The Slanted Door: Modern Vietnamese Food

Being a lover and reader of cookbooks, I have many more tomes than can fit in my small kitchen cupboard. The solution, for me, has been to try out e-cookbooks! I recently picked up Phan's latest offering, The Slanted Door, when it was a part of the publisher's specially priced offering that passed through my email one day. If you love cookbooks and enjoy adventuresome eating/cooking, you will want to pick up a copy as well!

I love that The Slanted Door offers readers a bit of history of the restaurant after which the cookbook is named. As you read, you get a sense of San Francisco and the food scene therein. A travel guide within a cookbook is a "win win" to me! Phan also includes other stories and anecdotes about what it takes to run a food business, what the food he presents means to him, and glimpses into family life and history that connect readers and would-be at-home chefs to the dishes presented. This is what makes me devour a cookbook!

I like that dishes from all parts of the menu are included in the cookbook. If you are intimidated to try a full-blown entre (and you really shouldn't be with Phan's step-by-step instructions and careful coaching in each recipe), you can always start with an appetizer! Abundant explanations and gorgeous photographs accompany each recipe and provide encouragement. What a delight!

In this modern era with global connections, it's hard to imagine that anyone would find the ingredients in Phan's dishes to be too exotic. I live in the middle of America, in the "fly-over" zone where grocery stores have limited shelf space. However, I feel confident that I could procure most of the ingredients to make any dish in the book readily and locally.

Having this book on my e-reader is great because I can set it on the kitchen counter and follow along with the recipe as I cook, thus saving paper. (Do note it helps to increase the length of time before your screen times out before you start cooking if you don't want to have to swipe the screen with messy fingers!) While it will take a bit of getting used to (also, set it out of splatter range!), it makes me feel even more technologically savvy as well. I will certainly be indulging in more e-cookbooks in the future!

From the Publisher . . .

The long-awaited cookbook featuring 100 recipes from James Beard award-winning chef Charles Phan’s beloved San Francisco Vietnamese restaurant, The Slanted Door.

Award-winning chef and restaurateur Charles Phan opened The Slanted Door in San Francisco in 1995, inspired by the food of his native Vietnam. Since then, The Slanted Door has grown into a world-class dining destination, and its accessible, modern take on classic Vietnamese dishes is beloved by diners, chefs, and critics alike. The Slanted Door is a love letter to the restaurant, its people, and its food. Featuring stories in addition to its most iconic recipes, The Slanted Door both celebrates a culinary institution and allows home cooks to recreate its excellence.

About the Author . . .

Charles Phan is the award-winning Executive Chef and Owner of San Francisco's The Slanted Door and 6 other restaurants. He is considered to be the inventor of modern Vietnamese cuisine in the United States.

Born in Da Lat, Vietnam in 1962, Charles and his family - parents and five siblings - relocated to Guam just before the fall of Saigon. They spent two years on Guam before settling in San Francisco in 1977.

Always having had a passion for food, Charles opened his first restaurant, The Slanted Door, on Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District in 1995. It was an immediate popular and critical success. The restaurant played a significant role in the revitalization of this vibrant area.

In 2004, the nationally acclaimed, The Slanted Door, became one of the principal tenants of San Francisco's historic Ferry Building and was instrumental in developing this landmark into one of the country's premier food destinations.

That year, he also won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef of California and in 2011 was inducted into the foundation's Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America.

Since then, Phan has opened six successful restaurants, all located in San Francisco, a city with a famously vibrant food scene. His enduring vision to showcase farm-fresh, locally sourced ingredients and prepare everything from scratch has kept The Slanted Door Group of restaurants on the forefront of San Francisco's dining scene.

Charles' first book, VIETNAMESE HOME COOKING, hopes to inspire readers to make interesting, fast, flavorful and healthy Vietnamese dishes in their home kitchens. The book won an IACP award in 2012.

His second cookbook, THE SLANTED DOOR, offers one hundred recipes of modern Vietnamese food, cocktail and dessert. The book comes at the right time to celebrate James Beard Award's Outstanding Restaurant in May 2014 and its 20th anniversary in November.

Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life

This is the most important and profound book I have read in a long, long time!

I was a parish minister for 13+ years and in that time I sat with countless families at the bedside of their dying loved ones. Most often that vigil took place in a hospital setting, whether the ICU or the hospice suite. Sometimes I was called to the nursing home and, on a few rare occasions, to a home. Dr. Zitter's insight and wisdom on a topic that most Americans spend their lives and energy avoiding at all cost provides us with clear insights and a care-filled journey through the inevitable. For a time I served on the local hospice board and tried to make sure that local and area clergy were kept "in the loop" on end-of-life care options that might provide better spiritual continuity for their members. Dr. Zitter's book should be required reading not only for all entering the medical field and palliative care teams, but for all seminarians, social workers and all who care about making sure that the way we leave this life matches the values with which we lived life. Any and all book clubs willing to breach the subject of death and dying will find a wealth of topics to discuss. I will be spreading the word about this wonderful, helpful book to anyone and everyone who will listen!

