Summer Cooking

Summer means garden fresh vegetables, outdoor barbecues and ice cream!  These new cookbooks give insights into eating well and staying cool at the same time: 

Eat Cool: Good Food for Hot Days: 100 Easy, Satisfying, and Refreshing Recipes that Won't Heat Up Your Kitchen by Vanessa Seder
   Vanessa Seder, recipe developer, chef, and working mom, has come to rescue of summertime cooks with 100+ dishes you won’t hate to cook when it’s already hot as blazes. Inspired recipes focus on low- and no-heat techniques, make-ahead dishes served cold or at room temperature, smart seasonal ingredients to keep your body cool, and vibrant pairings of flavors, textures, and colors. Seder draws respectfully upon culinary common sense from across the globe, including Asian, Indian, South American, Mexican, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean influences. Each recipe is designed for the home cook, to reduce labor and cooking time, and to keep kitchens cool and diners sated without sacrificing flavor or texture.
   Eat Cool includes a family-friendly array of energy-rich breakfasts, wholesome bowls, vibrant salads, satisfying small plates, crowd-pleasing main courses, perfect summertime desserts, hard and soft drinks, and versatile sauces and pantry staples.  

The Chef's Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables--with Recipes by Farmer Lee Jones with Kristin Donnelly and a forward by José Andrés
   Near the shores of Lake Erie is a family-owned farm with a humble origin story that has become the most renowned specialty vegetable grower in America. After losing their farm in the early 1980s, a chance encounter with a French-trained chef at their farmers’ market stand led the Jones family to remake their business and learn to grow unique ingredients that were considered exotic at the time, like microgreens and squash blossoms. They soon discovered chefs across the country were hungry for these prized ingredients. Today, they provide exquisite vegetables for restaurants and home cooks across the country.
   In this guide and cookbook, Jones shares with readers his wealth of knowledge on how to select, prepare, and cook vegetables. Featuring more than 500 entries, from herbs, to edible flowers, to varieties of commonly known and not-so-common produce, this book will be a new bible for farmers’ market shoppers and home cooks. With 100 recipes created by the head chef at The Chef’s Garden Culinary Vegetable Institute, readers will learn innovative techniques to transform vegetables in their kitchens with dishes such as Ramp Top Pasta, Seared Rack of Brussels Sprouts, and Cornbread-Stuffed Zucchini Blossoms, and even sweet concoctions like Onion Caramel and Beet Marshmallows. 

Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day: A Cookbook by Rodney Scott, Lolis Eric Elie
   Rodney Scott was born with barbecue in his blood. He cooked his first whole hog, a specialty of South Carolina barbecue, when he was just eleven years old. At the time, he was cooking at Scott’s Bar-B-Q, his family’s barbecue spot in Hemingway, South Carolina. Now, four decades later, he owns one of the country’s most awarded and talked-about barbecue joints, Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ in Charleston.
   In this cookbook, Rodney spills what makes his pit-smoked turkey, barbecued spare ribs, smoked chicken wings, hush puppies, Ella’s Banana Puddin’, and award-winning whole hog so special. Moreover, his recipes make it possible to achieve these special flavors yourself, whether you’re a barbecue pro or a novice. From the ins and outs of building your own pit to essays on South Carolinian foodways and traditions, this stunningly photographed cookbook is the ultimate barbecue reference. It is also a powerful work of storytelling. In this modern American success story, Rodney details how he made his way from the small town where he worked for his father in the tobacco fields and in the smokehouse, to the sacrifices he made to grow his family’s business, and the tough decisions he made to venture out on his own in Charleston. 

