Top Ten Yummy Foods Mentioned In Books

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This topic is right up my (Lori) alley! I love food. I love reading about food. I love making food. I love eating food. I'm surprised I'm not 84,000 lbs.

1.  Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan--This book is basically what it seems on its face: a comedian rhapsodizing on food. Yes, I think the American diet is horrible, but you can't deny that most Americans love their food. :)

2.  Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James Salter and Kay Salter--The book is divided into 365 short entries, one for each day of the calendar year. Each entry has a note about entertaining or recipes or a variety of food related topics that helped make me a better cook and hostess.

3.  An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler--Filled with essays on food, this book forever changed the way I make scrambled eggs and boil pasta.

4.  Heartburn by Nora Ephron--Ths novel describes the end of Ephron's marriage to Carl Bernstein. It also contains a few recipes by Ephron, a known foodie.

5.  Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living by Julie Powell--I loved this book! I love how Powell used cooking to change her life and pull herself out of a major rut. It's one I think of whenever I get a little blah about my life.

6.  Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook--This cookbook has so much yes. Full of amazing southern style recipes, it added a fantastic tweak to my already near-perfect fried chicken recipe and gave me my chili recipe (which has needed very few tweaks over the years). Highly recommend.

7.  100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life--This is my go-to cookbook whenever I know someone getting their first apartment. It has everything. Yes, the recipe titles might be a little strange or creepy (Let's Make a Baby Pasta? Seriously? But it is damn good pasta, with a nice kick of spice!). It's very budget-friendly and has so many recipes that I always recommend it.

8.  Made in Italy by Giorgio Locatelli--I first heard of this cookbook in one of those celebrity reading lists. It's a huge book, with a pretty good-sized price tag, which kept me from purchasing it for quite a while. I finally found a good used copy. :) It is full of food porn and for that I love it.

9.  Audrey at Home: A Kitchen Table Biography by Luca Dotti--What a wonderful idea for a biography! Hepburn's son compiled photographs, details, and recipes that say so much about the beloved actress and humanitarian. I love the idea of using someone's favorite foods to tell their story! If anyone ever writes a biography about me, this is how I want it to be done!

10.  To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion by Phillip Greene--A book of alcoholic recipes related to the novels and stories of one of my favorite authors? Yes, please!

Honorable Mentions:

Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste by Bianca Bosker--I haven't read it yet, but it sounds fun.
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford--I love Italian food. Probably more than I should. This sounded like a good read.
Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food by Megan Kimble--I've started and stopped this one a few times. Sometimes it delves a bit more into the science than I am really interested in knowing, but I love the idea of using my dollars to make a statement.

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A Cocktail & Conversation -- Summer Go-To's

Every other Thursday here at The Broke & The Bookish is A Cocktail Conversation time. One of the TB&TB members will pose a question to 2-3 of the other members of TB&TB crew about books, life, music, etc and then they'll answer and we can converse about it. So grab a cocktail & cozy up for some conversation. It's 5 o'clock somewhere, friends. 

This week we are talking FOOD -- which, besides books, is my favorite thing in life.

This week the question is: 

What is your go-to summer recipe/meal/drink?

  
Jamie says: In the past couple summer's one of our go-to recipes is this healthier, no-mayo potato salad. I love potato salad but I don't particularly love eating mayo so I found this and last year we had to cook for about 30 people during our family vacation one night and it was a HIT. We actually just made it last week to bring to my niece's graduation party. It's so easy to make and it's tasty without being loaded with mayo so I don't feel like I have to miss out on typical ~summer classics~ while still trying to be mindful of what I'm eating.  It's a compromise.

Bridget says: Going to any barbecues this summer? Need to bring a dish? This mac and cheese is always a crowd-pleaser. It's my mother-in-law's recipe and my husband and I make it all the time. It's super easy and super delicious. I never liked mac and cheese until I had this recipe, and once you try it you'll never go back to the boxed stuff ever again!

Daisy says:  One of my favourite things to make is pesto chicken salad, because you can just prepare it at any time and put it in the fridge till you're ready to eat/take it with you if you're bringing food. It's also ridiculously easy to make:
Cook pasta (any pasta, doesn't matter what you choose, it's all good), let it cool off after, add a little bit of olive oil so they don't stick together. Cut up some lettuce and add a bit of rucola (arugala for those in the states), mix in a small bottle of green pesto, add pieces of smoked chicken, pine nuts, add in pasta and TADA DONE! Tastes awesome and you can save leftovers for the next day, maybe next 2 days if it hasn't been sitting out on the table all night. Add tomatoes if you want, not necessary though.
This is always a winner with my friends and family and so easy. You can also switch the smoked chicken with bacon or add mozzarella. This is almost anything goes

Tell us your go-to summer eats!!

