I love to read, and sometimes I want to be lost in a story or world for just an hour or two. Oh, I’m always sorry when a good story ends, no matter how long or short. But a good novella is like a slice of homemade chocolate cake. I might want to eat more, but if it’s perfectly done, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as that first, warm slice out of the oven.
A wonderful mix of humor, mystery, and a delightful tendency to land tropes upside down (Vampires drink tomato juice, for example).
This volume has three stories, and it serves as a nice introduction to K.M. Shea’s whimsical style. Fits easily into the cozy paranormal genre. I’ve enjoyed many other K.M. Shea books, but this was one of my first reads of hers. I love the zany, unexpected character traits and the unique tangents of the main plots.
High School student Morgan Fae is beginning to question her sanity.
After witnessing a weird incident involving a werewolf, a substitute teacher/possible vampire, and a thermos of tomato juice, she is taken to the Magical Beings' Rehabilitation Center. The MBRC is an organization that strives to integrate magical beings into human society and hides itself in Chicago’s Union Station. It’s also a massive secret, and Morgan’s accidental initiation into it breaks every rule the place has.
Until MBRC officials can figure out how to undo the damage, Morgan is given a part-time job at the center so its residents can…
I’ve loved gardening ever since I was five years old, when I followed my grandmother around her yard as she watered her dinner plate-sized dahlias. As a college student, I rode a bus to school each day and read every gardening book and magazine I could get my hands on. After I graduated with a degree in Journalism, I realized I wanted to write about flowers and veggies and show other people how beautiful and bountiful a garden could be. My first book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, led to a wonderful speaking experience in Orlando at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival, and to contracts for two more books in the spiritual living genre.
Have you ever wished you could grow those nutritious, meaty peas and beans your granddaddy used to grow? Some had cool names, like Rattlesnake Beans, Big Red Ripper, or Blue Podded Shelling. They were probably heirloom varieties, plants that have been around for 50 years or more. While heirlooms are harder to find than they used to be, and nurseries and garden centers don’t often sell them as young plants, you can still grow these varieties from seeds (tip: look for them online or search for “seed swaps” in your area). Weaver is an organic gardener and food historian who discusses the old-timey veggies our forebears ate and where their seeds came from. You’ll want to plant your own kitchen garden with many of the varieties he covers.
"This book is sure to be a modern classic and is one of the most important books on gardening in the current century." —Jere Gettle, founder, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
Heirloom Vegetable Gardening has always been a book for gardeners and cooks interested in unique flavors, colors, and history in their produce. This updated edition has been improved throughout with growing zones, advice, and new plant entries. Line art has been replaced with lush, full-color photography. Yet at the core, this book delivers on the same promise it made two decades ago: It’s a comprehensive guide based on meticulous first-person…
Growing up as a mixed kid (Mexican, African, Indigenous, and Eastern European) in a homogenous rural town, I relied on stories to offer a peek into different cultures. My love for storytelling strengthened during my studies at UCLA, leading to a career as an actress and author. In my debut children’s book, food is at the center of my mixed character’s journey because of its inviting, universal nature. I truly believe stories centered on food are a lovely way to introduce children to diverse cultures. I hope you enjoy my picks and feel inspired to share a meal with someone new.
Tomatoes for Neela is a beautiful book and such a treat to read knowing it’s written by a prominent chef!
I have to admit that I am not one who loves vegetables (I’m a sweet tooth!). However, this story really inspired me to take full advantage of the access I have to fresh produce. I share Neela’s excitement for her favorite day of the week being the day of the green market.
My own neighborhood has the most charming farmer’s market every Thursday and I love walking around, seeing all the colors and varieties of food there. I was definitely encouraged to add more veggies, especially tomatoes, to my tote bag and enjoy having a go-to tomato sauce recipe from the Padma Lakshmi to share with friends for pasta night.
Padma Lakshmi, bestselling author and host of Bravo's Top Chef and Hulu's Taste the Nation, and Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator Juana Martinez-Neal team up in this celebration of food and family.
“Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of cooking with the women in my family. It is the foundation for all I have spent my life working on.” –Padma Lakshmi
Neela loves cooking with her amma and writing down the recipes in her notebook. It makes her feel closer to her paati who lives far away in India. On Saturdays, Neela and Amma go to the green market and…
I’ve loved gardening ever since I was five years old, when I followed my grandmother around her yard as she watered her dinner plate-sized dahlias. As a college student, I rode a bus to school each day and read every gardening book and magazine I could get my hands on. After I graduated with a degree in Journalism, I realized I wanted to write about flowers and veggies and show other people how beautiful and bountiful a garden could be. My first book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, led to a wonderful speaking experience in Orlando at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival, and to contracts for two more books in the spiritual living genre.
Author John Forti’s book combines personal essays and gardening info on traditional/ heirloom plants. He encourages readers to slow down and reconnect with the land (he’s one of the founders of the Slow Food movement) and learn or re-learn sustainable, traditional gardening skills. He describes herbs like angelica, pre-industrial agricultural practices (I wish I had goats, so they could eat all the poison ivy around my house), and much more. I enjoyed the beautiful woodblock print images throughout the book. They help remind me that I don’t have to depend on all the modern “stuff,” like technology, chemicals, and modern hybrids, to have a successful and satisfying garden.
An A-to-Z compilation of traditional gardening skills and heirloom plants, nostalgically illustrated with wood block art. Modern life is a cornucopia of technological wonders. But when we spend so much time glued to our phones and computer screens, something precious is lost: a sense of connection to the generations that have preceded us. John Forti is acutely aware of this loss, and his mission is to heal it. In The Heirloom Gardener, he celebrates and shares the lore and traditional practices that link us with the natural world and with each other. Arranged alphabetically, entries include heirloom flowers like beebalm,…
I loved this beautiful book because it took me back to my own childhood as an outsider in rural Georgia, a time when I was lonesome and frightened.
If only I had access to a novel tender and poignant as Red Clay Suzie growing up, I would have experienced much needed representation of myself within the pages, discovering a sort of transcendent hopefulness and acceptance I was desperate to find.
The coming-of-age story of Philbet, a gay, physically-misshapen boy in rural Georgia, who battles bullying, ignorance, and disdain as he makes his way in life as an outsider-before finding acceptance in unlikely places.
Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He's happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet's world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen…
I’ve loved gardening ever since I was five years old, when I followed my grandmother around her yard as she watered her dinner plate-sized dahlias. As a college student, I rode a bus to school each day and read every gardening book and magazine I could get my hands on. After I graduated with a degree in Journalism, I realized I wanted to write about flowers and veggies and show other people how beautiful and bountiful a garden could be. My first book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, led to a wonderful speaking experience in Orlando at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival, and to contracts for two more books in the spiritual living genre.
There’s one thing most gardeners agree on: you simply can’t beat the taste of a homegrown tomato. Supermarket tomatoes have been bred to withstand shipping and stacking, so they look like perfect, red globes, but unfortunately, many have lost their old-fashioned flavor along the way. Author Craig LeHoullier is a tomato connoisseur who tells you how to grow over 200 varieties, from planting to harvesting and saving their seeds for another season. The photos in this beautifully illustrated book will make your mouth water—just like the tomatoes he recommends.
This book contains everything a tomato-growing enthusiast needs to know about growing over 200 varieties of tomatoes - how to sow seeds, plant, cultivate, and collect seeds. It also offers a comprehensive guide to pests and diseases of tomatoes. No other book offers such a detailed look at the specifics of growing tomatoes, from the point of view of a true expert, with beautiful photographs and tomato profiles throughout.
I am a food blogger and cookbook author who has been making up recipes for fictional foods from fantasy and science fiction since I was old enough to walk and talk. I love building a bridge between stories, imagination, fandom and food. For over a decade, with a lot of research and some really bad puns, I have been helping other geeks and nerds all over the world make their fictional food fantasies come true.