Ice Cream Party: Mix and Match to Create 3,375 Decadent Combinations by Shikha Kaiwar, with illustrations by Megan Roy
   A simple and delicious cookbook in the form of a board book filled with endless ways to enjoy a sweet frozen treat. Each page is divided into thirds, making it easy to flip around and create a perfect combination for any moment. Featuring bright and colorful illustrations, and both classic and new flavors, including Coffee Toffee Ice Cream, Spiced Hot Fudge Sauce, Black and White Sesame Brittle, Cocoa Nib-Candied Ginger Ice Cream, and Buckwheat Brownies, there's something to satisfy every sweet tooth.
   Indulge in thousands of sweet combinations! With three categories of recipes—cookies and crusts, ice creams, and toppings—to build unique and delicious frozen desserts, Ice Cream Party encourages readers to mix and match different selections in any and every way possible to create fresh, new tastes.
   Ice cream is forever and this book celebrates a deep love for the frozen confection in a fun format. With thousands of combinations for ice cream desserts, this book will offer new ideas and fun options for years to come. Fun format, cute illustrations will make this a family favorite! 

Keep 'Em Full and Keep 'Em Rollin': The All-American Chuckwagon Cookbook by Natalie Bright
   A local rancher and Texas Panhandle pioneer, Charles Goodnight, is credited with inventing the chuckwagon, an iconic symbol of the great cattle drives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a critical part of keeping cattle moving across the Great Plains. The fire-pit cooking techniques used to keep the hard-working cowhands fed are still popular today.
   Keep ’Em Full and Keep ’Em Rollin’: The All-American Chuckwagon Cookbook combines cooking and history with more than 100 recipes and the history of the cattle trailing industry. It includes first-hand accounts of life on the range from the men and women who were there. Archival photos and beautiful food photography add to the enjoyment. 

Wild Child: Adventure Cooking With Kids by Sarah Glover, with photographs by Kat Parker
   In her first cookbook, Wild: Adventure Cooking, Sarah Glover showed how easy it is to cook beautiful healthy food outdoors. Now she brings kids of all ages into the mix, proving that they too can take part in collecting, preparing, and cooking campfire meals the whole family can enjoy. Glover’s simple yet elegant meals are inspired by the land and the sea: fish and ears of corn dangled on a stick over an open flame; perfect bread baked directly on hot coals; kale and potatoes simmered in saltwater; eggs fried alongside spicy sausage and toast; chili-brined cherry tomatoes—and more. Glover emphasizes fresh seasonal food that can be acquired locally. And, while her techniques date back to ancient traditions, the flavors are distinctly modern. Brimming with gorgeous landscape photography from across the Australian continent, this stylish yet down-to-earth cookbook encourages families to embrace the outdoors, teaches young chefs valuable techniques and life skills, and proves once again that everything tastes better cooked over an open flame.

EAT LOCAL.  SUPPORT FARMER'S MARKETS.  ENJOY!

My June Updates

I have been in New Jersey for the past nine weeks, helping my son and his family finish the COVID school year.  As I packed for the visit, these are among the books that accompanied me: 

The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey
   November 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four month tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.
   Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. Feeling guilty for failing to have helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist Freny’s family in the fraught dealings of the coroner’s inquest. When Freny’s death appears suspicious, Perveen knows she can’t rest until she sees justice done. But Bombay is erupting: as armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger?
   If you have not started this series set in 1920’s India, take note and begin with The Widows of Malabar Hill. Sujata Massey gives great insight into the history of India, much like Jacqueline Winspear does for England. 

The Killing Hills by Chris Offutt
   Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren’t getting along. His sister, a new sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can’t handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer’s increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife.
   The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal—sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers—and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor. 

The Other Black Girl: A Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris
   Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.
   Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.
    It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.
   The Other Black Girl was highly anticipated and will have great appeal to anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace. Part satire, part mystery with an ending twist that will have you immediately start re-reading! 

Ridgeline: A Novel by Michael Punke
   On December 21, 1866, Crazy Horse and his warriors lured 80 US soldiers into a trap, killing them all. Whether you know the battle as The Fetterman Massacre or The Battle of the Hundred Hand, this book tells who was there and what happened. The prologue is set on the day of the battle and then moves into the five months leading up to that day. Punke lists the key players—The Lakota, soldiers, and civilians that came to a valley in Wyoming.
   Crazy Horse and his people called the valley sacred. They came to teach the ways of the tribe, to wander the land and to hunt. Col Henry Carrrington led “a traveling circus” of cavalrymen, a military band, a herd of cattle and women and children to bring civilization to the valley. Fort Phil Kearney was established to protect miners going to and from the Montana gold fields despite Jim Bridger’s advice.
   The key players come to life as Punke imagines the inner thoughts and conversations of these real people. He states: “I have worked to stay true to important facts so that readers are not left with as misimpression of historical events.” The “Historical Notes and Further Reading” section at the end of the book gives further insight. Ridgeline is historical fiction at its best. 

