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Baltimore Sun Says What’s Up September 10, 2008

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We got a nice little mention in a Baltimore Sun article on kids cookbooks:

Cooking with children has lots of benefits. It can help make kids less picky about what they eat, steer them away from fatty, salty, overprocessed foods and toward fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and give them lifelong kitchen skills.

It’s also really, really trendy.

Everyone, it seems, has a kids’ cookbook out this summer. There are books for toddlers like The Toddler Cafe by Jennifer Carden, and for teenagers, such as Freshman in the Kitchen: From Clueless Cook to Creative Chef, by Eli and Max Sussman.

Advice from Some Chefs: Cooking = More Money for Goin’ Out September 9, 2008

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Check out Eli’s post on CollegeCandy.com. For those of you into the pop culture references, they abound, and there’s a sweet recipe from the book too:

Advice from Some Chefs: Cooking = More Money for Goin’ Out
By Freshman in the Kitchen

Another year in school, and that means another year away from your parents. What a glorious concept. Breathe in that new year of college air. Do it fast though, because it’s the first week of classes (and parties) and pretty soon the air’s going to smell like burning couches and puke.

Now, college can be the greatest place on earth… that is, until the cash starts running low. And since right after you read this you are going to head to Urban Outfitters “just to look around”, and you are bound to find that rug/lamp/’80s drinking game/hip wall art, and you just “absolutely have to have them all because they are all so cute and will go perfect in your room,” you might not be the most frugal shopper on campus.

College can become a pretty expensive place for a lot of different reasons. Now, we know you aren’t paying for drinks at the bar (ahhh… to be a girl in college…) but next week is your BFF’s b-day and then your MFF’s HY b-day (most favorite friend’s half year birthday) and you are way past making them a friendship collage. Also I’m pretty sure season one of Gossip Girl comes out on DVD soon so there are some big purchases in the near future you cannot avoid.

With all these costs racking up, the 300 person line to that cheap franchised burrito place isn’t looking too long anymore (even though you know it only tastes good after 7 Slippery Nipples) and the Golden Arches seem like the right option to squeeze every penny. But we are here to convince you of another option. It’s called cooking. For yourself. With real ingredients.

Wait… wait. C’mon, at least let me explain before you go check Perez and go watch Lauren Conrad make yet another terrible BF selection (will she ever learn?).

My brother Max and I are professional chefs who wrote a cookbook that’s just for you. It’s a step by step guide starting with incredibly simple recipes that you don’t even need an oven or microwave for and then gets progressively more challenging with each chapter. By the end of our book you will be whipping up three-course meals for your BFFs, MFFs, BFs, GFs, RAs, TAs, roomies, your big sis, and maybe even the ‘rents. You’ll be like Monica from Friends, but without having to deal with Ross’s constant bitching about his lady troubles.

We want to help get it in your mind that cooking isn’t really all that difficult, time consuming, or expensive. In the cookbook we have tips on how to set up your kitchen, how to grocery shop, and even how to boil water and cook perfect pasta. So any possible cooking question you could have, we answer it. And if you come up with something we don’t answer in our cookbook, email and ask us and we’ll get back to you the same day. Technology is really an amazing thing.

Here’s a great healthy recipe below that isn’t too heavy so you can eat it before you go out. It will be so much more delicious that any fast food dinner option, too. We suggest having a few girlfriends pitch in so the overall cost is REALLY cheap. Grab a bottle of wine, crank up the Chris Brown and get cooking. We know you’ll feel a real sense of accomplishment once you finish making this. And hey, isn’t feeling a sense of accomplishment what college is all about?

Metro Times “Food Stuff” August 28, 2008

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Some great notices from the Metro Times:

HIGHER EATING — Authors Max and Eli Sussman will appear this week to sign their book Freshman in the Kitchen: From Clueless Cook to Creative Chef (Huron River Press, $17.95), described as a “hip, thoughtful, good-humored primer for novice cooks,” inspired by Eli’s experience as a student at Michigan State University helping his roommates prepare accomplished meals with ease on a budget. The event will include food and takes place at Book Beat (26010 Greenfield, Oak Park; 248-968-1190), 1-4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 24.

EAT THE PAGE

Brothers Max and Eli Sussman are not celebrity chefs, “but we do got skills.” Combining their years of culinary experience, they have written Freshman in the Kitchen (Huron River Press, $17.95) aimed at rookie cooks. Beginning with simple noncooked dishes and progressing to more difficult recipes, they help guide the cook to success. The instructions simplify the processes, making cooking approachable and fun, as well as lending a measure of expertise to anyone willing to put the effort and time in.

Mittenlit August 22, 2008

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Check out Eli’s post on Mittenlit:

In case you missed this comment from co-author Eli Sussman, don’t miss some terrific events this weekend in Southeast Michigan.

I want to let you know about the new cookbook “Freshman in the Kitchen: From Clueless Cook to Creative Chef” that my brother Max and I recently published through Ann Arbor’s Huron River Press. The book is available now and we will be having a huge kickoff weekend filled with events starting this Friday August 22nd. My brother and I were born and raised in Huntington Woods where our parents still live. My brother went to U of M and still lives in Ann Arbor. I went to Michigan State and recently moved to Los Angeles.

The cookbook is geared toward people that don’t know about cooking but want to learn more. We want to demystify cooking so we created an easy to follow, step by step cookbook that is really a teaching tool so that those who use the book can grow to become a creative chef. The chapters become more challenging as they progress and the cookbook answers all the questions a new cook wants to ask about how to grocery shop, buy produce, use a grill and cook their boyfriend or girlfriend dinner. In our book we talk about learning and growing as cooks while working in Michigan at various stages of our cooking careers.

