Search results matching tags 'nonfiction' and 'food'

Thanksgiving

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 16:50:00 GMT

Thanksgiving is maybe one of our simpler holidays. We give thanks for what we have and we eat good food. The giving thanks part usually doesn't require a lot of preparation; maybe just a few minutes quiet consideration. The good food, on the other hand, can sometimes be a challenge. Last November, it seemed like a lot of people came to the library looking for Thanksgiving cookbooks, so I thought I'd highlight a few here this year.

Thanksgiving: How to Cook it Well by Sam Sifton

Thanksgiving by Lou Seibert Pappas, with photographs by Lara Hata

How to Cook a Turkey and All the Other Trimmings by the editors of Fine Cooking

Betty Crocker Complete Thanksgiving Cookbook

Thanksgiving 101 by Rick Rodgers

Vegetarian Times Complete Thanksgiving Cookbook by the editors of Vegetarian Times

If you're looking for something beyond the food, try these titles:

The Thanksgiving Book: A Companion to the Holiday Covering Its History, Lore, Traditions, Foods and Symbols, Including Primary Sources, Poems, Prayers, Songs, Hymns, and Recipes, Supplemented by Chronology, Bibliography with Web Sites and Index by Laurie C. Hillstrom

Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday by James W. Baker

My Cooking Class Book Series

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:47:00 GMT

A new series of cookbooks has recently caught my attention. The My Cooking Class series includes Vegetable Basics, Sauce Basics, Chocolate Basics, Steaming Basics and Middle Eastern Basics. All the books have large color photographs to illustrate every recipe. I'm looking forward to spending some time with Vegetable Basics and Chocolate Basics, then maybe I'll try some more titles from the series.

Geeking Out in the Kitchen

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:05:00 GMT

I've always thought if you can read a recipe, you can cook, more or less. However, I've been told this simply isn't true and that there are actually very smart people who fail miserably in the kitchen. This past summer O'Reilly, a publisher I usually associate with software manuals, published Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food by Jeff Potter. It is not just a cookbook. Yes, there are recipes aplenty but the book is more about cooking as a science, which might just be perfect for challenged cooks with scientific minds.

The book also features brief interviews with people like Adam Savage, from the television show Myth Busters.

Previously on the Books Blog: The Hungry Scientest Handbook

An Almost Overwhelming Selection of Yummy Cupcake Books

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:46:00 GMT

Cupcakes are for everyone! Who doesn't love cupcakes? They're fun, they're delicious and they can be easy to make. There are more than a dozen books devoted to cupcakes here at EVPL! Hello, Cupcake! and What's New Cupcake? by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson are good choices if you want to get fancy with the icing on top. Do you know someone who eats a vegan diet? Surprise them with cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. If you prefer to work with boxed cake mixes, Cupcakes From the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn and Betty Crocker Just Cupcakes are for you. Personally, I think Crazy About Cupcakes by Krystina Castella is one of the most promising of the batch, but you'll have to come to the library, check some out and see what you like best.

Halloween is Almost Here

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:16:00 GMT

Halloween is almost here and new books for Halloween have been arriving at the library over the past month. Here are the two that have me most excited:

Ghoulish Goodies by Sharon Bowers is a whole 150-page cookbook just for Halloween! Extreme Halloween by Tom Nardone covers a broader range of Halloween excitement while doing exactly what the subtitle says: making Halloween scary again!

You might also look at Tom Nardone's older books, Extreme Pumpkins and Extreme Pumkins II, as well as his Extreme Pumpkins website.

The Ripest Moments by Norbert Krapf

Bufkinite@evpl — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:00:00 GMT

The Ripest Moments is a simple pleasure to read. While reading this memoir of growing up in the 40s and 50s in Jasper and rural Dubois County, Indiana, I found myself reminded over and over again of my own childhood in northern Indiana, and the cousins, aunts, and uncles we'd often visit in Ohio and West Virginia.

While this is primarily a book about place, and family, it's also a book about community, and the work ethic that built communities like Jasper - and like Evansville, for that matter - with materials and stock that, in the author's words, were "one generation removed from the farm, two or three generations removed from Germany, and a hundred years beyond the wilderness."

