Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook, by Joe Yonan

Eat Your Vegetables:

Bold Recipes for the Single Cook

Author: Joe Yonan

Publisher: Ten Speed Press

Publication Date: August 6, 2013

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I love, love, love the tone of this book. It's slightly scolding, as you can glean from the title ("Eat your vegetables!") but in a good way. In the introduction the author basically comes right out and says that if you live alone you probably eat crap and you should knock it off. Stop saving the fancy dishes for the dinner parties you're never going to have and cook yourself a proper meal! So true. I don't even live alone and I can relate to that. Plus even those dinner parties (that almost never happen) can benefit from some fancy vegetable recipes. How many holiday meals have I attended in which the vegetables are a total afterthought? A side dish boiled and thrown on the plate? Too many!

Not all of the recipes in the book are for vegetables (or even just for side dishes), but a lot of them are fruit and veggie heavy because the author's right. I do eat like crap too much. Way too much.

Now to plan my next dinner party...NO WAIT, I'VE LEARNED NOTHING!

Simply Delicious Amish Cooking: Recipes and Stories From the Amish of Sarasota, Florida, by Sherry Gore

Simply Delicious Amish Cooking:

Recipes and stories from the Amish of Sarasota, Florida

Author: Sherry Gore 

Publisher: Zondervan

Publication Date: May 7, 2013

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I'm not Amish but I'm a sucker for cookbooks. I figured an Amish cookbook would be awesome, filled with delicious buttery goodness and farm fresh recipes. But Simply Delicious Amish Cooking was a little different from what I expected.

On the plus side, it has a lot of great cookbook qualities. It has beautiful full-colour photos (awesome), a comprehensive index (helpful), and it's spiral bound (awesome AND helpful). It's a cookbook you could definitely use in your kitchen, letting it rest open on your counter while you follow along with the recipes.

On the other hand, the recipes themselves were...well...different from what I expected. I'm not sure what the Amish of Sarasota typically cook, but I was picturing old-fashioned "from scratch" recipes with basic farm ingredients. I was surprised by how many of the recipes called for things like processed cheese spread, Miracle Whip, Jell-O, marshmallows, canned fruits and vegetables, and even soda pop (hint: it's a lot). And there seem to be a disproportionate number of coleslaw and ambrosia recipes. (If you don't know what ambrosia is, it's that combination of canned fruit, marshmallows, gelatin and whipped cream that is favoured by seniors, particularly at church social events. A lot of the recipes in this book, though they go by different names, are variations of this horrible recipe.)

Many of the recipes reminded me of old cookbooks from the 1950s my mother used to have, back when people had just discovered preservatives and were all super excited about it. I figured an Amish cookbook would be old-fashioned, but I didn't think this is what they meant. Where were all the cake recipes that called for, like, 45 eggs? Instead there were things like "Gingerale Salad." What the--?

No Ordinary Apple: A Story About Eating Mindfully, by Sara Marlowe (illustrated by Philip Pascuzzo)

No Ordinary Apple:

A Story About Eating Mindfully

Author: Sara Marlowe

Illustrator: Philip Pascuzzo

Publisher: Wisdom Publications

Publication Date: June 11, 2013

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I had to do an exercise in college similar to the one described in this book. I was studying Buddhism or meditation practices or something and our professor had us all eat raisins slowly. Really slowly. We had to look at them, smell them and talk about them before taking even the smallest bite. I think it took 15 minutes. In the end I was salivating over the deliciousness of the raisin--and I don't even like raisins. I vowed to eat all my food mindfully from then on. I'd take two hour lunches! I'd eat less and appreciate it more! Raisins were awesome! But I forgot about it almost immediately and went back to normal.

This book is pretty much describing that experience, except with an apple. A child is taught to eat an apple mindfully by a neighbour and vows to eat everything slowly from now on. I don't know. Maybe fictional kid in the book will do better than I did with it.

Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson

Yes, Chef

A Memoir

Author: Marcus Samuelsson

Publisher: Random House

Publication Date: June 26, 2012

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I expected the memoir of Marcus Samuelsson--possibly the most likable person to ever wear the mantle of "celebrity chef"--to be interesting, but I never expected it to be so poetic. It starts with Samuelsson's description of his birth mother, or rather his inability to describe her properly. He has no photos of her because no photos of her exist. But there is so much he can learn about her by learning about her food, the food of the region where she lived, the flavours of Ethiopia where he spent his very earliest years. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was just two years old, after walking for miles and miles to take him and his sister to a hospital in Ababa Addis. Marcus and his sister survived--thanks to his mother--and were adopted by a family in Sweden. Today, Marcus Samuelsson's food is influenced by his two families, his extensive travels and the place he now calls home: Harlem in New York.

There is not a great deal of celebrity gossip in Yes, Chef, though he does speak frankly about his dislike of Gordon Ramsay and the exhaustion he felt while filming Top Chef Masters at the same time he was preparing for the first state dinner for the Obamas. Mostly the book is about food. About gravlax and berbere spice and smoked salmon and fried chicken. It's about the food memories of a person whose life story is not only unusual but remarkable.

The Banana Police, by Katy Koontz (illustrated by Kelsey C. Roy)

The Banana Police

Author: Katy Koontz

Illustrator: Kelsey C. Roy

Publisher: Willow Moon Publishing

Publication Date: November 29, 2012

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Mayor McFroontz has a problem. His jungle community is being overrun by elephants! They're everywhere. They take up too much space in the grocery store. They sit in the front row at the movie theatre. They're VERY loud. Something has to be done! Of course, without the elephants around there will be no one to eat all the extra bananas that grow everywhere. Soon the people of the jungle will have more bananas than they can handle. What will they do?

My daughter and I both loved this book. The exuberant silliness and message of cooperation and community spirit reminded me of Dr. Seuss. And the illustrations hit just the right balance between realism and foolishness (they reminded me a little of Michael Martchenko, who illustrates so many of Robert Munsch's books).

I particularly loved the various things the people in the book tried to do with all of their excess bananas, including banana pizza and banana scrambled eggs. My daughter Magda and I had fun thinking of all the things you can do with bananas (though hopefully NOT the banana eggs!).

Candy Experiments, by Loralee Leavitt

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Wow! This book is so exciting as I was reading it I wasn't even thinking, "Oh my daughter would like this" or "The kids in my class will like this" as much as I was thinking, "OMG CANDY! I WANT CANDY! I want to melt it and blow it up and separate the dyes and OMG CANDY!!"

Did you know that if dissolve Pixy Stix in water the water will get colder, but if you dissolve crushed Jolly Ranchers in water it will get warmer? Did you know you can make Peeps Hearts appear to beat? Did you know you can reshape candy canes into fun shapes by heating them? 

The World in Your Lunch Box: The Wacky History and Weird Science of Everyday Foods, by Claire Eamer

 

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What a clever way of teaching kids a little more about the history of their food! It's set up like a week-long food journal, with each day exploring the history of a few lunch time ingredients. I hope they make ten sequels to this book to cover more food facts! (The World on Your Dinner Plate, The World in Your Picnic Basket, etc.)