Hands Off Cooking or Behind Bars

Hands-Off Cooking: Low-Supervision, High-Flavor Meals for Busy People

Author: Ann Martin Rolk

Perfect for today's hectic lifestyles, this quick-and-easy cookbook will help home cooks free up extra time without sacrificing great homemade meals. Distinctively different, this cookbook features dishes that can be prepared fast and left unattended while the cook answers an e-mail, spends time with the kids (or the guests), or simply relaxes. More than 100 delicious recipes include everything from main dishes and sides to breads and desserts. There are recipes for the crock-pot, stovetop, and oven. Unlike typical "quick" dishes, these emphasize freshness and flavor and avoid highly processed foods. With Hands-Off Techniques, Stress Savers, Eye Appeal ideas, useful tips on ingredients and equipment, plus timesaving recipes, Hands-Off Cooking is the cookbook busy people can't wait to get their hands on.

See also: The New Art of Running or Running past 50

Behind Bars: The Straight-Up Tales of a Big-City Bartender

Author: Ty Wenzel

After reading Behind Bars, a no-holds-barred tell-all in the spirit of Kitchen Confidential, you'll never look at your favorite bartender the same way again.

Ty Wenzel offers a raw and clever account of slinging drinks in New York City on the Bowery before and during its renaissance. Wenzel, now thirty-six, has just thrown in the towel after a decade at the swank Marion's Continental Restaurant and Lounge--a gig that was supposed to be a temporary escape after corporate burnout, but instead, like with most bartenders, took over her life.

Honest, clever, and often scathingly funny, this memoir at once offers outrageous tales, the dirty little secrets of the trade, and inspired commentary on bar culture and the human condition. Wenzel's candid stories of life behind the bar covers everything: sex, money, celebrities, the tricks mixers play on you to get you to stay on that stool, how to jumpstart your own bartender fantasy, that all-important tip . . . and how "pink drinks" like the Cosmopolitan are ruining civilization.

Behind Bars is also a riveting narrative of Wenzel's life outside the bar, which is complicated by her Islamic background, her drive to save enough money and get out of "the life," and the ultimate realization that the grueling lifestyle that is driving her crazy is also something she has grown to love.

Publishers Weekly

In this self-absorbed, mildly amusing, but ultimately uninspired memoir, Wenzel offers her bona fides-a Muslim born in Turkey who moves to New York, attends fashion school, rejects the "shallow and harsh world" of working at Cosmopolitan magazine and spends a decade tending bar in a fashionable Lower East Side club. She then spends the next 250 pages recounting what she learned there, which isn't much: bartenders use sex and flirting to get more tips; a good sexy bartender in New York City can make a lot of money from tips; many movie stars and rock stars (she lists about 30 by name) are good tippers; bartenders are usually pursuing "creative endeavors"; people who drink a lot often throw up. When she isn't recounting details of her nightlife, she often mentions her novelist husband, Kurt Wenzel, but she never really says what her own creative endeavor is outside of making "enough money to stop agonizing about bills every month." And her occasional attempts at sociological insight-"The age of Starbucks has given birth to a generation of people who can't see past their own, self-magnified needs"-are inevitably and hilariously undercut by the author's staggering self-centeredness and blissfully unaware cliches ("Alcohol is a great way to soften the blows of life") deployed throughout the book. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A former "spineless, frustrated Islamic New Jersey girl" chronicles her decade-long bartending stint at Marion's, a "kitschy fifties knockoff" in Manhattan. Wenzel was in it for the money, like most bartenders. That woman behind the counter batting her eyelashes isn't in love with you, the author explains; she's in love with your tip, and it better be decent or your night is going to be a thirsty one. Bars are the stomping ground of outrageous behavior, and Wenzel has plenty of stories about mean and stupid drunks, about men who simply urinate where they stand or sit ("You ever hear of Depends diapers?" she asks), about sex ("Dry humping and heavy necking are de rigueur at the bar, but outright fornication does transpire on occasion. . . . Ah, if restaurant bathrooms could talk!"), about squirting Visine into drinks of the truly loathed, about managers stealing bartenders' tips. "Girly drinks" are undermining the nation's foundations, she tells us, and "taking tobacco out of the environs of a bar is like taking the bubbles out of champagne." Now and again as she lays out the dos and don'ts of bar behavior, Wenzel's vibe gets a little thick: "My wet dream is serving other bartenders. . . . I know they are going to take care of me and I am certainly going to do anything they want short of bending over." But the vibe in most bars is also thick, she reminds us: "Let's face it, God invented bars so people could get laid." For those with a serious bar fixation, here's a look into the barkeep's not-always-enviable world. For those who never seem to be able to get the mixer's attention at a packed bar, here's a helpful hint: you pay for it. Enough jaundice to turn the paper yellow, but alsoenough pep and advice on bar etiquette to get you on the barstool for a test drive. Agent: Douglas Stewart/Curtis Brown

Table of Contents:

	Shaken but Not Stirred	1
	Sex with a Twist	17
	The Rules: How to Date the Bartender	61
	To Tip or Die in Manhattan	73
	Pink Drinks and the Downfall of Culture	99
	The Orphans	119
	At the Kahiki Lounge	151
	There's a Fly in My Martini	175
	Still Want to Mix?	223
	Last Call	257