How to Eat a Small Country
A Family's Pursuit of Happiness, One Meal at a Time
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3.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
"How to Eat a Small Country shares a few key traits with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in particular an infectiously likeable narrator and mouthwatering descriptions of European food. But Finley’s memoir is less precious, more honest, and ultimately more rewarding." -- Boston Globe
A professionally trained cook turned stay-at-home mom, Amy Finley decided on a whim to send in an audition tape for season three of The Next Food Network Star, and the impossible happened: she won. So why did she walk away from it all? A triumphant and endearing tale of family, food, and France, Amy’s story is an inspiring read for women everywhere.
While Amy was hoping to bring American families together with her simple Gourmet Next Door recipes, she ended up separating from her French husband, Greg, who didn’t want to be married to a celebrity. Amy felt betrayed. She was living a dream—or was she? She was becoming famous, cooking for people out there in TV land, in thirty minutes, on a kitchen set . . . instead of cooking and eating with her own family at home.
In a desperate effort to work things out, Amy makes the controversial decision to leave her budding television career behind and move her family to France, where she and Greg lived after they first met and fell in love. How to Eat a Small Country is Amy’s personal story of her rewarding struggle to reunite through the simple, everyday act of cooking and eating together. Meals play a central role in Amy’s new life, from meeting the bunny destined to become their classic Burgundian dinner of lapin à la moutarde to dealing with the aftermath of a bouillabaisse binge. And as she, Greg, and their two young children wend their way through rural France, they gradually reweave the fabric of their family.
At times humorous and heart-wrenching, and always captivating and delicious, How to Eat a Small Country chronicles the food-filled journey that one couple takes to stay together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Finley thought she had found her life's calling when she won the third season of The Next Food Network's Star, subsequently earning her own Food Network show, The Gourmet Next Door. While she was thrilled to be embarking on a new career that would use the skills she learned at culinary school in Paris, her husband was less than supportive of her new venture. Faced with the choice of her career or her family, she left her fledgling stardom behind and embarked on a tour of France and its food with her family in an effort to repair her marriage. With an equal share of culinary delights and disasters, the family winds its way through France and their own unresolved feelings toward each other. Under the guise of a food-focused memoir, Finley spends more time grappling with her own conflicted emotions about balancing family and a career than on her interest in French cuisine, leaving the reader less than satiated.
