving for beans and rice in coconut milk."—Luisa Weiss, founder of The Wednesday Chef and author of My Berlin Kitchen

"If you like Laurie Colwin and MFK Fisher, you'll love Amelia Morris and Bon Appétempt. It's a charming, thoughtful, and touching memoir about growing up and becoming the person and artist you've always wanted to be—both inside and outside the kitchen."—Edan Lepucki, author of California


"Amelia Morris's debut, Bon Appétempt, is one of the most compulsively readable books I've picked up in years. It's spirited, funny, smartly nostalgic, wistful, real. I've never seen another author break a reader's heart, make them laugh, and offer up a recipe for broccolini in the span of two pages. It's all here: big love, big sadness, superb self-aware writing, and cake. Indulge in all of it as fast as you can, and enjoy the rewarding fullness of this incredible book."—Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women


"There is a moment I call the 'exchange', a tipping point, where the events of a book start to interest me more than the events of my own waking life. It's the reader's dream and the reason to read. I felt this so deeply and and pleasurably while reading this book. It is full of delight, both intellectual and earthy. It's a book about food, and about family, and about becoming oneself, finally, absurdly, wonderfully. It's just a joy to live inside this book for a while. It's etched in my mind permanently."—Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat

From the Publisher

2014-11-11
A refreshing take on growing up and coming to terms with the joys and travails of family, career and navigating the kitchen.After moving from the East Coast to hypercompetitive Los Angeles, Morris felt stymied by her lack of success as a creative writer and her husband's failure in the film industry. But on Christmas Day, after attempting a complex chocolate cake recipe, which failed spectacularly, the author concluded that hard work doesn't always translate into success. More importantly, for the first time, she understood that failure is just another part of growing up. Following the cake disaster, Morris moved on from resenting the images in slick cooking magazines and began blogging about her own culinary exploits, comparing her creations with those in cooking magazines. What began as a "novelty hobby" became a source of pleasure. "I enjoy the whole process—from grocery shopping to eating the results, and even, on some days, in the repetitive nature of washing the dishes at the end of the night," she writes. In addition to chronicling her culinary adventures, Morris also dissects her often bumpy family relationships. After submitting an essay about cooking with her elderly grandmother and having it rejected, Morris posted it on her blog; it eventually won " ‘Best Culinary Essay' in Saveur magazine's food blog awards." Throughout the book, Morris couples significant life events with recipes that recall memories of that time. When her parents divorced and her mother moved to Pittsburgh, Morris recalls her cooking chicken cordon bleu; upon returning home from a trip to Paris, the author craved miso ramen with a poached egg; and the first meal the author made sans recipe was rice and black beans in coconut milk with avocado. Whether Morris is deconstructing her failed attempts at finding satisfying work, struggling with rocky family relationships or experiencing a culinary failure, she adroitly blends the ingredients of humor and self-reflection.

Kirkus Reviews

A delicious portrait of love, loss and what I ate...I read this book the way I eat a pizza that's really good. I ate the whole thing in one sitting...Morris is masterful and funny in stirring the pot...Whether Morris is winning or failing in her relationships or mastery of the dishes, she is always human.

The News and Observer (Raleigh)

A winning memoir about youthful befuddlement and finding yourself.

People