It was impossible to not salivate while reading Fannie Flagg lovingly describe the delicious southern dishes in her iconic novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. This book is the companion cookbook to the novel and it has recipes for deep-fried chicken, bourbon-chocolate pecan pie, pork chops with apples and sweet potatoes and, of course, fried green tomatoes. I realize that I hardly need to say more, but… that’s not even the best part. Fannie’s signature sense of humor shines throughout this beautiful book. (Don’t worry, the pulled pork is made with actual pork!)
"IT'LL MAKE FOR SOME MIGHTY FINE EATING." --Fort Worth Star Telegram After the tremendous success of her novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and the beloved movie that followed, author Fannie Flagg received thousands of requests from all over the world asking for recipes from the little cafe of her Alabama childhood that was the model for the cafe in her novel. Now, she joyfully shares those recipes, in what may well be the first cookbook ever written by a satisfied customer rather than a cook! Inside you'll find wonderful recipes for: * Skinless Fried Chicken *…
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
I think one of the most important yet hardest things to study with food in history is its sensory appeal.
Taste and smell are so important to how we experience food, but don’t leave a record. Visualizing Taste is a smart, fun look at the role of the senses in food marketing, and how businesses remade markets around visual selling.
To illustrate what an incredible revolution this was, just think about the following: when you walk into a supermarket, what do you smell? Chances are, if it’s a decent one, the answer is nothing. Which is kind of crazy since food should smell!
Hisano shows us how modern marketers changed our relationship to food, elevating color over other attributes of food, such that today we rely more on sight than taste or smell to buy our food.
Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider "natural," "fresh," and "wholesome."
The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of "natural" oranges-we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them-wholesome, fresh, uniform-has been…
I’ve loved gardening ever since I was five years old, when I followed my grandmother around her yard as she watered her dinner plate-sized dahlias. As a college student, I rode a bus to school each day and read every gardening book and magazine I could get my hands on. After I graduated with a degree in Journalism, I realized I wanted to write about flowers and veggies and show other people how beautiful and bountiful a garden could be. My first book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, led to a wonderful speaking experience in Orlando at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival, and to contracts for two more books in the spiritual living genre.
As a Southern gardener, I’ve learned a lot from Passalong Plants by co-authors Steve Bender, the self-described “grumpy gardener” columnist for Southern Living magazine, and Felder Rushing, from Mississippi, who is an eleventh-generation gardener, writer, author, and broadcaster on MPB Think Radio. As the title suggests, their book is about plants that have been passed along from one gardener to another, sometimes over a neighboring fence. Many are now living heirlooms you can’t find at retail. Instead of focusing only on seeds, Bender and Rushing discuss plant swaps, dividing and sharing perennials, and growing more plants from cuttings. Their style is chatty and informal but also informative.
Passalongs are plants that have survived in gardens for decades by being handed from one person to another. These botanical heirlooms, such as flowering almond, blackberry lily, and night-blooming cereus, usually can't be found in neighborhood garden centers; about the only way to obtain a passalong plant is to beg a cutting from the fortunate gardener who has one. In this lively and sometimes irreverent book (don't miss the chapter on yard art), Steve Bender and Felder Rushing describe 117 such plants, giving particulars on hardiness, size, uses in the garden, and horticultural requirements. They present this information in the…
I’ve loved gardening ever since I was five years old, when I followed my grandmother around her yard as she watered her dinner plate-sized dahlias. As a college student, I rode a bus to school each day and read every gardening book and magazine I could get my hands on. After I graduated with a degree in Journalism, I realized I wanted to write about flowers and veggies and show other people how beautiful and bountiful a garden could be. My first book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, led to a wonderful speaking experience in Orlando at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival, and to contracts for two more books in the spiritual living genre.
This is a guide to saving and growing 160 different vegetables, and you must know how to harvest, save, and store their seeds if you want to plant some of the harder-to-find varieties. Co-author Kent Whealy was one of the founders of Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit organization and seed bank that has a collection of over 20,000 varieties of heirloom flower, vegetable, fruit, berry, grain, and herb seeds. He and his former wife, Diane Ott Whealy, are credited with sparking the heirloom seed movement in the 1970s.
Seed to Seed is a complete seed-saving guide that describes specific techniques for saving the seeds of 160 different vegetables. This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book,…