My brother is currently a chef in Ann Arbor Michigan and recently returned from Chile where he was a chef at a fishing resort in Chilean Patagonia. In Los Angeles I work for a music ad agency. I also moonlight as a chef for two catering companies.

The goal of the book is to create an accessible teaching tool to engage people so they become comfortable with cooking. Since my brother is 25 and I am 23, we can easily connect to a wide range of ages and can speak to a younger audience that many cookbooks overlook.

Starting on August 22nd we have a book release weekend in Michigan with 3 great events. We will be having book signings in Oak Park, Lexington and Ann Arbor. We also will be appearing on WDET’s Detroit Today show on Friday.

Debra Darvick on Freshman in the Kitchen August 19, 2008

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Author and blogger Debra Darvick has written a review of Freshman in the Kitchen:

Max and Eli Sussman’s Freshman in the Kitchen: from Clueless Cook to Creative Chef will do for neophyte cooks what Julia Childs did for French cooking in the 70’s: demystify, clarify, and simplify the art of making a good meal. These twenty-something brothers — seasoned cooks both — take the hungry and clueless through the basics and then build on skills learned in earlier chapters to create multi-course feasts. The book is a beginner’s bible and a terrific resource for those of us who remember when “iceberg lettuce” was a redundant phrase. If you’re local, Book Beat in Oak Park is having a signing party this Sunday, August 24, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm. And if you’re not, order the book by clicking on the link above. Stock up now for those grad presents, moving-into-a new-place presents, and get one for yourself, too.

Cooking Course: A pair of brothers team up to teach college students the art of a good meal August 8, 2008

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Originally published in the Detroit Jewish News, August 8, 2008.

Cooking Course

A pair of brothers team up to teach college students the art of a good meal

Written by Keri Guten Cohen
Photographs by Steve Klein and Kate McCabe

Chefs Max and Eli Sussman are products of their environment - a home in Huntington Woods with no junk food, no bottled salad dressing and a mother who cooked inventive meals from scratch nearly every night. The brothers went from sous chefs in their mom’s kitchen to revolutionizing the “cuisine” at their childhood camp to professional cooks to published cookbook authors.

Eli (left) and Max Sussman check out the produce.

Freshman in the Kitchen: From Clueless Cook to Creative Chef (Huron River Press; $17.95), which hits bookstores this month, is a hip, thoughtful, good-humored primer for novice cooks - an idea that developed from Eli’s experience living at Michigan State University with roommates who had little clue how to cook while he whipped up accomplished meals with ease.

Offering recipes ranging from BBQ chicken and Ultimate Chocolate Fudge Cake to sushi and tzatziki in a manner that takes the mystery out of home cooking, Max, 25, and Eli, 23, provide clear step-by-step instructions (boiling pasta), explanations about cooking tools (choosing the right knife) and techniques (how to clean leeks), time requirements, tips for buying locally produced food - and savvy, humorous, personable commentary.

While writing the book, the brothers - who shopped their concept to only two publishers before landing a deal just a year ago - bounced e-mails and phone calls between Eli in Los Angeles, where he is a part-time chef for catering companies and a full-time assistant media buyer at advertising agency the Gary Group, and Max, a cook at Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor who spent five months of the year as a sous chef at a fly-fishing resort in Patagonia in southern Chile. Before that, he honed his skills at eve - the restaurant, also in Ann Arbor.

“We both bring unique abilities to the table,” says Eli. “Max has a more high-end culinary background, where I have experience working in fast breakfast and lunch joints where speed is a necessity, but the quality is still high.”

Working summers in the kitchen at > >Habonim Dror’s Camp Tavor in Three Rivers, Mich., was the beginning of the culinary teamwork. “I started to truly become passionate about cooking when we worked together at camp,” says Eli. “We would go through our meats and produce and then stand in the kitchen and brainstorm, bouncing ideas off each other and the rest of the staff.

“Max was the brains behind the operation, and I was his sounding board. I would tell him what I thought we could accomplish in the time frame we had because Max always wanted to do something crazy like make a three-course Indian meal with only a few hours to spare before dinner.”

With that same give-and-take relationship, the brothers targeted Freshman in the Kitchen to their contemporaries. “Most kids entering college are coming straight from living with their parents,” explains Eli. “If kids realized they could cook delicious food for themselves and not spend all their money eating in average restaurants, they’d probably start cooking more.”

Adds Max, “I think people are becoming interested in knowing where their food comes from, who makes it and how to prepare it. The Postville incident [the Iowa kosher meatÐsupplier scandal] is a good example of this,” he says. “If we knew half the things that go on in large food processors like that, we’d want to meet the people who grow our food and buy directly from them at farmers’ markets as much as we could.”Ê

The brothers are the sons of Lynne Avadenka, a book artist (who tested recipes for the book), and attorney Marc Sussman, well known in certain circles for his homemade challah and Passover lamb stew. The pair, who still live in Huntington Woods and are members of West Bloomfield’s Congregation B’nai Moshe, outlawed junk food at home while the boys were growing up - a serendipitous decision. “They were always adventurous eaters, willing to try what was put in front of them. That made it more fun for me,” says Avadenka. Adds Marc Sussman, “They wanted the book to look good and be functional; they thought about all that.”

The best part? “We thought it was great they did this together, especially since Eli moved to L.A.,” says Avadenka. “It’s a way for them to stay close, and we’re happy to see it.”