Verwandte Artikel zu Make It Messy: My Perfectly Imperfect Life

Make It Messy: My Perfectly Imperfect Life - Hardcover

Samuelsson, Marcus; Chambers, Veronica

 
9780385744003: Make It Messy: My Perfectly Imperfect Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385744005 ISBN 13: 9780385744003
Verlag: Delacorte Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In this inspirational autobiography, world-famous chef and owner of Red Rooster Harlem, Marcus Samuelsson tells his extraordinary story and encourages young people to embrace their mistakes and follow their dreams. Based on his highly praised adult memoir, Yes, Chef, this young adult edition includes an 8-page black-and-white family photo insert.

Marcus Samuelsson’s life and his journey to the top of the food world have been anything but typical. Orphaned in Ethiopia, he was adopted by a loving couple in Sweden, where his new grandmother taught him to cook and inspired in him a lifelong passion for food. In time, that passion would lead him to train and cook in some of the finest, most demanding kitchens in Europe.

Samuelsson’s talent and ambition eventually led him to fulfill his dream of opening his own restaurant in New York City: Red Rooster Harlem, a highly acclaimed, multicultural dining room, where presidents rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, and bus drivers. A place where anyone can feel at home.

"'Step up to the challenge; don't avoid it. Win or lose, take the shot.' Samuelsson neatly serves up inspiration and food for thought."--Kirkus Reviews

"The perfect book for teen foodies and a great choice for others, thanks to its . . .  compelling story . . .  and sound advice."--VOYA

"A delightful read. . . .Samuelsson effectively connects his love of food to his personal journey."--School Library Journal

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARCUS SAMUELSSON is an internationally acclaimed chef who caught the attention of the culinary world at the age of twenty-five, when he became the youngest person ever to receive a three-star review from the New York Times for his work at the New York City restaurant Aquavit. His iconic restaurant Red Rooster Harlem celebrates the roots of American cuisine in one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally rich neighborhoods.

Marcus is the author of several cookbooks, including The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem, as well as the New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award-winning memoir Yes, Chef. He was a winner of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters and Food Network's Chopped All-Stars. He was honored to be a guest chef at the White House, where he planned and executed the Obama administration’s first state dinner, for the first family, the prime minister of India, and four hundred guests.

Marcus lives with his wife, Maya, in Harlem. He plays soccer on weekends and is constantly on the search for the best street food around. Follow him on Instagram, on Facebook and on Twitter at @marcuscooks.

VERONICA CHAMBERS is a prolific author, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, Mama's Girl. She has written more than a dozen books for young readers, including Plus and the Amigas series. You can visit her online at veronicachambers.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

My African Mother

I've never seen a picture of my mother.

I have traveled to her homeland, my homeland, dozens of times. I have met her brothers and sisters. I have found my birth father and eight half brothers and half sisters I didn't know I had. I have met my mother's relatives in Ethiopia, but when I ask them to describe my mother, they throw out generalities. "She was nice," they tell me. "She was pretty." "She was smart." Nice, pretty, smart. The words seem meaningless, except the last is a clue because even today, in rural Ethiopia, girls are not encouraged to go to school. That my mother was intelligent rings true because I know she had to be shrewd to save the lives of me and my sister, which is what she did.

Although I've never seen a picture of my mother, I know how she cooked. For me, my mother is berbere, an Ethiopian spice mixture. You can use it on everything from lamb and chicken to roasted peanuts. It's Ethiopians' salt and pepper. I know she cooked with it because it's in the DNA of every Ethiopian mother. Right now, if I could, I would lead you to a red tin in my kitchen--one of dozens I keep by the stove in my apartment in Harlem--that is filled with my own blend and marked with blue electrical tape and my own illegible scrawl. I would reach into this tin and grab a handful of the red-orange powder, and hold it up to your nose so you could smell the garlic, the ginger, the sun-dried chili.

My mother didn't have a lot of money, so she fed us shiro. It's a chickpea flour you boil, kind of like polenta. You pour it into hot water and add butter, onions, and berbere. You simmer it for about forty-five minutes, until it's the consistency of hummus, and then you eat it with injera, a sour, rich bread made from a grain called teff. I know this is what she fed us because this is what poor people eat in Ethiopia. My mother carried the chickpea powder in her pocket or bag. That way, all she needed to make dinner was water and fire.

In Meki, the small farming village near where I'm from, there are no roads. We are actually from Abrugandana, a village smaller than Meki that does not exist on most maps. You go to Meki, take a right in the middle of nowhere, walk about five miles, and there's Abrugandana.

