Exotic culinary discovery on an oddysey around the world

We’ve just received an email with some information about a book Sea Fare: A Chef’s Journey Across the Ocean by Victoria Allman. The description is very convincing, and 5-star comments on Amazon just make us not only want to read the book but eat it as well! Hopefully we’ll get one our way soon, but until then, this book just might be a great New Year’s present for all travel, sea and cuisine lovers! Here is what the media information says:

Exotic recipes, true love, and astonishing cultural discoveries await a young Canadian chef on her odyssey around the world

Victoria Allman’s memoir, Sea Fare – A Chef’s Journey Across the Ocean, begins in Canada, where the young chef struggles to make ends meet while dreaming of the food in far-off places. When friends introduce her to the world of yachting, she agrees to travel as chef on board a yacht. Her subsequent experiences highlight the cuisine of the places she visits. Inevitably, they also highlight the cultures.

Her food-related adventures include buying fish from an “olive-skinned Italian wrinkle of a man,” traveling up a muddy river in Papua New Guinea past “wide-eyed, crusty-nosed children with bloated bellies to barter for bananas among women with breasts sagging to their bellies,” and snorkeling the Bombay-colored shallows of the South Pacific “in pursuit of one of the world’s deadliest creatures for dinner, led by a Tahitian man with dark tribal tattoos of tikis, turtles, and rays” running up and down his body.

“Sea Fare is filled with colorful characters and food-driven escapades,” notes Victoria. “I wanted to bring to life the glamorous and adventurous world of yachting from the perspective of a chef responsible for buying and storing food at sea, catching and preparing fresh fish right out of the ocean, and procuring food – and recipes – from the natives in the places we visited.”

Victoria uses the food culture in each port as the focus of Sea Fare, but her tales will interest anyone who loves to read about travel, yachts, adventure, and above all exotic cultures and cuisine.

Some of the reviews:

When she isn’t catching fish on hidden islands, immersing herself in fascinating cultures, like Papua, New Guinea, or hanging out with colorful characters, she is serving up the most amazing meals………. and sharing her recipes and secrets. Victoria Allman is as good a writer as she is a cook. I loved reading the book. I wish I could have eaten it.

–Rita Golden Gelman, author TALES OF A FEMALE NOMAD, Living at Large in the World.

Acting on wanderlust breeds fantastic discoveries. Making it a lifestyle puts dreams into reality.  In Sea Fare, Victoria presents a global collage of unscripted culinary experience that offers the reader an honest portrayal in the school of life.

– Chef David Shalleck, author of MEDITERANNEAN SUMMER

Chef Victoria Allman became hooked on travel following a trip to the Bahamas more than 10 years ago. Since that time she’s caught, sautéed, simmered and served her way through the Caribbean, Mediterranean, North America, Europe, Africa, and the South Pacific from Australia to Tahiti. Sea Fare – a Chef’s Journey Across the Ocean is her travel memoir of food, lust, finding true love and high seas adventure.

–Tina Koenig, MiamiARTzine

About the Author: Victoria Allman has been following her stomach as a yacht chef for ten years. Culinary trained at the Stratford Chef School in Canada and the Culinary Institute of America in New York, each new destination adds recipes, deepens her knowledge of world cuisine, and contributes to her ever-growing arsenal of fascinating food-related stories. She writes a monthly column for Dockwalk magazine and blogs about her travels at www.victoriaallman.com.

Her book “Sea Fare: A Chef’s Journey Across the Ocean” is available at: www.norlightspress.com and www.amazon.com and at independent bookstores for $12.95.