In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. Over the next six years, while living in Baghdad and Beirut, she broke bread with Shiites and Sunnis, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her memoir of the hunger for food and friendship—a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body in times of war. Reporting from occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husband’s hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war. But just as the young couple settles into a new home, the bloodshed they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to illuminate a vibrant Middle East that most Americans never see. We get to know people like Roaa, a determined young Kurdish woman who dreams of exploring the world, only to see her life under occupation become confined to the kitchen; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient city’s legendary cafés; Salama al-Khafaji, a soft-spoken dentist who eludes assassins to become Iraq’s most popular female politician; and Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo’s sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family recipes—which are included in a mouthwatering appendix of Middle Eastern comfort food. As bombs destroy her new family’s ancestral home and militias invade her Beirut neighborhood, Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war with an extraordinary ability to anchor the rhythms of daily life in a larger political and historical context. From forbidden Baghdad book clubs to the oldest recipes in the world, Ciezadlo takes us inside the Middle East at a historic moment when hope and fear collide.

    Her story is raw like that first bite of wild onion, alive with startling imagery, and told with uncommon emotional power.Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Northwest Indiana. While gathering raspberries as a toddler, Regan preternaturally understood to pick just the ripe fruit and leave the rest for another day. In the family’s leaf-strewn fields, the orange flutes of chanterelles beckoned her while they eluded others.Regan has had this intense, almost otherworldly connection with food and the earth it comes from since her childhood, but connecting with people has always been more difficult. She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned twenty, and a woman in an industry dominated by men—she often felt she “wasn’t made for this world,” and as far as she could tell, the world tended to agree. But as she learned to cook in her childhood farmhouse, got her first restaurant job at age fifteen, taught herself cutting-edge cuisine while running a “new gatherer” underground supper club, and worked her way from front-of-house staff to running her own kitchen, Regan found that food could help her navigate the strangeness of the world around her.Regan cooks with instinct, memory, and an emotional connection to her ingredients that can’t be taught. Written from that same place of instinct and emotion, Burn the Place tells Regan’s story in raw and vivid prose and brings readers into a world—from the Indiana woods to elite Chicago kitchens—that is entirely original and unforgettable.

    F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf— written in 1942 during wartime shortages—An Everlasting Meal shows that cooking is the path to better eating. Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks. In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs know: that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them. She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully. By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.

    Setting out—again—on the barbecue trail four years ago, Steven Raichlen visited 60 countries—yes, 60 countries—and collected 309 of the tastiest, most tantalizing, easy-to-make, and guaranteed-to-wow recipes from every corner of the globe. Welcome to Planet Barbecue, the book that will take America’s passionate, obsessive, smoke-crazed live-fire cooks to the next level. Planet Barbecue, with full-color photographs throughout, is an unprecedented marriage of food and culture. Here, for example, is how the world does pork: in the Puerto Rican countryside cooks make Lechon Asado—stud a pork shoulder with garlic and oregano, baste it with annatto oil, and spit-roast it. From the Rhine-Palatine region of Germany comes Spiessbraten, thick pork steaks seasoned with nutmeg and grilled over a low, smoky fire. From Seoul, South Korea, Sam Gyeop Sal—grilled sliced pork belly. From Montevideo, Uruguay, Bandiola—butterflied pork loin stuffed with ham, cheese, bacon, and peppers. From Cape Town, South Africa, Sosaties—pork kebabs with dried apricots and curry. And so it goes for beef, fish, vegetables, shellfish—says Steven, "Everything tastes better grilled."In addition to the recipes the book showcases inventive ways to use the grill: Australia's Lamb on a Shovel, Bogota's Lomo al Trapo (Salt-Crusted Beef Tenderloin Grilled in Cloth), and from the Charantes region of France, Eclade de Moules—Mussels Grilled on Pine Needles. Do try this at home. What a planet—what a book.

    Kenji López-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. In The Food Lab, Kenji focuses on the science behind beloved American dishes, delving into the interactions between heat, energy, and molecules that create great food. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don’t work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new—but simple—techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes with over 1,000 full-color images, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

    I like getting the balance of taste and texture just right, using familiar ingredients and creating big, intense flavours. Now, I hope you'll use my recipes to make some best ever dishes of your own.' Tom KerridgeAs the most down-to-earth but high-flying chef on the food scene, Tom Kerridge has become known for his big flavours and beautifully crafted yet accessible food. And with more than 100 of his favourite recipes, Best Ever Dishes brings this spectacular cooking to the home kitchen.Tom starts with classics we all love such as tomato soup, chicken Kiev and rice pudding (plus a few new ideas of his own), then refines and elevates them to the best version that he has ever tasted. Give the Kerridge twist to a simple lasagne, and you'll discover that every mouthful is a taste explosion. Put a special spin on a chocolate tart, and you'll transform it into an exceptional, melt-in-the-mouth pud of the gods. With stunning photography by Cristian Barnett, this book really will change the way you cook.

    This luscious cookbook is perfect for anyone who loves the fresh seasonal food of the Pacific Northwest. Defined by the bounty of the Puget Sound region, as well as by French cuisine, this cookbook is filled with seasonal, personal menus like Renee’s Fourth of July Crab Feast, Wild Foods Dinner, and a fall pickling party. Home cooks will cherish Erickson’s simple yet elegant recipes such as Roasted Chicken with Fried Capers and Preserved Lemons, Harissa-Rubbed Roasted Lamb, and Molasses Spice Cake. Renee Erickson's food, casual style, and appreciation of simple beauty is an inspiration to readers and eaters in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

    “Kelly Fields bakes with the soul of a grandma, the curiosity of a student, and the skill of a master.”—Vivian Howard, author of Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Bon Appétit • The Atlanta Journal-Constitution • Garden & GunCelebrated pastry chef Kelly Fields has spent decades figuring out what makes the absolute best biscuits, cornbread, butterscotch pudding, peach pie, and, well, every baked good in the Southern repertoire. Here, in her first book, Fields brings you into her kitchen, generously sharing her boundless expertise and ingenious ideas. With more than one hundred recipes for quick breads, muffins, biscuits, cookies and bars, puddings and custards, cobblers, crisps, galettes, pies, tarts, and cakes—including dozens of variations on beloved standards—this is the new bible for Southern baking.

    An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?"Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it—all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society.Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

    Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There, born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents', her mother's, and her own. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing observations.This is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.

    Her vegetable recipes are sophisticated and daring, beloved by omnivore, vegetarian, and vegan diners alike. Dirt Candy: A Cookbook shares the secrets to making her flavorful dishes—from indulgent Stone-Ground Grits with Pickled Shiitakes and Tempura Poached Egg, to hearty Smoked Cauliflower and Waffles with Horseradish Cream Sauce, to playfully addictive Popcorn Pudding with Caramel Popcorn. It also details Amanda’s crazy story of building a restaurant from the ground up to its currently being one of the hardest-to-get reservations in New York City—all illustrated as a brilliant graphic novel. Both a great read and a source of kitchen inspiration, Dirt Candy: A Cookbook is a must-have for any home cook looking to push the boundaries of vegetable cooking.

    This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the "counterculture" venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to "virtuous agriculture" by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project. The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm

    Author James Peterson, who wrote the book Sauces, a James Beard Cookbook of the Year winner, and the incomparable Splendid Soups, once again demonstrates his connoisseurship with Fish & Shellfish, a monumental cookbook that will take its rightful place as the first and last word on seafood preparation and cooking.Fish & Shellfish demonstrates every conceivable method for preparing sumptuous meals of fish and shellfish, from baking, braising, deep-frying, grilling and broiling to poaching, panfrying, marinating, curing and smoking, steaming, and microwaving. Whether your taste runs strictly to shellfish or to everything seafood, Fish & Shellfish offers the equivalent of a complete cookbook on each subject. Within the chapters on finfish you'll learn how to prepare enticing recipes remarkable for their ease of preparation, their versatility, and their originality Here Peterson offers such splendid flavors and textures as succulent Stuffed Striped Bass with Spinach, Shrimp, and Mushrooms; crunchy Halibut Fillets with Curry, Herbs, and Almond Crust; delicate Salmon Fillets A la Nage with Julienned Vegetables; savory Braised Tuna with Vegetables; and fiery Thai-Style Swordfish Satay.If it's shellfish you prefer, there are pages and pages of recipes for baking, frying, steaming, or serving raw everything in a shell, including mussels, clams, oysters, scallops, lobster, shrimp, crab, and crayfish. Peterson explains how to judge freshness and how to prepare shellfish delights, including lemony-flavored Steamed Mussels with Thai Green Curry; aromatic Littleneck Clams in Black BeanScented Broth; a simple and comforting Linguine with Clam Sauce; elegant Hot Oysters with Leeks and White Wine Sauce; rich and savory Braised Scallops with Tomatoes and Fresh Basil; Steamed Lobster with Coconut Milk and Thai Spices; Shrimp with Tomato Sauce, Saffron Aioli, and Pesto; hit-the-spot Sautéed Crab Cakes; and Japanese Style Grilled Squid, to name but a few of the brilliant and vast array of wonderful seafood selections.Fish & Shellfishalso offers techniques for preparing raw, marinated, cured, and smoked fish.As you exploreFish & Shellfish, you'll learn not only the essentials of seafood preparation but everything in between, including how to make a curry sauce, which red wines to cook with, how to fry parsley, and how to make Vietnamese dipping sauces. You'll learn the secrets of a variety of coatings, how to blacken fish, add stuffings, and deglaze the pan for sauces, as well as discover the delights of salsas, chutneys, relishes, mayonnaises, and butters.Here is seafood in every incarnation, from soups, stews, and pastas to mousses, soufflés, and salads. Try everything from pureed Marseilles-Style Fish Soup and Moroccan Swordfish Tagine with Olives and Saffron to Homemade Cuttlefish-Ink Linguine, and Crayfish Stew with Tomatoes, Sorrel, and Vegetables.Jim Peterson has traveled the world and brought back the best international seafood flavors, textures, and techniques. Now you can improvise on your own with Thai marinades, Indian spices and condiments, and Japanese grilling methods, all of which play off more familiar ingredients to produce memorable dishes.At the end of Fish & Shellfish you'll find a complete Finfish Dictionary, where you'll learn all you need to know about more than sixty species of saltwater and freshwater fish. There's also a 32-page section of color photographs that pictures many of the mouthwatering recipes in the book. And the step-by-step pictorials in the color section will show you how to prepare fish and shellfish for cooking.James Peterson's books have been hailed as the most companionable and dependable of cooking guides. Replete with tables, timing charts, advice about equipment, safety preparations, a glossary of foreign ingredients, and an exhaustive index, Fish & Shellfish will give you the power of flexibility and spontaneity as it transforms you into an accomplished seafood cook. Here is a fundamental cookbook that you will come to depend on every time you think seafood-and now you'll be thinking seafood all the time.

    Using straightforward, easy-to-follow techniques, there are foolproof recipes for cakes, traybakes, bread, biscuits, tarts, pies, puddings and desserts.If you are a confident baker or ready to move onto the next stage, each chapter also showcases the best recipes from the series – Mary and Paul's Signature Bakes, Technical Challenges and Showstoppers, plus the best bakers' recipes from series 4.There are step-by-step photographs to guide you through the more complicated techniques and beautiful photography throughout, making this the perfect gift for all bakers.The finalists' recipes will be available after the final has transmitted in October. For more information go to: www.bakeoffbook.co.uk.

    With appealing vulnerability, he shows cooks of all levels how to become more confident and casual in the kitchen. The verve and naturalness of his approach earned raves from Food & Wine and Bon Appétit to GQ and the New York Times, which noted his dishes prove that “sometimes simple is anything but simplistic.” Some of the recipes in this book are weeknight healthyish meals, while others are perfect for off-the-cuff entertaining. Visual stunners, they’re often composed of fewer than five ingredients. Whether Bastardized Easy Ramen; Malaysian Chili Shrimp; Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Pesto; or Salty Lemon Squares, all are visual stunners and can be carried off with panache, even by beginners.