Lori Talks Books about Fresh Eating

Spring is finally completely here!  In Oklahoma, we've been flirting with it for a while, but I think we are finally done with temps that dip into the 40s and below.  Good riddance!  I hate the cold.  Our highs are generally in the 70s and 80s.  Basically, I'm a happy camper (you know, aside from looming finals...).

This nice weather ushers in the fresh fruits and vegetables that I actually enjoy eating--strawberries, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, and, soon enough, peaches.  :)  My boyfriend and I decided to give our front and back porches some color.  He planted flowers and I planted some herbs and tomatoes, so that I can make lots of yummy pasta using fresh ingredients that I grew myself!  I attempted to include a picture of my plants, but computer issues.

There is a point to all of this that is bookish related...

Spring has me growing very mindful about what I'm eating.  I want to eat foods that make me feel good and are good for me.  In true book nerd fashion, I've found some reading material to go along with this new urge of mine.

Here's what I've found:

Unprocessed by Megan Kimble--I'm currently reading this one.  Kimble decided to eliminate processed foods from her diet when she was a grad student in her mid-20s.  She didn't have a lot of money and she quickly discovered that having to do things like making her own bread was time consuming--but so rewarding.  I love how, thus far, she's tying in a discussion about some of the sociological, economic, and environmental ramifications of her diet versus the American diet.  It really sparked the idea of planting my own stuff and generally making my own food.

The 20-30 Something Gardening Guide:  A No-Fuss, Down and Dirty Gardening 101 for Anyone Who Wants to Grow Stuff by Dee Nash--I love books that are designed for people who don't have a ton of time or skill, but still want to make positive changes in their lives.  I haven't yet had the time to dive into this one, but it looks like it will be really useful.  It begins with container gardens, which is what I have right now, but transitions into full-fledged gardens.  It even has tips on rotating what you plant for the seasons.

Food Rules by Michael Pollan--I read this one a couple of years ago.  I need to re-read it.  This book is comprised of 64 quick and easy rules for better eating.  A lot of it is common sense and/or self-explanatory, but it helps to see things in black and white.  The book is a distillation of Pollan's In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto, which I have not yet read, but now definitely want to.  Pollan's basic message boils down to "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  It certainly seems like something to strive for.


Now a couple of cookbooks that I have been loving...

Audrey at Home:  A Kitchen Table Biography by Luca Dotti--This one is part biography, part cookbook.  Everyone knows Audrey Hepburn and many view her as a classic style icon.  However, she was also really into food, particularly fresh food.  Her son, Dotti, wrote this book that talks about Audrey's life, her relationship with food as a means of bringing people together, and includes recipes for some of her favorite dishes.  I've read part of the biography, but kept flipping through to see all of the recipes.  I'll definitely have to read more thoroughly when I have time this summer.

Tuscan Sun Cookbook by Frances Mayes and Edward Mayes--One of my favorite parts of Under the Tuscan Sun is the recipes Mayes includes of simple but hearty Italian meals she and her husband prepared after a long day's work.  Here, Mayes and her husband have compiled some of her favorite recipes and not all of them are pasta!  :)  I love flipping through this book for recipes and the food porn.  There are excellent pictures.


And one more fun foodie book...

Life Is Meals:  A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter--Each day of the year gets its own treatment in this book.  Some days have recipes.  Some have food-related anecdotes.  Some have tips on entertaining.  It's a fun and thoughtful book.  I definitely need to reread it.

And lastly, I want to give a quick shoutout to a couple of food blogs that have given me a lot of inspiration--Iowa Girl Eats and The New York Times Food Blog.  I started printing copies of recipes that caught my eye.  That pile quickly became unmanageable.  I've since hole-punched them, and organized them in a binder.  I can pull out the ones I want to try that week, write notes on them after I make the recipe, get splotches of food on them (it gives them character!), and toss the ones that aren't keepers.  It's kind of fun curating my own book of recipes.


Are there any amazing food books I left off?  Any spectacular cookbooks out there?

