Cake: A Cookbook


Maira Kalman - 2018
    Filled with Kalman's inimitable illustrations and memories, from chocolate cake on a terrace in Tel Aviv as a child to a gorgeous pink cake enjoyed over Lucretius and Nietzsche in Rome, and sprinkled with seventeen mouthwatering recipes prepared by Scott-Goodman, Cake is a joyful and whimsical celebration of a timeless dessert.

Braided: A Journey of a Thousand Challahs


Beth Ricanati - 2018
    This is the surprise that physician-mother Beth Ricanati learned when she started baking challah almost a decade ago: that simply stopping and baking bread was the best medicine she could prescribe for women in a fast-paced world. Braided chronicles a journey of a thousand challahs and one woman’s quest for wellness and peace.

One Pound Meals: Delicious Food for Less


Miguel Barclay - 2017
    Here is delicious food for less.So much more than cheap dinner ideas - here are meals that cost under a pound but look and taste a million dollars! Recipes for the whole family without breaking the bank.Instagram chef sensation Miguel Barclay is taking the world by storm with his delicious meals that cost less than £1 per person.'I've always loved cooking but I'm not a fan of needlessly over-complicated recipes that waste time and money.So I've created my own style of cooking: simple ingredients, straightforward recipes and mouthwatering meals, all on a budget.Now you can eat the food you love - from meatball marinara to chicken katsu curry, lamb moussaka to aubergine dal - all for under £1 per person.'Miguel's easy-to-follow, ready-in-minutes recipes are for a single serving, and can all be cooked for under £1 per person - just multiply them up for more servings. 'As you would expect from such a relaxed style of cooking, the book is laid out in a similarly laidback manner. There are no chapters or themes. Just flick through the pages and cook whichever dish you fancy. But, as a nod to my Instagram roots and to help you identify types of dish, I have labelled each recipe with hashtags, so if you want to find veggie food, just look out for the veggie hashtags.One Pound Meals are designed to use a core group of ingredients, and this is the key to eliminating waste. Just start with one recipe, and depending on what you have left over, choose your next recipe accordingly. I want you to bounce around the book on a sort of never-ending random journey as you use up those leftover ingredients. It also means you can plan a week's worth of meals in one go and shop more efficiently.'With savvy supermarket shopping swaps and time-saving tips, One Pound Meals makes cooking quicker, easier and tastier, and with less waste.One Pound Meals includes:* Lasagne * Crab mac & cheese * Chicken katsu curry * Pork chop in a mustard & leek sauce * Spaghetti carbonara * Mushroom risotto * Quiche lorraine * Aubergine dal & chapati * Scotch Egg * Ultimate £1 burger * Ham & mushroom pizza * Pancake stack

A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family


Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan - 2011
    But as a thirtysomething fashion writer in New York, she felt the Singaporean dishes that defined her childhood beginning to call her back. Was it too late to learn the secrets of her grandmothers' and aunties' kitchens, as well as the tumultuous family history that had kept them hidden before In her quest to recreate the dishes of her native Singapore by cooking with her family, Tan learned not only cherished recipes but long-buried stories of past generations. A Tiger in the Kitchen, which includes ten authentic recipes for Singaporean classics such as pineapple tarts and Teochew braised duck, is the autobiography of a Chinese-Singaporean ex-pat who learns to infuse her New York lifestyle with the rich lessons of the Singaporean kitchen, ultimately reconnecting with her family and herself.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South


Michael W. Twitty - 2017
    In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. Twitty travels from the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields to tell of the struggles his family faced and how food enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and visits Civil War battlefields in Virginia, synagogues in Alabama, and black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the South's past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep-the power of food to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together.

The Takeaway Secret: How To Cook Your Favourite Fast Food At Home


Kenny McGovern - 2010
    After over 5 years of research and investigation, the secret ingredients and cooking techniques used by takeaway and fast food restaurants can now finally be revealed.In today's increasingly health conscious and now financially cautious world, there's never been a better time to learn the secrets of cooking your own takeaway food at home. From now on, the takeaway menu will become an inspiration to cook, not an expensive option for dinner.Some of the recipes which can now be faithfully recreated at home include Lamb Donner and Chicken Kebabs, Chicken and Vegetable Pakora, Szechuan Chicken, Sweet and Sour Chicken, Chicken Wings, Spare Ribs, Triple-Decker Burgers, Chicken Burgers, Spiced Onions, Kebab Sauces, Sub Rolls, Wraps and many more. Many recipe books call for an extensive and expensive list of ingredients, often interesting to read but impractical for everyday cooking. The Takeaway Secret will stand out as the modern cookbook, ideal for a generation of people who desire delicious food, delivered quickly without the need to slave over a hot stove for hours on end. The recipes included make it possible for home cooks, both novice and professional, to recreate their favourite takeaway and fast food restaurant dishes in their own kitchen.

Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater


Frank Bruni - 2009
    Round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize appetite for food. But his relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early.When he was named the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. He would be performing one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was inevitable, especially for someone whose writing beforehand had focused on politics, presidential campaigns, and the Pope.But as he tackled his new role as one of the most loved and hated tastemakers in the New York restaurant world, he also had to make sense of a decades-long love-hate affair with food, which had been his enemy as well as his friend. Now he’d have to face down this enemy at meal after indulgent meal. His Italian grandmother had often said, "Born round, you don’t die square." Would he fall back into his worst old habits? Or had he established a truce with the food on his plate?In tracing the highly unusual path Bruni traveled to become a restaurant critic, Born Round tells the captivating story of an unpredictable journalistic odyssey and provides an unflinching account of one person’s tumultuous, often painful lifelong struggle with his weight. How does a committed eater embrace food without being undone by it? Born Round will speak to every hungry hedonist who has ever had to rein in an appetite to avoid letting out a waistband, and it will delight anyone interested in matters of family, matters of the heart, and the big role food plays in both.