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray
   In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps build a world-class collection.
   But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.
   The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths to which she must go—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.
   I have been fascinated by the concept of private libraries and the process of their acquisitions ever since my library science class took a tour of New York City libraries which included The Morgan Library. The authors have given a rightful tribute to Belle Greener and her determination to build a great library.

As you travel, remember to bring enough books!  Thankfully, there are e-books and audio books that can cut down luggage space and weight.  Thankfully, I was staying with a family of readers who took me to two local libraries to supplement my choices.  But I still packed seven books, most are being left behind...

 

Ideas for Father's Day

These new releases will appeal to anyone that seeks adventure, courage and intrigue, or maybe just reflections on time and place. 

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown
   They came from across the continent and Hawaii. Their parents taught them to embrace both their Japanese heritage and the ways of America. They faced bigotry, yet they believed in their bright futures as American citizens. But within days of Pearl Harbor, the FBI was ransacking their houses and locking up their fathers. And within months many would themselves be living behind barbed wire.
   Facing the Mountain portrays the journey of four Japanese-American families and their sons, who volunteered for 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible.
   But this is more than a war story. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers’ parents, immigrants who were forced to shutter the businesses, surrender their homes, and submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of a brave young man, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best—striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring. 

The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History by Margalit Fox
   Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches him with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.
   The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for the “Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.  

Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
   In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory. His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica.
   But de Gerlache’s plans to be first to the magnetic South Pole would swiftly go awry. After a series of costly setbacks, the captain faced two bad options: turn back in defeat and spare his men the devastating Antarctic winter, or recklessly chase fame by sailing deeper into the freezing waters. The commandant sailed on, and soon the Belgica was stuck fast in the icy hold of the Bellinghausen sea. When the sun set on the magnificent polar landscape one last time, the ship’s occupants were condemned to months of endless night. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness and besieged by monotony, they descended into madness.
   Drawing on the Belgica’s crew’s diaries and journals and exclusive access to the ship’s logbook, Sancton tells the story of human extremes, one so remarkable that even today NASA studies it for research on isolation for future missions to Mars. 

Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers by John Gierach
   In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is “an acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives.”
   Lifelong fisherman though he is, Gierach writes with self-deprecating humor about his own fishing misadventures, confessing that despite all his experience, he is still capable of blowing a strike by a fish “in the usual amateur way.” Gierach offers witty, trenchant observations not just about fly-fishing itself but also about how one’s love of fly-fishing shapes the world that we choose to make for ourselves. 

Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River by John N. Maclean
   Home Waters is chronicle of a family who claimed a river, from one generation to the next, of how this family came of age in the 20th century and later as they scattered across the country, faced tragedy and success, yet were always drawn back to the waters that bound them together. Here are the true stories behind the beloved characters fictionalized in A River Runs Through It, including the Reverend Maclean, the patriarch who introduced the family to fishing; Norman, who balanced a life divided between literature and the tug of the rugged West; and tragic yet luminous Paul whose mysterious death has haunted the family and led John to investigate his uncle’s murder and reveal new details in these pages.
   Woodcuts and photographs make this a gorgeous chronicle of a family and the land they call home, and a celebration of the art of fishing, Maclean’s memoir beautifully portrays the inextricable ways our personal histories are linked to the places we come from—our home waters.

 

Have and Safe and Happy Reading Summer!

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Highly Anticipated June Books

Some of the new titles that have received advance reviews have peaked my interest.  These are books that I have recently added to my list of Books to Read, as time allows! 