Tahleen reviews: "Relish: My Life in the Kitchen" by Lucy Knisley

Title: Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
Author: Lucy Knisley
Publisher: First Second, 2013

Rating: 4.5 stars

Lucy Knisley is the daughter of two gourmands, and as a result grew up around all types of delicious food. In this graphic novel, she tells her story through the foods she's tasted, whether its fresh empanadas, spinach and garlic, Japanese cuisine, her mother's farm-to-table cooking, or just plain old junk food.

It took me a little bit to get into this book, as the amount of text is more than I'm used to for graphic novels, but once I hit my groove I devoured the whole thing. Pun intended.

Knisley has a way of making you crave just what she is describing. During my reading, I wanted to go find a bakery or a gourmet food shop or a cheesemonger, or cook one of her many delicious-sounding recipes inserted throughout the book (I love these, and I love the illustrations included with each step.

Here's one of her recipes! I definitely want to make this.

This is a memoir, yes, and it's a graphic novel. But most of all, it's a love letter to food, and to dining with people you care about. If you at all enjoy the act of eating, I highly recommend this one.

I'm glad this won an Alex Award, because without it I might never have picked this one up!

Disclaimer: I got this book from my local library.

Jen Talks About Food & Beverages While Reading

When I read I also need to have some type of beverage beside me.  Reading makes me thirsty I guess?  If I start my book with no drink I can't concentrate until I have something to quench my thirst.  Even though there have been many times that I've been so engrossed in a book my beverage was completely ignored.  So my hot drink became cold and my iced drink turned watery and room temperature.

Lately, my "reading" drink of choice has been tea.  I've been sipping green tea or white tea while reading.  Since the majority of my reading done at night, a book and some tea is a great way to unwind from a busy day.


But as the seasons change so does my choice of "reading" beverages.  During those lazy days of summer I love reading at the beach or by the pool with a glass of lemonade or unsweetened ice tea.  In the cooler fall months I usually prefer apple cider or a hot vanilla chai.  In the winter (after shoveling massive amounts of snow), I sit curled up with a blanket, a book, and a cup of dark hot chocolate.

Now eating...I like to snack but I usually don't eat while reading.  I find it to be too inconvenient.  Unless it's something small like crackers, a granola bar or my favorite Easter candy (Cadbury Mini Eggs anyone?).  But there have been a handful of times that I've eaten a meal while reading. For example, I had about fifty pages left in Perfect Fifths but I was starving (seriously though, my stomach was making obnoxious 'feed me now' noises).  Luckily, there were leftovers to quickly heat up because I didn't want to put the book down for long.  That's been one of the few times I've ate while reading.  Although I think I got more reading done than eating.


I want to know if you eat or drink while enjoying a book, or are you afraid of crumbs and spills?  Do you read while eating a meal or just during snacks?  For drinks do you use a regular glass or are you so concerned about a potential spill your cup has a lid? 

Jen Reviews a Vegetarian: Create Great-Tasting Dishes Through The Seasons

Title: Vegetarian: Create Great-Tasting Dishes Through The Seasons


Authors: Ting Morris, Carla Bardi, Rachel Lane

Published: Reader's Digest, 2010

How I Got It: Purchased myself

Review:

I've been a vegetarian since I was eight years old.  My mom said that one day I came home from school and announced that I wasn't going to eat meat anymore.  She thought it was just a phase and eventually I'd grow out of it.  I guess it's been a pretty long phase since I'm twenty-four and I still don't eat meat.

Since being a vegetarian cuts out an entire food group I've had to learn to be creative when going out to eat.  During the summer most people love going to cookouts.  I hate them.  I always eat before I go and stash granola bars in my purse.  Why?  Hot dogs and hamburgers galore.  Not veggie friendly.  I usually munch on chips and hog the veggie tray.  Oh yeah, and eat most of the cookies.

I'm always on the lookout for a good vegetarian cookbook.  The verdict:  I'm still looking.  Cookbooks are fairly personal.  Everyone's taste-buds are different and it can be hit or miss. This particular cookbook was a miss for me.  There's just too many dishes that I wouldn't try.  Things like Dandelion and Garden Flowers with Quail Eggs or Cauliflower and Pea Samosas.  But some of the recipes don't sound too bad, like Corn Fritters, Pumpkin Fritters or Spinach Gnocchi with Tomato Sauce.  Cookbooks are so subjective.

Even though not all of the recipes in this book appeal to my palate there were still a few things that I loved:

• The gorgeous pictures of the food.  The presentation is excellent.
• Every recipe has a picture of the finished meal.
• Simple recipes.  All of the ingredients and directions fit on one page.  (Side note: I hate complicated recipes)
• Font size, it's fairly large in this cookbook so no squinting while you're preparing a recipe.