About Alice


Calvin Trillin - 2006
    You mean I peaked in December of 1963?I’m afraid so.But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.

The Incredible Spice Men


Cyrus Todiwala - 2013
    Tony and Cyrus have taken to the road, exploring the British Isles and adding their own spicy twist to our most classic and best-loved dishes. Try jazzing up a Sunday roast chicken with a honey and ginger, adding a cumin and coriander kick to a shepherd's pie or lacing a Victoria sponge with aromatic fennel seeds and cardamom.With delicious, everyday recipes accompanied by Cyrus and Tony's top tips and favourite spices, The Incredible Spice Men will demystify the contents of your spice rack, and open your everyday cooking up to a world of exciting new flavours.

Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab


Melissa Plaut - 2007
    But it always seemed like a fleeting whim, a funny idea, something I would never actually do.”In her late twenties and after a series of unsatisfying office jobs, Melissa Plaut decided she was going to stop worrying about what to do with the rest of her life and focus on what she was going to do next. Her first adventure: becoming a taxi driver. Undeterred by the fact that 99 percent of cabbies in the city were men, she went to taxi school, got her hack license, and hit the streets of Manhattan and the outlying boroughs.Hack traces Plaut’s first two years behind the wheel of a yellow cab traveling the 6,400 miles of New York City streets. She shares the highs, the lows, the shortcuts, and professional trade secrets. Between figuring out where and when to take a bathroom break and trying to avoid run-ins with the NYPD, Plaut became an honorary member of a diverse brotherhood that included Harvey, the cross-dressing cabbie; the dispatcher affectionately called “Paul the crazy Romanian”; and Lenny, the garage owner rumored to be the real-life prototype for TV’s Louie De Palma of Taxi.With wicked wit and arresting insight, Melissa Plaut reveals the crazy parade of humanity that passed through her cab–including struggling actors, federal judges, bartenders, strippers, and drug dealers–while showing how this grueling work provided her with empowerment and a greater sense of self. Hack introduces an irresistible new voice that is much like New York itself–vivid, profane, lyrical, and ineffably hip

A Meaningful Life


L.J. Davis - 1971
    Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate, and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

Further Adventures in Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics


Heston Blumenthal - 2007
    The book to accompany the second season of the prime-time flagship BBC2 TV series

Up from Orchard Street


Eleanor Widmer - 2005
    Long-widowed Manya is the family’s head and its heart: mother of dapper Jack, mother-in-law of frail and beautiful Lil, and adored bubby of Elka and Willy. She’s renowned throughout the teeming neighborhood for her mouthwatering cooking, and every noontime the front room of the flat turns into Manya’s private restaurant, where the local merchants come to savor her hearty stews and soups, succulent potato latkes and tzimmes, preserved fruits and glorious pastries. She is just as renowned for her fierce sense of honor, her quick eye for charlatans, and her generosity to those in need. But Manya is no soft touch–except, perhaps, where her adored granddaughter Elka is concerned. It is skinny, precocious Elka who is her closest companion and confidante–and the narrator of this event-packed novel. Through Elka’s eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who come in and out of the Roths’ lives: relatives, eccentric locals, doctors, busybody neighbors–as well as the many men who try fruitlessly to win voluptuous Manya’s favors. We live through the bittersweet world of these blunt, earthy, feisty people for whom poverty was endemic, illness common, crises frequent, and zest for living intense. Money may have been short but opinions were not, and their tart tongues and lively humor invest every page. In this riveting story lies the heart of the American immigrant experience: a novel at once wise, funny, poignant, anguishing, exultant–and bursting with love.From the Hardcover edition.

Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I've Played


Tovah Feldshuh - 2021
    But offstage, Tovah struggled to fulfill the one role she never auditioned for: Lily Feldshuh's only daughter.Growing up in Scarsdale, NY in the 1950s, Tovah—known then by her given name Terri Sue—lived a life of piano lessons, dance lessons, shopping trips, and white-gloved cultural trips into Manhattan. In awe of her mother's meticulous appearance and perfect manners, Tovah spent her childhood striving for Lily's approval, only to feel as though she always fell short. Lily's own dreams were beside the point; instead, she devoted herself to Tovah's father Sidney and her two children. Tovah watched Lily retreat into the roles of the perfect housewife and mother and swore to herself, I will never do this.When Tovah shot to stardom with the Broadway hit Yentl, winning five awards for her performance, she still did not garner her mother's approval. But, it was her success in another sphere that finally gained Lily's attention. After falling in love with a Harvard-educated lawyer and having children, Tovah found it was easier to understand her mother and the sacrifices she had made during the era of the women's movement, the sexual revolution, and the subsequent mandate for women to "have it all."Beloved as he had been by both women, Sidney's passing made room for the love that had failed to take root during his life. In her new independence, Lily became outspoken, witty, and profane. "Don't tell Daddy this," Lily whispered to Tovah, "but these are the best years of my life." She lived until 103. In this insightful, compelling, often hilarious and always illuminating memoir, Tovah shares the highs and lows of a remarkable career that has spanned five decades, and shares the lessons that she has learned, often the hard way, about how to live a life in the spotlight, strive for excellence, and still get along with your mother. Through their evolving relationship we see how expectations for women changed, with a daughter performing her heart out to gain her mother's approval and a mother becoming liberated from her confining roles of wife and mother to become her full self.

Inside Rikers: Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony


Jennifer Wynn - 2001
    She chronicles their journeys as they struggle to "go straight" and find respect in a city that fears and rejects them.