A Curious Harvest

Most cookbooks are designed to answer the question “What do I want to eat?” Practical Food for the Curious Cook tackles the more realistic and fundamental question, “What do I have to eat?” Did turnip turn up in your local farm CSA? Maybe chard was marked down at the local market, or your neighbor had a surplus of zucchini. Flip through each page to find a beautiful illustration of a raw ingredient, like carrots, beets, kohlrabi or okra and a description of all the ways to prepare it. Roasted, steamed, boiled, grilled! Also available, is a list of ingredients it goes well with. Fortunately, you can mix almost anything and you are well on your way to a colorful roasted vegetable medley. There are no measurements to follow, no timers to keep track of. Maximus Thaler and Dayna Saffertein will guide you to provide cooking inspiration, not cooking dogma. Practical Food for the Curious Cook is for everyday people who want to regain a relationship with their food.

Examines the biochemistry behind cooking and food preparation, rejecting such common notions as that searing meat seals in juices and that cutting lettuce causes it to brown faster

The naming of Cats is a difficult matter,It isn't just one of your holiday games;You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatterWhen I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.So begins one of the best-known poetry collections of all time. The practical cats need no introduction, but this stunning new full-colour version, illustrated by Júlia Sardà, is the perfect companion to Old Toffer's Dogs. Whether you are a cat or a dog person, you will be enchanted by Júlia's highly original interpretation.

"[Strange Harvests is] an impressive addition to the modern travelogue, painting some of the world's most remote terrain in visceral and sometimes breathtaking prose . . . an engrossing read." --NPR An original and magical map of our world and its riches, formed of the stories of the small-scale harvests of seven natural objects In this beguiling book, Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world--eiderdown, vicuña fiber, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano, and edible birds' nests--that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but to their harvesters they are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore, and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history. Strange Harvests follows the journeys of these uncommon products from some of the most remote areas of the world to its most populated urban centers, drawing on the voices of the people and little-known communities who harvest, process, and trade them. Blending history, travel writing, and interviews, Posnett sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape. What do they tell us about capitalism, global market forces, and overharvesting? How do local microeconomies survive in a hyperconnected world? Is it possible for us to live together with different species? Strange Harvests makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity, and new concern.

Celebrating the collaboration between farmer and chef--and the journey from land to table--"Harvest to Heat" explores this dynamic relationship and paints beautiful portraits of these often unheralded people, even while it offers up a bounty of 100 recipes.

When Ruby smells smoke while George and Jack are harvesting, thoughts of a successful broad bean crop harvest are almost extinguished. Join the Farmer family in this pulsating tale of smoky success.

An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.