Do you have a favorite cookbook?  If you want to try something new where do you usually go to find a new recipe?

Jessi Reviews "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

Title/Author: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher/Year: HarperCollins, 2007
How I Got This: From my local public library
Why I Read It: It was required reading for a class I'm taking (Sustainable Agriculture in Pennsylvania), but it's also one that I've been wanting to read for a while
Rating: 4 Stars




Quick Synopsis: 
Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miraclemakes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

While Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma fell flat for me, this book turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It was fascinating, informative, and yet poetic. 

There were so many things that I loved about this book. I think most of all, I just really liked Kingsolver's idea of chronicling a year of eating intentionally with her family. For an entire year, they tried to only consume food products that were local to their area in the Appalachian foothills in Virginia and food that was currently in season. If you stop and think about it, it wasn't all that long ago that this particular way of life was the norm and, in fact, the only option. 

The writing is excellent, as well. I typically read fiction a majority of the time, and I had no trouble picking this up and getting lost in its pages. I've never read any of Kingsolver's other books, and now I can't wait to! She writes beautifully, yet simply. It wasn't fluffy, and it wasn't clunky. It was just right. The way Kingsolver writes--I was there. My mouth was watering for half of the book. I mean, she just had a way of wording things (like when she talks about gardening or the joy of cooking a meal) that left me wondering why I had never thought of it like that myself. And she was so funny and down-to-earth, too! I couldn't wait to see what antics her and her family would get up to next. At the same time that this book was a lot of fun to read, it was also really informative, too. I learned just as much about food and our food industry as I did while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, except I enjoyed it so much more. I really shouldn't compare the two, but as I mentioned in my review of Pollan's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the perfect example of presenting the general public with a book about food that they'll WANT to read. 

Hands down, though, my favorite thing about this book was that I could actually relate to a good bit of it. I've grown up in a family that values gardening, canning, local food, etc. For as long as I can remember, my dad has grown a garden, and in recent years, I've learned a thing or two about gardening myself. Some of my favorite childhood memories revolved around the tomato and beet canning days in the fall. So, when Kingsolver wrote about harvesting tomatoes or the feeling of watching something you've planted grow into something that will feed you, I wanted to jump up and pump my fist in the air. I wanted summer, and I wanted to try out all of the DELICIOUS recipes sprinkled throughout the book. 

Overall, I highly recommend this book if you love food or if you love learning about food. I learned so much reading this, and I'm looking forward to this summer so that I can revisit these recipes! Yum! 

Jen Reviews Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

Title: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes For Cupcakes That Rule

Authors: Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero

Published: 2006, Marlowe & Company

How I Got This Book: Purchased myself a few years ago

Rating: 4 cupcakes (couldn't resist!)

Review:

A few years ago I came across this book, an entire book of vegan cupcake recipes. This intrigued me because I was interested to see how well a cupcake would turn out with no eggs or milk. Honestly, I didn't think they would be very good...they'd be too dry or dense. But I'm never one to turn down a cupcake so I bought the book and headed to the grocery store to pick up a few ingredients.

For the next couple of months I baked a different kind of cupcake every week. And you know what? They all turned out delicious. Since I was making so many cupcakes I would share them with pretty much anyone who wanted to try them. Unfortunately, I know people who would not try these cupcakes if I told them that they were vegan cupcakes. So I tricked those people into eating them. They were all shocked to learn that the dessert they were going back for thirds and fourths for were vegan.

There is quite the variety of cupcakes recipes in this cookbook. They range from your basic chocolate or vanilla cupcake to a banana split cupcake to a s'mores cupcake to green tea cupcakes to coconut lime cupcakes. Plus there are recipes for vegan frosting. Is your mouth watering yet? The peanut butter cupcakes are a personal favorite, I've made those multiple times.

However, I do have one gripe about this book. It lies. There are not "75 dairy-free recipes for cupcakes". I counted. There are only 39 cupcake recipes. Then there are an additional 14 recipes for frosting or glaze. 39 + 14 = 53. So where are the other 22 recipes?? I'm thinking the authors are counting the variations listed at the end of some of the recipes. That disappointed me a little, I was looking forward to 75 original recipes.

Overall, this is a great book filled with amazing cupcake recipes. If want to make a batch of vegan cupcakes or just try a new recipe (apple cider cupcakes anyone?), then this book is a great place to start.