Creative inspiration: The Soul of a Chef (the journey toward Perfection)

With the rise of glamor-shot cookbooks, social media posts of meals, and cooking shows, it seems like cooking has become one of our favorite spectator sports. And yes, watching, looking at, and reading about food and cooking can be entertaining and fun!

But that’s not what this book is about, and not why I would recommend it to a narrative podcaster, creative writer, filmmaker, or really anyone working to improve their creative process. What The Soul of a Chef does so well is highlight how many inter-disciplinary lessons there are in cooking for the rest of us, whether it’s expressing our personalities through our work, starting with quality ingredients, fanatical attention to detail, devotion to quality ingredients, or perhaps most importantly, enjoying the mundane, repetitive details of the creative process.

I had hope to pack this review with a handful of the countless thoughts I underlined from the book, but I’m on the road so don’t have the book with me. But I can’t recommend it highly enough, and would put it on my shortlist of creative inspiration books, along with Pixar founder Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc, Anne Lamott’s memoir-meets-writing-how-to Bird by Bird, advertising guru Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!, Hugh McLeod’s cartoon manifesto How to Be Creative, and a few others.