When Its Done The Making Of A Chef By Gretchen Hanson
Chef Gretchen Hanson began cooking at the age of two and a half. Food was safe, food was comforting, but most of all, food provided the nurturing deeply lacking in her own family. When It’s Done: the Making of a Chef winds through her life story beginning with an abusive childhood, addiction and far too many marriages, culminating in her becoming an award-winning chef and restauranteur. Each story is part of the path that brought Chef Hanson to the place where she could cook for people with compassion, and through cooking, find forgiveness. Chef Hanson explores her weaknesses as a person and addresses them with the fire that allowed her to become a person who cooks to nurture and cooks with love. A coming of age novel filled with self-deprecating humor and failures of mythic proportions, When It’s Done: The Making of a Chef takes the reader on a story of redemption. This poignant memoir is layered with food and forgiveness. Told with acerbic wit, this is not a touchy feely story about eating kind food: it is the story of the sordid back alleyways behind the kitchen, the seductive passion of the nightly line, the egocentric narcissism of the profession and the breaking free from the traditional bonds that define us.
Chef Hanson deconstructs the making of a chef into the basic ingredients of learning to live a life from scratch.