Saturday, December 5, 2009

Asian Diet or Strawberries

Asian Diet: Get Slim and Stay Slim the Asian Way

Author: Diana My Tran

Many Americans marvel at the slim-ness of Asian women and wonder what their secret is. Cookbook author Diana My Tran (The Vietnamese Cookbook, Capital Books, 2000), and Registered Dietitian, Idamarie Laquatra, reveal the secrets of the Asian Diet in this unique book featuring a fourteen day diet, more than 100 delicious and nutritious recipes, and a plan for life-long health.



Interesting textbook: Unleashing the Idea Virus or ABC for Book Collectors

Strawberries

Author: Oda Tietz

Our Heavenly Treats Series continues with three fresh titles, each accompanied by a miniature kitchen utensil. Perfect gifts for all occasions. It's finally strawberry time! At the first sign of a fresh strawberry stand, the car stops, and desserts with shortcake, red, ripe strawberries, and whipped cream become an evening ritual. This versatile fruit is perfect in fine desserts from tottes to mousse to tasty salads, or a special spring or summer soup. This sweet, popular fruit is the perfect addition to any recipe for cooks of all ages. A stem remover is also added, to make your time in the kitchen even easier.



Friday, December 4, 2009

Around the Tuscan Table or Low Cost Cooking

Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence

Author: Carole M Counihan

Renowned food scholar Carole Counihan serves up a delicious narrative about family and food in twentieth-century Florence. By looking at how family, and especially gender relations, have changed in Florence since the ending of World War II and continuing on to an examination of current food practices today, Around the Tuscan Table offers a portrait of the changing nature of modern life as exemplified through food. How food is produced, distributed, and consumed speaks volumes about a given culture, and this compelling and artfully narrated book aims to preserve, propagate, and interpret Florentines' world-renowned cuisine and culture.

At the market, in the kitchen, and around the table, Counihan gives readers a taste of everyday life in this region of Italy: how eating together unites the family; how the production of food is gendered; how food is a key tool of socialization, and how culture forms aesthetic tastes.

With more than 20 illustrations and age-old family recipes, this is a treat for the senses and the intellect.



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Low Cost Cooking

Author: Florence Nesbitt

Manual of cooking, diet, home management & care of children for housekeepers who must conduct their homes with economy, originally prepared in 1917. A fascinating collection of old recipes, and much of the common sense advice would still be very applicable today.

As the author said: "Economizing on food is a most dangerous thing to try unless the housekeeper has an understanding of food values. She must know what foods are necessary for the health of her family and in what food materials she gets the most for her money, to be able to decide where it is wise and safe to cut and where unsafe." The book was originally published by the American School of Home Economics.

Florence Nesbitt was field supervisor and dietician for the Department of Relief of the Juvenile Court of Chicago, lecturer for the Chicago Visiting Nurses' Association, and formerly visiting housekeeper of the United Charities of Chicago.



Table of Contents:
Business of Home-Making5
Food and the Body7
A Well-Balanced Diet9
Economy in Buying11
Tables of Composition and Proportion16
Setting the Table18
Ceneral Household Directions19
General Recipes21
Week's Menu for Winter with Directions66
Week's Menu for Summer with Directions86
Additional Three Weeks' Menus for Winter101
Additional Three Weeks' Menus for Summer104
Calculation of Cost107
Household Helps--
1.Home-Made Fireless110
2.Cold Lunches112
3.When Mother Works Outside the Home113
Feeding and Care of Children117
Index223

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Parties That Renew the Heart or Food Morals and Meaning

Parties That Renew the Heart

Author: Ellen Jeanne Baumgartner

This book is a must for today’s time conscious host/hostess, giving them a tool to use when planning a party. The purpose in writing this book was to provide structured formats that will enable the host/hostess to be creative, yet have available at their fingertips, ideas that will help them create a gratifying and truly significant party. What is so unique to this entire collage, is indeed the format. It can be used by individuals or large groups. The size of the special event is not a significant factor. There are eight parties presented in this book. The format for all the parties follows a common structure. This book provides an opportunity to create a heart to heart gathering of friends with less stress on the host/hostess.



Read also Onions and Other Vegetable Alliums or Piece of Cake

Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

Author: John Coveney

Food, Morals and Meaning traces our complex relationship with food and eating and our preoccupation with diet, self-discipline and food guilt. Using our current fascination with health and nutrition, it explores why our appetite for food pleasures makes us feel anxious. This second edition includes an examination of how our current obsession with body size, especially fatness, drives a national and international panic about the obesity "epidemic."
Focussing on how our food anxieties have stemmed from social, political and religious problems in Western history, Food Morals and Meaning looks at:
· the ancient Greeks' preoccupation with eating
· early Christianity and the conflict between the pleasures of the flesh and spirituality
· scientific developments in 18th and 19th Century Europe and our current knowledge of food
· the social organization of food in the modern home, based on real interviews
· the obesity "epidemic" and its association with moral degeneration
Based on the work of Michel Foucault, this original book explains how a rationalization food choice - so apparent in current programmes on nutrition and health - can be traced through a genealogy of historical social imperatives and moral panics. Food, Morals and Meaning is essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.