We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters
   When Waters first opened Chez Panisse in 1971, she did so with the intention of feeding people good food during a time of political turmoil. Waters came to see that the phenomenon of fast food culture, which prioritized cheapness, availability, and speed, was not only ruining our health, but also dehumanizing the ways we live and relate to one another.
   Over years of working with regional farmers, Waters and her partners learned how geography and seasonal fluctuations affect the ingredients on the menu, as well as about the dangers of pesticides, the plight of fieldworkers, and the social, economic, and environmental threats posed by industrial farming and food distribution. So many of the serious problems we face in the world today—from illness, to social unrest, to economic disparity, and environmental degradation—are all, at their core, connected to food.
   This is a declaration of action against fast food values, and a working theory about what we can do to change the course. As Waters makes clear, every decision we make about what we put in our mouths affects not only our bodies but also the world at large—our families, our communities, and our environment. We have the power to choose what we eat, and we have the potential for individual and global transformation—simply by shifting our relationship to food. All it takes is a taste. 

The Eagle's Claw: A Novel of the Battle of Midway by Jeff Shaara
   Spring 1942. The United States is reeling from the blow the Japanese inflicted at Pearl Harbor. But the Americans are determined to turn the tide. The key comes from Commander Joe Rochefort, a little known “code breaker” who cracks the Japanese military encryption. With Rochefort’s astonishing discovery, Admiral Chester Nimitz will know precisely what the Japanese are planning.
   But the battle to counter those plans must still be fought.
   From the American side, the shocking conflict is seen through the eyes of Rochefort and Admiral Nimitz, as well as fighter pilot Lieutenant Percy “Perk” Baker and Marine Gunnery Sergeant Doug Ackroyd.
   On the Japanese side, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is the mastermind. His key subordinates are Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, aging and infirm, and Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, a firebrand who has no patience for Nagumo’s hesitation. Together, these two men must play out the chess game designed by Yamamoto, without any idea that the Americans are anticipating their every move on the sea and in the air.
   This is the much anticipated conclusion to Shaara’s Pearl Harbor saga that began with To Wake the Giant, now available in paperback. 

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin
   Orphaned young, Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants, is raised by the notorious leader of a California crime syndicate, who trains him to be his deadly enforcer. But when Ming falls in love with Ada, the daughter of a powerful railroad magnate, and the two elope, he seizes the opportunity to escape to a different life. Soon after, in a violent raid, the tycoon’s henchmen kidnap Ada and conscript Ming into service for the Central Pacific Railroad.
   Battered, heartbroken, and yet defiant, Ming partners with a blind clairvoyant known only as the prophet. Together the two set out to rescue his wife and to exact revenge on the men who destroyed Ming, aided by a troupe of magic-show performers, some with supernatural powers, whom they meet on the journey. Ming blazes his way across the West, settling old scores with a single-minded devotion that culminates in an explosive and unexpected finale.
   The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is at once a thriller, a romance, and a story of one man’s quest for redemption in the face of a distinctly American brutality. Fans of Cormac McCarthy take note. 

The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease by Daisy Hernández
   Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.
   After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.
   Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. An investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.  

Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Scott Borchert
   WPA guides and artwork are still part of every state’s history, but I know little about the program that set out to create a state-by-state guidebook to America—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters. Scott Borchert tells the story of this raucous, utopian institution, from its starry-eyed early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, its lessons are urgent and strong.
   The plan was idealistic. Take thousands of broke writers, whether formally unemployed or self-anointed, communists or nonconformists, urbanites or country dwellers, young or old, poets or reporters, but all of them American and put them to work writing a guidebook to a country in a Great Depression. Not one but forty-eight guides were written, along with hundreds of miscellaneous books dedicated to cities, territories, folklore, and even slave narratives, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct regional sensibilities.
   All this fell within the purview of the Federal Writer’s Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ not just writers but anyone who seemed ill-suited to manual labor. It was a predictably eclectic organization, directed by an equally eccentric man, Henry Alsberg—a Manhattanite prone to fits of melancholy who took his advice from the anarchist Emma Goldman. 

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
   Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.

   Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess.
   Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
   But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Happy Summer Reading