Review The 4 Hour CHEF

I've just finished reading Timothy Ferriss' book The 4-Hour CHEF. It's a strange cooking book, to say the least. It's the only book I've read so far that includes not only recipes for various meals, but also catching food in the wild or even pigeons in the park. Also mentioned in there is memorization techniques good for developing vocabulary and random numbers.

I suppose it all dove in with his goal of "Meta Learning." As a jack of all trades myself, I approve. True that the book will not make you a Master Chef, as opposed to Joy of Cooking, but that's what the references are for. There's a lot of links in the book that goes back to his website. I have yet to check them all.

There's a lot of interesting tid bits, including how to win eating contest (he didn't, not exactly) and still be thin (he is). I'm not too happy about the fried rice meal. My favorite is the chicken fried rice, and although he has chicken, and fried rice, the featured fried rice featured mealworms, instead of chicken. Well, I suppose adapting his recipes is a given.

I am also not too happy with his tool selection. Way too many tools for what is supposedly a simple chef. I suppose now I have to get myself a 7 inch chef knife. That and a thermometer. Not to mention Modernist Cuisine book by Nathan Myhrvold. He also didn't mention my favorite cooking implement: Rice cooker. Using rice cooker effectively is what enables me to write 1000 words essay while the food is cooking. To be fair, he did mention 2 hour chicken meal, and I can fit in more than 1000 words with that kind of meal, but I digress.

A section of surviving catastrophe, like San Francisco earthquake is very interesting. Apparently, you need to be able to survive on your own for about 7-10 days without electricity or water. Get out a generator, because that is what you need to power your refrigerator! Very interesting and important knowledge to have. I just didn't expect to find it in a cookbook!

If Timothy Ferriss would come down my way sometimes, I'd like to ask him if he's interested in learning computer languages. After all, I learned my first computer language, the Applesoft Basic, in 3 hours. That's one hour shorter than his 4 hours learning. Admittedly, the subsequent computer language took longer than that, at about 2 days to one week. It's still relatively fast approach, though, compared to the traditional computer programming learning.

Maybe I'm an outlier. My life has never been an easy conformance. I sure want to know whether that 5 minutes per week weight-lifting exercise is any good. I suppose I'll need to add his other book to my library as well. Sigh. I'm supposed to be writing Nanowrimo right now! I wonder if Barry Ross wrote a book? Will have to check that out.

This book review was written while my food is cooking on rice cooker. It just beeped me, so I’m done!