Wednesday, December 2, 2009

5 Minutes Smoothies or Slow Food

5 Minutes Smoothies

Author: Quarto Publishing

Get the low-down on how to create a variety of tasty, satisfying, and all-natural smoothies that can boost your stamina, combat stress, or just delight your taste buds! Includes grater/zester, swizzle sticks, and straws.



New interesting book: Mozilla Firefox or Tablet PCs for Dummies

Slow Food: The Case for Taste

Author: Carlo Petrini

Take a breath.... Read slowly.

How often in the course and crush of our daily lives do we afford ourselves moments to truly relish-to truly be present in-the act of preparing and eating food? For most of us, our enjoyment of food has fallen victim to the frenetic pace of our lives and to our increasing estrangement, in a complex commercial economy, from the natural processes by which food is grown and produced. Packaged, artificial, and unhealthful, fast food is only the most dramatic example of the degradation of food in our lives, and of the deeper threats to our cultural, political, and environmental well-being.

In 1986, Carlo Petrini decided to resist the steady march of fast food and all that it represents when he organized a protest against the building of a McDonald's near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Armed with bowls of penne, Petrini and his supporters spawned a phenomenon. Three years later Petrini founded the International Slow Food Movement, renouncing not only fast food but also the overall pace of the "fast life." Issuing a manifesto, the Movement called for the safeguarding of local economies, the preservation of indigenous gastronomic traditions, and the creation of a new kind of ecologically aware consumerism committed to sustainability. On a practical level, it advocates a return to traditional recipes, locally grown foods and wines, and eating as a social event. Today, with a magazine, Web site, and over 75,000 followers organized into local "convivia," or chapters, Slow Food is poised to revolutionize the way Americans shop for groceries, prepare and consume their meals, and think about food.

Slow Food not only recalls the origins, firststeps, and international expansion of the movement from the perspective of its founder, it is also a powerful expression of the organization's goal of engendering social reform through the transformation of our attitudes about food and eating. As Newsweek described it, the Slow Food movement has now become the basis for an alternative to the American rat race, the inspiration for "a kinder and gentler capitalism."

Linger a while then, with the story of what Alice Waters in her Foreword calls "this Delicious Revolution," and rediscover the pleasures of the good life.

Publishers Weekly

Slow Food, a group of 75,000 members that supports recognition of traditional foods and eating patterns (e.g., the family meal), is an important player in today's battle for the palates and stomachs of the world. As "The Official Slow Food Manifesto" states, "Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters," but to find them, it's going to need more friendly material than this didactic screed. Italian journalist Petrini founded the group in 1989, changing the name of a previous organization from Arcigola to Arcigola Slow Food in response to the opening of a McDonald's in Rome's Piazza di Spagna, a development described in excruciating detail. Petrini's condescending tone ("When you see the word `flavorings' on the package, don't imagine that it always refers to natural substances") isn't helped by a clumsy translation that adheres to Italian syntax. It's a shame, because the elitist tone and convoluted language obscure Petrini's informed opinions on genetically modified organisms and nutritional education in the schools (he references mainly Italian public schools). Petrini's case against McDonald's is perhaps his strongest card, but it's geared mainly to an Italian, or at least European, audience (it's doubtful that many American parents comfort themselves with the thought that "when they're old enough the kids will develop a taste for Barolo") and more thorough and better written arguments have already been made, most notably in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Neither a cookbook nor a foodie memoir, Slow Food is nevertheless an important work. Its closest recent companion would be Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, but instead of further condemning the fast-food industry, this book extols regional food traditions and ingredients and other elements of the slow-food movement. Started in 1989 by Italian food writer Petrini as a reaction to the fast-food lifestyle that was threatening to homogenize Italian culinary traditions, the movement has spread to more than 40 countries. Petrini's book is both a philosophical treatise and a history of the movement all in one slim volume, yet it suffices. Slow Food will help the reader better understand why so many cookbooks and chefs promote local and seasonal produce. Petrini, too, promotes quality, locally produced ingredients in the service of taste, and taste as a key to pleasure. More important, however, he recognizes the cultural and environmental impact of the food heritage that he strives to preserve. Appendixes noting the movement's Italian and international foodstuffs provide an interesting closing note. Recommended for serious culinary collections in public and academic libraries.-Peter Hepburn, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.