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

Traces the creation of a rural Pennsylvania residential subdivision from its planning and building stages to the residencies of its first owners, in an account that offers insight into the years-long process of housing development and how it is related to sprawl and ex-urban growth. By the author of The Perfect House. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

"[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.

Fall is here, with all its wonderful visual delights—not just colors, but shapes! This clever concept book follows a family on a trip to a pumpkin patch and invites children to pick out shapes from the seasonal scenery—apple bushel circles, square hay bales, diamond kites in the autumn sky! Felicia Sanzari Chernesky’s sweet verses are perfectly complemented by Susan Swan’s gorgeous collage-inspired art.