I know my mother was not taller than five feet two inches, but I also know she was not delicate. Country women in Ethiopia are strong because they walk everywhere. When I go there now, I stare at the young women and their children and it's like watching a home movie that does not exist of my childhood. Each woman has a kid, which is me, on her back, and the fingers of her right hand are interlocked with another, slightly older kid's fingers, and that's my sister. Each has her food and wares in her bag, which is slung across her chest and rests on her hip. The older kid holds a bucket of water on her shoulders, a bucket that's almost as heavy as she is. That's how strong that child is.

Women like my mother don't wear shoes. They don't have shoes. My mother, my sister, and I would walk the Sidama savannah for four hours a day, to and from my mother's job selling crafts in the market. Before three p.m. it would be too hot to walk, so we would rest under a tree and gather our strength and wait for the sun to set. After eight p.m. it was dark and there were new threats--animals that would see a baby like me as supper and dangerous men who might see my mother and attack her.

I have never seen a picture of my mother, but I know her features because I have seen them staring back at me in the mirror my entire life. I know she had a cross somewhere near her face. It was a henna tattoo of a cross, henna taking the place of the jewelry she could not afford or even dream of having. There was also an Orthodox cross somewhere on the upper part of my mother's body, maybe on her neck, maybe on her chest, near her heart. She had put it there to show that she was a woman of faith. She was an Orthodox Ethiopian Christian, which is very similar to being a Catholic.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois spoke of the double consciousness that African Americans are born into, the need to be able to live in both the black world and the white world. But that double consciousness is not limited to African Americans. My mother was born into it, too. Her tribe was a minority in that section of Ethiopia, and it was essential to her survival that she spoke both the language of her village, Amhara, and the language of the greater outside community, which is Oromo. She was cautious, and when she left the Amharic village, she flipped that switch. She not only spoke Oromo, but she also spoke it with a native accent.

I was just a toddler when a tuberculosis epidemic hit Ethiopia. My mother was sick, I was sick, and my sister, Linda, was doing only slightly better than the two of us. We were all coughing up blood, and my mother had seen enough sickness in her young life to measure the ravages of the disease. She knew she had to do something. She put me on her back. It was all coming at her now: the fatigue and the fever; pieces of her lung splintering and mixing with her throw-up; the calcifications on her bones, where the disease had already spread. She and Linda walked more than seventy-five miles, my mother carrying me the whole way, under a hot sun, from our village to the hospital in Addis Ababa to get help. I don't know how many days they walked, or how sick my mother was by the time she got there. But I do know that when we arrived, there were thousands of people standing in the street, sick and dying, awaiting care. I do not know how my mother managed to get us through those lines and into that hospital. I do know that she never left that hospital and that perhaps it was only by the miracle of that henna cross that Linda and I got out alive.



Today, in the dead of night when I should be sleeping, I sometimes imagine the breath of the woman who not only gave me life but also delivered me from death. I sometimes reach into that tin by my stove and take a handful of berbere, sift it through my fingers, and toss it into the pan. I have taught myself the recipes of my mother's people because those foods are for me, as a chef, the easiest connection to the mysteries of who my mother was. Her identity remains stubbornly shrouded in the past, so I feed myself and the people I love the food that she made. But I cannot see her face.



Chapter 2

My Swedish Mother

My father wanted a son. That is how I came to live in Sweden, of all places. My sister and I were orphaned in Ethiopia in 1972, in the tuberculosis epidemic that cost my mother her life. And the Samuelssons of Goteborg, Lennart and Ann Marie, wanted a son.

They already had a daughter, an eight-year-old foster child named Anna, who had been born to a Swedish woman and a Jamaican man. While it would take decades for the United States to see a wave of international and transracial adoptions, this had been going on in Sweden since the 1950s and 1960s. In those days, it was nearly impossible to find a Swedish child to adopt. Single and pregnant Swedish women either had abortions or raised their children as single mothers, which was not frowned upon by the society at large. So in the late 1960s, my parents were matched with fifteen-month-old Anna. She was not technically adopted but was part of the family and was doted on nonetheless by Lennart and Ann Marie, who were thrilled to have their dream of becoming parents come true.

Before a family adopts a child, there's a journey they go on. For my parents, it was ten long, painful years of "We want to have a baby, but we can't." Today, if a couple is trying to get pregnant and it's not happening, doctors can do tests and, in most cases, offer up a diagnosis and sometimes a measure of hope. Back then, there was just my mother, Ann...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Delacorte Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385744005
ISBN 13 
9780385744003
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar