Recipes feature the best of Italian, Asian, and Latin American cuisine, barbecue favorites, comfort food classics, slow cooker creations, everyday dinners, and special occasion inspirations. Sandra lends her Semi-Homemade, worry-free, time-saving approach to a host of delectable appetizers, snacks, main dishes, side dishes, salads, and desserts. The on-call pantry--a foolproof list of at-the-ready convenience foods for recipe success at a moment's notice. Tasteful tablescapes make every dining experience special. Beautiful color photo of every recipe.

    House Beautiful Style Essentials: What Every Room Needs is an inspiring and hardworking handbook that shows readers how to create the rooms of their dreams by revealing what “every room needs.” Chapters like “Every Room Needs a Hiding Place” provide clever ideas for storage and organization, while sections like “Every Room Needs Something Shiny” give examples of how reflective surfaces can enhance and enlarge any space. Simple yet elegant advice from some of the biggest names in the interiors world is paired throughout with stunning photography of the best and most beautiful rooms featured in the magazine. From a room’s overall look and color down to its smallest details, House Beautiful Style Secrets provides tips, tricks, and secrets on how to cultivate a comfortable home and uncover the potential of every living space.

    Luckily, twenty-seven-year-old decorating prodigy Kyle Schuneman knows that a paper-thin wallet and four plain walls don’t have to stand in your way, and the ten amazing, real apartments in this book show it.From coast to coast, these fabulous first homes are the perfect balance between cool design and comfort, and they offer plenty of practical ideas for making your apartment feel open, organized, and inviting. Examples include:■ Multifunctional studios■ A loft that was sectioned into livable areas■ Cookie-cutter apartments with one-of-a-kind personality■ Shared spaces that accommodate different decorating tastes■ Fantastic examples of how to display collections, hide unsightly stuff, and manage picky landlordsKyle’s creative solutions reveal how you can make your space feel much larger than it really is—and how it can reflect your passions, your travels, and your location. He will inspire you to use your surroundings for decorating ideas (think taxi-cab-yellow accents in New York or graffiti-like dip-dye curtains in Seattle). Short on time and long on style, the thirty DIY projects here include no-sew pillows and a dresser update using a little glue and decorative paper. Full of bold, vibrant photos, an extensive resource section, and hundreds of big ideas for small spaces, this book proves that there are no limits on how spacious and how cool your first apartment can feel.

    Bart McDowell takes readers through centuries of Vatican history, describing the days of the Roman Empire, the glorious years of the Renaissance, the power struggle between Church and State that endured from the late 7th century until 1929, and much more. Since the center of the Roman Catholic Church is also the world's smallest nation, McDowell explains religious matters, such as the process of canonization, and governmental operations of the Vatican-highlighted by a visit with Pope John Paul II as he attends to his many daily duties. Photographer James L. Stanfield spent nearly a year inside the Vatican with unprecedented access to its museums, ceremonies, and people. His full-color photographs show art that few visitors to the Vatican have the chance to see-works of such masters as Michelangelo and Raphael-and provide private viewings of Pope John Paul II's quarters, the necropolis beneath St. Peter's Basilica, and world-renowned libraries. Through these beautiful and exclusive photographs and the revealing text that accompanies them, Inside the Vatican celebrates a small, dynamic community unique in the world.

    Now this renowned decorator and lifestyle philosopher teaches you hoe to see with the expertise and clarity of professional designers.First, Alexandra helps you become more attuned to your surroundings-as you set a table, straighten out a linen closet, stroll through a garden, or browse in a thrift shop.  Then, through personal anecdotes; examples from masters; a rich array of ideas, tips, and techniques, she reveals hundreds of ways to see and solve problems or proportion, pattern, color, and composition.  Her simple suggestions-whether it's changing a lampshade, rearranging treasured objects on a table, or moving a chair-will yield dramatic results.  Filled with practical solutions offered with warmth and encouragement , Open Your Eyes helps make each day a visual feats as it deepens your understanding not only of what makes something beautiful but what makes something beautiful to you.

    It can be a gift that enables a traveler to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe, or a thread that weaves an indelible tie; it can be awful or ambrosial - and sometimes both at the same time. Celebrate the riches and revelations of food with this 38-course feast of true tales set around the world.