As the title suggests, there's quite a bit remembered about the importance of gardens, orchards, and farms in this book. Family garden plots were central to the survival of pre-suburban, working families. "Summers on the Farm," "The Rye Field," and "The Garden and the Strawberry Patch" are just a few of the more mouth-watering chapters.

If you were born & raised in southern Indiana, you'll find something familiar, and likely something warm, in this book. But even if you're a transplant, this book may speak to you. Quoting the author's preface: "I have always believed that any story set deeply in one time and place, if told well, speaks for other times, places, and people. To put it another way, a sense of time and place travels well. A life lived deeply anywhere resonates beyond the context of its specifics."

This one resonated with me.

The author's website.

Do you stand in front of your closet every morning wondering what will fit, not what do I want to wear?

SuDocQueen@evpl — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:55:00 GMT

Here's my dirty little secret; I've been doing that all summer. To look at me no one would say I have a weight problem, but thanks to sports injuries and other medical issues this summer, I've been sidelined from my normal active lifestyle. Sprawling on the chaise lounge and reading instead of chasing a fuzzy green ball across the tennis court and doing yard work has been a surprisingly enjoyable change. Unfortunately, I didn't change my eating habits along with my reduction in activity and the inches have been creeping on. Every morning when I reach for the elastic waist pants I tell myself 'this is it, gotta cut back', but each night I eat my healthy, delicious, home-grown cherry tomatoes, and still reach for the French Fried Onion rings (ever get one of those big bags from one of the warehouse stores?). Since even my "fat cloths" are getting tight, it's time to get serious.

Counting calories and making a point of skipping the junk food is the best way to do that, but that can be boring (yeah, like that's an excuse -- but what can I say). Doing the right thing can be easier when it's also fun, and I know just the place to go www.mypyramid.gov. Be prepared for a near information overload. Designed and run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the site's main page has so many links to useful information that you hardly know where to start. There are waaay too many of them for me to go through here, but I do want to tell you about my favorite, www.mypyramidtracker.gov.

You start out by telling the Tracker your age, weight, and height (why fudge? No one but the computer will know and if you don't tell the truth, later you won't get an accurate breakdown of what nutrition you need). Next you're asked to list all the foods you ate for the day, then the number of servings. After that the Tracker will analyze your intake for the day and shoot you to a page where you can choice to see if you met the 2005 Dietary Guidelines -- they use cute little emoticons as well as showing you the amount you actually ate and the amount that is recommended; you can see your nutrient breakdown for the day -- you get your total calories consumed along with a breakdown of your fats, proteins, and vitamins; you get "Pyramid stats" which show you graphically whether you got your recommended daily amount of milk, meat, veggies, grains, etc; and lastly you can view your "healthy eating history by day, month, up to a year -- this is assuming you've registered and have faithfully input your eating habits for a while.

Registration is free or you can use "check it out" daily without registering. I think the benefit of registering is that you can save your information for at least a year in order to track how well you're doing. Plus, you won't be able to access your "check it out" information from the whole day if you don't use the same computer all day -- no adding breakfast and lunch at your work computer then going home and adding dinner. You'd have to start from scratch adding your entire food intake for the whole day. Frankly, I think the benefits of seeing how your eating habits change over time is well worth the registration.

Plusses and minuses of the Tracker...well, today I couldn't find Velveeta sliced cheese, so I had to compensate with the next best thing (American/cheddar cheese, processed), but I could choose one slice as my serving size. Plus, I could add plain M&M's and select as few as 10 pieces as my serving size! The Tracker strives to offer a huge range of foods to choose from, from simple foods like bananas to restaurant food like McD's Big Mac. And they have very flexible serving sizes, from a whole apple (and you can even choose large or medium) to a slice as a serving size. My only real quibble is that they don't show you the calories for your individual foods. I like to know how many calories those 10 M&Ms are verses one (or two) Hershey's Kisses so I know which food choice will be cheaper calorie-wise when I'm limiting my sweets intake.