My deepest thanks to Dr. Zitter for taking on this important subject and for this sage book!! My thanks to the publisher for providing me the free review copy in exchange for this fair and honest review.

From the Publisher . . .

An ICU and Palliative Care specialist featured in the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary Extremis offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level.

In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die.

Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care—to become an ICU physician—and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice.

Extreme Measures charts Zitter’s journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another—a doctor who prioritizes the patient’s values and preferences in an environment where the default choice is the extreme use of technology. In our current medical culture, the old and the ill are put on what she terms the End-of-Life Conveyor belt. They are intubated, catheterized, and even shelved away in care facilities to suffer their final days alone, confused, and often in pain. In her work Zitter has learned what patients fear more than death itself: the prospect of dying badly. She builds bridges between patients and caregivers, formulates plans to allay patients’ pain and anxiety, and enlists the support of loved ones so that life can end well, even beautifully.

Filled with rich patient stories that make a compelling medical narrative, Extreme Measures enlarges the national conversation as it thoughtfully and compassionately examines an experience that defines being human.

About the Author . . .

After two decades of caring for critically ill patients, Jessica Nutik Zitter, MD, MPH is a strong advocate for a new approach to caring for the dying. She practices the unusual combination of ICU and palliative care medicine at Highland Hospital, the county hospital in Oakland, California. Having herself participated in the default and indiscriminate use of technology with the dying and witnessed the resultant suffering, Dr. Zitter has come to view this situation as a public health crisis. She is committed to reorienting our care of the dying to a more collaborative process whereby the patient, rather than her organ or disease, is the primary focus of care.

Dr. Zitter’s first book, Extreme Measures, Finding A Better Path to the End of Life, (Avery, an imprint of Penguin-Random House, Spring 2017), offers an insider’s view of intensive care in America and its impact on how we die. Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other publications. In 2005 she co-founded Vital Decisions, a telephone counseling service for patients with life-limiting illnesses.

Her work is featured in the Tribeca award-winning documentary, “Extremis,” which has been shortlisted for an Oscar, and is available on Netflix. This vérité film follows Jessica, her team and several patients and their families in the intensive care unit at Highland Hospital.

Dr. Zitter attended Stanford University and Case Western Reserve University Medical School and earned her Master of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Her medical training includes an Internal Medicine residency at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a fellowship in Pulmonary/Critical Care at the University of California, San Francisco.

Shadows On the Lake

Inspector Stefania Valenti is called to the mountain pass above Lake Como when the road crew constructing a new road to the Swiss border unearths human remains in the process. What ensues is a matter of political and historical intrigue involving one of the area's most well-known families and villas. The skeleton offers up clues that point to murder, but Inspector Valenti must discover the motives and what the now elderly family members may know about the circumstances surrounding the WWII era death.

I am a fan of mysteries and the fact that this one included some historical intrigue pulled me in from the start. I also enjoyed the chance to travel to Italy in my mind as I read the book. Although the villa and exact details of the town have been fictionalized, I did hop on the internet and do a little exploring of the mountains that form the border between Italy and Switzerland as a way of getting into the setting.

I found Inspector Valenti an entirely believable character along with those around her. To some extent the characters fall into the expected roles of any detective/mystery novel: the no-nonsense, "get it done" chief; the eagle-eyed inspector who doesn't miss a detail and has the uncanny ability to link details together (sometimes with the help of equally capable peers), and the underling officers who help out with some of the leg work. Add to this a blooming romantic connection, an ex-husband, and Valenti's school-aged daughter and that rounds out the main cadre of characters.

Although set in the present day, I enjoyed the connection back to World War II days: smuggling Jews across borders, worries over fascism and communism, etc. This made Valenti's quest for justice for the victim a cause I think anyone would want to see through to the conclusion.

The book was a quick, enjoyable read which I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a mystery or detective novel. If it is a new genre to you, this is a good place to start! My thanks to the publisher for the ARC I received for free in exchange for this honest review.

From the Publisher . . .

A new atmospheric Italian mystery novel set in Lake Como, introducing the clever and captivating Inspector Stefania Valenti.

During the construction of a new road to the Swiss border in the mountains above Lake Como, the remains of a young man are unearthed on the powerful Cappelletti family’s property. On the case is Stefania Valenti, forty-five, divorced with a young daughter, and a brilliant, determined police inspector.

Her investigation takes her back to World War II and deep into the history of the region, a place that during the war attracted smugglers, deserters, secret agents, and fleeing Jews. Steeped in the beautiful atmosphere of Northern Italy, Valenti’s investigation brings to light a family’s secret, a tragic romance, and reveals a fascinating piece of Italian history.