    It contains reminiscences of many periods of the author's life. He associated with a number of celebrities of his times, including Jean-Martin Charcot, Louis Pasteur, Henry James, and Guy de Maupassant, all of whom figure in the book. He also associated with the very poorest of people, including Italian immigrants in Paris and plague victims in Naples, as well as rural people such as the residents of Capri, and the Nordic Lapplanders. He was an unabashed animal lover, and animals figure prominently in several stories, perhaps most notably his alcoholic pet baboon, Billy.The stories cover a wide range in terms of both how serious they are and how literal. Several discussions with animals and various supernatural beings take place, and the final chapter actually takes place after Munthe has died and includes his discussions with Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven. At no point does Munthe seem to take himself particularly seriously, but some of the things he discusses are very serious, such as his descriptions of rabies research in Paris, including euthanasia of human patients, and a suicide attempt by a man convinced he had been exposed to the disease.Several of the most prominent figures in Munthe's life are not mentioned in Story of San Michele. His wife and children do not figure in the narrative; very little of his time in England is mentioned, even though he married a British woman, his children were largely raised in England, and he himself became a British citizen during the First World War. His decades-long service as personal physician and confidante to the Queen of Sweden is mentioned only in the most oblique terms; at one point, while naming her only as "she who must be mother to a whole nation", he mentions that she regularly brings flowers for the grave of one of her dogs buried at Villa San Michele, at another point, one of his servants is out walking his dogs, and encounters the Queen, who mentions having given the dog to Munthe.Munthe published a few other reminiscences and essays during the course of his life, and some of them were incorporated into The Story of San Michele, which vastly overshadows all his other writing both in length and popularity. Notably, his accounts of working with a French ambulance corps during the First World War are not included.World wide, the book was immensely successful; by 1930, there had been twelve editions of the English version alone, and Munthe added a second preface. A third preface was written in 1936 for an illustrated edition

    This collection follows a year in the life of this community garden, reflected in recipes that are unusual without being daunting. Many of the recipes reflect everyday activitiesTurkish women rolling flatbreads or clipping the young vine leaves to make dolmades, families gathering to grill kebabs on the weekendand the spirit of the community is captured in the photographs and the dishes. The 150 imaginative and seasonal recipes include Moro favorites and new combinations such as Pigeon Smoked Duck Breast with Apples, Walnuts and Chicory; Fried Green Tomatoes with Garlic and Sweet Vinegar; and Courgette and Yoghurt Soup. This character-filled garden was bulldozed to make way for the 2012 Olympics making this a true treasure, documenting the last ever growing season for Sam and Sam and the unique men and women of Manor Garden. Includes metric measurements

    We may be delicate and ornamental on the outside, she said, but inside, we're strong and fiery.Reese's Southern heritage informs her whole life, and she loves sharing the joys of Southern living with practically everyone she meets. She takes the South wherever she goes with bluegrass, big holiday parties, and plenty of Dorothea's fried chicken. It's reflected in how she entertains, decorates her home, and makes holidays special for her kids - not to mention how she talks, dances, and does her hair (in this audiobook, you will learn Reese's fail-proof, only slightly insane hot-roller technique). Reese loves sharing Dorothea's most delicious recipes as well as her favorite Southern traditions, from midnight barn parties to backyard bridal showers, magical Christmas mornings to rollicking honky-tonks.It's easy to bring a little bit of Reese's world into your home, no matter where you live. After all, there's a Southern side to every place in the world, right?

    It could be anywhere in southern Europe where people once lived and then moved away because there was no work to hold them there. You might find things scattered in the empty rooms: a bread oven, a broken spade, earthenware jars that still hold the pungent scent of olive oil; even clothes left hanging in a cupboard, a silent clock on a shelf, a picture cut from a newspaper pinned on a wall.The house is remote, but it is surrounded by a tracery of thin paths. One path goes steeply down to a village; others zigzag their way to scattered huts and stone shelters, to caves where you could hide in times of danger and to unexpected lookout points from where you could watch the approach of animals or human intruders.Julia Blackburn and her husband moved to a little house in the mountains of northern Italy in 1999. She arrived as a stranger speaking no Italian, but a series of events brought her close to the old people of the village. They began to tell her stories that made the landscape come alive, repopulating it with their vivid memories. Until quite recently most of them had been mezzadri, half-people who were trapped in an archaic feudal system and owned by a local padrone who demanded his share of all they had - even a pretty wife or daughter. They were eager to talk about the old way of life and about how everything changed with the eruption of the Second World War. This village was at the heart of the conflict between the fascists and the partisans, so they learnt a lot about death and fear and hunger and how men and women could hide like foxes in the mountains. 'Write it down for us,' they said, 'because otherwise it will all be lost.'Thin Paths is a celebration of the songlines of one place that could be many places; it is also a celebration of the humour and determination of the human spirit.

    Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for." He takes his title from Gaugin's masterwork, and asks the same questions: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The answers are elusive, hiding in French Polynesia, where he travels to write about Gaugin and the lure of the exotic; at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he goes to see the masterpiece in person only to be told it is traveling; and in Norway, where he and his wife journey to see, but end up not seeing, the Northern Lights. But at home in California, after a medical event that makes Dyer see everything in a different way, he may finally have found what he's been searching for.