Saturday, December 5, 2009

Instant Bean or Cooking with Crazy Charley IV

Instant Bean

Author: Martin Ston

For years we've known how good beans are, but who had time for all that soaking, waiting, and cooking for hours? Now The Instant Bean lets us have our beans - and our busy lives, too. From filling and flavorful soups that are ready in less than thirty minutes but taste as if they've been simmering all day, to easy one-dish meals that are elegant enough for company and satisfying enough to feed a hungry family, this essential cookbook gives you more than 150 new and delightful ways to put beans on your table - fast! Whether it's fragrant Chickpea and Coriander Pesto spread on toasted pita bread, delicate Cannellini Beans with Lemon and Basil, or mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Mousse Pie, you'll find fabulous, inventive recipes for pita pizzas, no-cooking icebox soups, wrapped salads, and skillet dinners. These spirited dishes are filled with exotic flavors from Italy and India to the Far East. Noted cookbook authors Sally and Martin Stone also show you how a simple bean spread can add zip to baked potatoes, make a zesty filling for an omelet, or become a no-cook pasta sauce. They give you the lowdown on a variety of legumes, from limas to split peas. For instance, did you know that lentils are the fastest-cooking dried bean? Or that if you saute canned black beans to make them slightly crispy they make the perfect foil for tiny pasta? Plus they offer tips on choosing and preparing the perfect accompaniments for your bean dishes.

Publishers Weekly

No strangers to the nutritional versatility of beans, the Stones (The Brilliant Bean) are equally familiar with the common complaint that beans require too much preparation time to be a practical staple in today's kitchen. Their response is this collection of 150-plus innovative and appealing recipes that generally require no more than 30 minutes' prep time. Speed-it-up tricks include using canned beans when appropriate and, for dried beans, quick-soaking methods, using a pressure cooker and freezing recipe-sized portions of cooked beans. They describe characteristics of nearly 50 varieties of beans (including the not-so-common lablab, adzuki, molasses eyes and rattlesnake) and offer a chart of soaking and cooking times for dried beans. Recipes aim to please jaded palates: e.g., Black Bean Chocolate Mousse Pie; Garlicky Lentil Salad with Browned Sausage; Crisped Black Beans with Orzo and Toasted Walnuts; and Cannellini, Calamari and Spinach Stew. Home cooks will relish the range and ingenuity as well as the ease of preparation of these recipes, although the Stones' reliance on Maggi seasoning in so many dishes seems oddly limiting. (May)

Library Journal

The Stones are the authors of The Brilliant Bean (LJ 3/15/88) and Desserts with a Difference (LJ 4/15/93), recipes for sweets made with root vegetables and beans. Although their newest bean recipes aren't exactly "instant," they use canned, frozen, or fresh beans, not dried, so that they can be made in 30 minutes or fewer. Although quick, these dishes are not necessarily uncomplicated, and some combinations work better than others. Brooke Dojny's Full of Beans (LJ 3/15/96) offers a nice sampling of simple recipes for legumes; larger collections could add this title as well.



Book review: Curious George in the Snow or 20000 Leagues Under the Sea

Cooking with Crazy Charley IV: Cajun and Creole Cuisine

Author: Charley Addison

Cajun and Creole recipes from Crazy Charley Addison.



Friday, December 4, 2009

On Tap or The Herb and Spice Companion

On Tap: A Calvacade of Trivia and Tall Stories Celebrating 200 Years of the Australian Pub

Author: Mark McKay

On Tap delves into the annals of pub-lore to discover funny, sad, illuminating, and intriguing episodes and incidents in the life of this great Australian institution. The author has collected anecdotes, serious history, folklore tall stories and urban myths about Australians and pubs.



Read also Jeffersons Empire or Encyclopedia of the Palestinians

The Herb and Spice Companion

Author: Marcus A Webb

This book guides the reader through all aspects of herbs, including their history; how to grow, harvest, and dry them; and their preparation for medicinal use. This volume also contains an extensive directory of more than 50 spices. Each entry gives the essential properties of the spice, as well as its medicinal and culinary uses where appropriate.



Thursday, December 3, 2009

The Restaurants Book or Black Hunger

The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where we Eat

Author: David Beriss

Is the restaurant an ideal total social phenomenon for the contemporary world? Restaurants are framed by the logic of the market, but promise experiences not of the market. Restaurants are key sites for practices of social distinction, where chefs struggle for recognition as stars and patrons insist on seeing and being seen. Restaurants define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods or standing for the ethos of an entire city or nation. Whether they spread authoritarian French organizational models or the bland standardization of American fast food, restaurants have been accused of contributing to the homogenization of cultures. Yet restaurants have also played a central role in the reassertion of the local, as powerful cultural brokers and symbols for protests against a globalized food system. The Restaurants Book brings together anthropological insights into these thoroughly postmodern places.



New interesting textbook: Eyewitness Travel Guide or Eyewitness Travel Florence and Tuscany

Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U. S. Identity

Author: Doris Witt

The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life. Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.



Table of Contents:
Prologue3
Pt. IServant Problems
1"Look Ma, the Real Aunt Jemima!": Consuming Identities under Capitalism21
2Biscuits Are Being Beaten: Craig Claiborne and the Epistemology of the Kitchen Dominatrix54
Pt. IISoul Food and Black Masculinity
3"Eating Chitterlings Is Like Going Slumming": Soul Food and Its Discontents79
4"Pork or Women": Purity and Danger in the Nation of Islam102
5Of Watermelon and Men: Dick Gregory's Cloacal Continuum126
Pt. IIIBlack Female Hunger
6"My Kitchen Was the World": Vertamae Smart Grosvenor's Geechee Diaspora155
7"How Mama Started to Get Large": Eating Disorders, Fetal Rights, and Black Female Appetite183
Epilogue211
African American Cookbooks217
Chronological Bibliography of Cookbooks by African Americans221
Notes229
Works Cited253
Index282