Staff Picks: Books
Staff-recommended reading from the
KPL catalog.
You won’t find ghosts, ghoulies, or anything supernatural in Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking and Super Natural Every Day, but you will find delicious recipes made with all natural, whole ingredients. San Francisco-based Heidi Swanson is well known to foodies in the blogosphere for her site 101 Cookbooks, where she posts recipes for food simple in nature but complex in flavor. It doesn’t seem to matter what vegetables, grains, or dairy she uses, she knows how to put things together to bring out the best in every ingredient. I’ve been a fan of her blog for ages, so I was very happy to find that KPL has copies of both of her cookbooks. My favorite recipes are for Straw and Hay Fettuccini Tangle, a pasta dish that uses asparagus and spinach to create a really tasty nontraditional pesto, and Double Broccoli Quinoa, a recipe that might convert even the strictest of broccoli haters. If you’re looking to incorporate more whole foods into your cooking, Super Natural Cooking and Super Natural Every Dayis a great place to start.
Book
Super Natural Every Day
9781580082778
Now that you've all had time to put tips from the book I last blogged about into practice, here's the follow-up you’ve been waiting for. Your time to cook : a first cookbook for newlyweds, couples & lovers by Robert Blakeslee will tell you everything you need to know to keep yourself and your new friend(s) fed. It could just as easily be titled So you’ve never used a stove: what to do when you’ve just moved out of your parents’ home and all you eat now is take-out, for this well-illustrated tome will walk you through every step, almost as though you are in the author’s kitchen. On my to-try list: stuffed mushrooms, and basil & cheese twirlies. Yum!
To justify the name, before every chapter is a page with marriage trivia, some romantic and some shudder-inducing, but really this book is just a solid introduction to culinary magic with a few exciting frills.
Book
Your time to cook : a first cookbook for newlyweds, couples & lovers
9780757002168
I have always struggled with feeling good about the dinners I prepare for my family. And now that I have teenagers whose extracurricular activities decrease the likliehood that we'll all be home during the conventional dinner hour--whatever that is--it has become all too easy to leave them to their own devices to find something they WANT to eat, WHEN they can, and just take care of it themselves. But then I feel guilty about not sitting together at the family table because that connection is still important to me. It's an ongoing battle.
So you can imagine how interested I am in this new book (currently on order) by Jenny Rosenstrach based on her blog of the same name. According to the author:
Family dinner is a mindset, and once you get comfortable with the idea of not doing it, the harder it becomes to make it happen. But the more you force yourself to make meals for your children, the more it will become second-nature, and the more addicted you’ll get to all the pleasures and dividends a family meal can yield.
At this point, I'll take all the help I can get!
Book
Dinner: A Love Story
0062080903