I won't bore you with the anal way I figure that out on my own, but I will tell you about a book that I absolutely love "The Calorie King Calorie Fat and Carbohydrate Counter" (613.23 CALOR 2009). I looked up M&Ms in the book, and it actually told me how many calories there were in one M&M! Okay, okay it only told me the calories for the plain M&M. It didn't go on and do the same for the peanut, almond, or peanut butter, but I was still impressed. Plus, it not only tells you the calories, it also gives the fat and carbohydrate counts. The book covers the normal basic foods -- like meat, breads, fruits veggies, etc -- and an amazing array of sweets (like M&Ms) as well as a huge section on restaurant foods. I found the Outback, O-Charley's, Sizzler, Red Lobster along with the usual suspects like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell. Starbucks was even in there. Do you really want to know how many calories your favorite frappuccino are costing you?

If all our copies of Calorie King are checked out, there's always the Reference copy you can use here, or you can try any of these other calorie counting books.

I'd like to talk more about www.mypyramid.gov but if I do that, this'll become a novel rather than a blog -- it's already leaning in that direction -- so just check it out on your own. If you have any questions on using it, pipe up here or give us a call at Reference!

Cooking Knowledge for College: Vegetarian Edition

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:27:00 GMT

When I decided to become a vegetarian in the fall of my third year at University of Southern Indiana, Carole Raymond's Student's Vegetarian Cookbook quickly became a favorite of mine. It isn't intimidating like a lot of the vegetarian cookbooks I'd looked at before it. Its recipes generally don't make big heaps of food that one person might have trouble eating on their own, which I find nice as well. If I'd had the brand new College Vegetarian Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends by Jill & Megan Carle, back then, it would have had me pretty excited as well. In fact, it looks good enough I am excited! I'm looking forward to trying the enchilada recipe on page 88. Like its non-vegetarian counterpart I wrote about before, the recipes are organized into chapters such as "Just Like Mom Makes" and "Impressing Your Date". Another book you might look at is The Starving Students' Vegetarian Cookbook by Dede Hall, although I wasn't very impressed with it. If you've given up egg & dairy along with meat, check out Carole Raymond's other book, Student's Go Vegan Cookbook.

Cooking Knowledge for College

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

If you're ready to try cooking something more than Hamburger Helper, check out these books: College Cooking: Feed Yourself and Your Friends by Megan & Jill Carle, The Healthy College Cookbook by Alexandra Nimetz, Jason Stanley & Emeline Starr and The Everything College Cookbook: 300 Hassle-Free Recipes for Students on the Go by Rhonda Lauret Parkinson. All three cookbooks offer tips for those just getting started with cooking and lots of recipes to try. The one that looks most promising, though, is College Cooking. It has chapters like "Impressing Your Date", "Just Like Mom Makes" and "Avoiding the Freshman Fifteen". In addition to those chapters, College Cooking has sections with ideas for food for theme parties-- Toga Party, Cinco de Mayo, Tapas Party, Oktoberfest, & 80's Party.

Do You Love Tomatoes? I Love Tomatoes!

Shh_ImReading@evpl — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:30:00 GMT

So far, I have recieved tomatoes from three different gardens this year, which is great because I love tomatoes! They're beautiful and taste good with almost anything; one of my favorite, simple things to do is put them on a grilled cheese sandwich. Yum!

Last week, a new cookbook, The Too Many Tomatoes Cookbook by Brian Yarvin arrived at the library. I was amused to see a whole book devoted to one of my favorite garden fruits. As so often happens, curiosity got to me and soon I was looking to see if we had other tomato books. It turns out there are more than a dozen just waiting for tomato-loving cooks!

So, how do you like your tomatoes?

The Heirloom Tomato : From Garden to Table : Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World's Most Beautiful Fruit by Amy Goldman; photographs by Victor Schrager

Tomatoes and Mozzarella : 100 Ways to Enjoy This Tantalizing Twosome All Year Long by Hallie Harron and Shelley Sikora

The Great Tomato Book by Gary Ibsen with Joan Nielsen

Tomato Imperative! : From Fried Green Tomatoes to Summer's Ripe Bounty by Sharon Nimtz and Ruth Cousineau

Lee Bailey's Tomatoes by Lee Bailey

Cooking With Sundried Tomatoes by Lois Dribin and Denise Marina ; illustrated by Susan Ivankovich