In Praise of Tomatoes

Straight from the vine to the cookpot and to terrific trivia: everyone will enjoy this juicy tribute to tangy, tasty tomato. Begin with a horticultural look at resurgent vintage varieties: a comprehensive chart gives specific growing and eating details on more than 50 delicious types, both heirloom and hybrid. Find out how to create and cultivate the “essential tomato garden,” even on a windowsill. From the backyard, head straight to the kitchen with information on how to store, peel, freeze, dry, can, and cook up the harvest. Recipes include such luscious dishes as tomato soup, jam, bread, and green tomato pie. The enlightening feast rounds out with fun facts on the tomato’s history and tomato festivals.

Chez Panisse Vegetables

More than 250 spirited recipes showcasing 40+ vegetables from amaranth to zucchini. For each, there is a short essay describing its cultivation, how it is used in Chez Panisse kitchens, how to shop for it, and how to prepare it for cooking. The ingenious and varied recipes are drawn from all seasons celebrating the glorious tastes, colors and textures of garden vegetables. This remarkable compendium of culinary expertise covers a broad range from unexpected combinations such as Grilled Asparagus with Blood Oranges and Tapenade toast to dishes as radically simple as Spring Onion Sandwiches.

One Potato, Two Potato

Everyone loves potatoes. This book transports cooks beyond the usual side dishes and introduces them to the secrets and specialties of great chefs and cooks the world over. Learn how to prepare spectacularly simple appetizers, including dips, chips, and showstopping cocktail potatoes made from a few ordinary ingredients. Here are dozens of major soups and salads, including rich summer Vichyssoise and Herb Garden Potato Salad. There are more than fifty main-dish possibilities, such as Sunday Lamb with Proper Roast Potatoes and Chicken Stuffed with Potatoes and Shiitake Mushrooms?not to mention a sophisticated rendition of Shepherd's Pie. The potato turns up as the hidden ingredient in such breads as Potato Cheddar Bread with Chives and in such desserts as moist Farmhouse Chocolate Cake. A comprehensive cookbook starring the world's favorite food, with hundreds of recipes, from humble dishes to haute cuisine.

Mostly Vegetables

150 delightfully healthy, simply elegant recipes celebrate fresh vegetables and fruits for meatless and almost meatless meals. Color photos.

Vegetables : Recipes from 40 Great French Chefs

Thirty-five of France's most prominent chefs share recipes that will make even the most resistant vegetable snubber reach for a fork. The chefs—including pastry god Pierre Hermé, l'Arpège's elegant Alain Passard, and grande dame of Parisian cuisine Hélène Darroze—create eye-catching and satisfying recipes with vegetables ranging from spinach and broccoli to rhubarb and sweet peas, from leeks and beets to fennel and artichokes. Vegetables offers a fresh, new view of French culinary trends. Vegetables opens with a vegetable patch tour featuring Joël Thiébault, a respected French farmer who delivers his amazing produce to the doorsteps of prominent French foodies including cookbook maven Patricia Wells. Joël offers tips for growing your own produce or selecting the best vegetables at market, along with the history and nutritional properties of the featured vegetables.

Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruit

This exceptional book highlights more than 1,000 vegetables, fruits, and herbs, providing all the information you need for growing, harvesting, and cooking. Written by three leading garden experts, with 600 recipes and 1,200 color photos. In The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruit, a dream team of top gardening experts provides for each plant: A history of the its origins and how it has traditionally been used; common, family, and Latin names; a wide-ranging list of species from which to choose, detailing size, leaf shape, form, and color; information on cultivation and propagation, pests and diseases; and harvesting and storage tips. The book explores all uses—medicinal, culinary, cosmetic and domestic—and features more than 600 recipes for enjoying your bounty.

Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook

What to do with a basketful of luscious tomatoes? How to prepare an armload of summer squash? Where to turn for new sweet corn preparations? These are the questions vegetable-lovers grapple with as they pick fresh-from-the-garden produce in their own backyards or from the ever-expanding farmer's market carts. The vegetables are so beautiful, yet their freshness so fleeting. Andrea Chesman is a cook and gardener who knows what it's like to be staring down pounds of vegetables and panicking about how to use them all before it's too late. Simple. Delicious. Planned to fit the season. That's the approach Chesman brings to the 175 recipes she's developed for The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook. The vegetables are organized seasonally by crop-readiness, with attention paid to combining vegetables that ripen together. All the favorites--spring salad greens, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, peas, potatoes, and more--are included, along with the more unusual--artichokes, endive, rutabagas, and edamame, to name a few. Popular techniques such as roasting and grilling accentuate the flavor in recipes such as Grilled Chicken and Asparagus Salad, Soy-Sesame Grilled Eggplant, and Maple Roasted Carrots. There are many vegetarian options, but even when combined with meat, vegetables get top billing. From Egg Rolls to Borscht, Caponata to Sweet Potato Pie, The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook has dishes destined to please every palate. And to address those nights when the mounds of vegetables are just too overwhelming to try a whole new recipe, Chesman includes fourteen master recipes for simple preparation techniques that can accommodate whatever is in your vegetable basket. Learn the basics of preparing a creamy quiche, a bubbly gratin, a basic stir-fry, or a zesty lo-mein. It's easy to create new meals every month around the freshest assortments of seasonal vegetables. The Garden-Fresh Vegetable Cookbook is sure to become a favorite for everyone who wants to enjoy their vegetables fresh, local, seasonal, and simple.

Pumpkin, A Super Food for All 12 Months of the Year,

We all know that pumpkin pie is super, so why not enjoy more of this delicious, nutirious squash in year-round recipes? Dee Dee Stovel carves out a new image for pumpkin with such creative combinations as Roasted Ginger Pumpkin & Pear Soup; Pumpkin Sage Risotto; Spring Spinach Salad with Strawberries and Pepitas; White Bean, Chicken, and Pumpkin Chili; Pumpkin Pizza with Gorgonzola Cheese; and Pork Tenderloin with Red Wine Pumpkin Sauce. These 125 recipes celebrate the varied ways that pumpkin can enhance a wide range of dishes, from beverages, starters, and snacks to soups, salads, main courses, and of course, pies, cookies, breads, and cakes. Whether starting from the whole pumpkin (which, Stovel shows, is easier than many may think) or from canned pumpkin (a fine alternative), cooks will be surprised by the variety of ways they can use the entire fruit, inclucing blossoms and seeds, as well as the pulp itself. Special features include complete menus and decorating and entertaining ideas for harvest celebrations and Halloween parties, as well as sidebars highlighting pumpkin festivals, lore, and growing facts. With pumpkin acreage and sales growing every year, and more health writers touting the fruit's nutritional powers, Pumpkin comes to the rescue for everyone who wants to expand their cooking repertoire.

Vegetables for Vitality

Vegetables for Vitality shows you how to get more illness-fighting vegetables into your diet through delicious recipes made with foods you already know and love. This exciting cookbook includes more than 200 mouthwatering recipes--for vegetable lovers and meat eaters alike--that creatively add vegetables to your daily diet. Five a day has never been so easy or tasted so great. Just serve up homestyle favorite Chunky Chicken and Vegetable Pot Pie, tantalizing Cheese Tortellini with Butternut Squash Sauce, or tasty Sweet Potato Biscuits. Or try delicious Carrot-Raisin Muffins--packed with heart-healthy beta carotene--or sizzling Beef, Pepper, and Onion fajitas that could slash your risk of colon cancer. Kids don't like vegetables? Sneak them into your family's meals with dips, sandwich spreads, and condiments so yummy they'll never even know they're eating healthy! You'll also find a bonus 84-page health section that outlines the health benefits of particular vegetables. All the recipes include easy-to-follow instructions, complete preparation and cooking times, nutrition counts, and a beautiful full-color photo of the finished dish. Filled with delicious dishes and the healing power of vegetables, your tastebuds--and your family and friends--will love this book.

Beans

Handy guide offers 25 classic and contemporary Southwestern recipes for heirloom, hybrid and standard varieties.

A Passion for Vegetables

New in paper! Imaginatively deploying more than sixty different vegetables from across the globe (from Swiss chard to choi sum, Jerusalem artichokes to kohlrabi), the author covers every single course, including appetizers and side dishes, including unusual jams and even some vegetable-inspired desserts. The intricacies of vegetable selection, storage, preparation and nutritional value are also discussed in detail and presented alongside over 150 original, inventive recipes. An informative glossary of terms and thorough index is also included to aid the reader.

Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook

The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook is for all those who say, I could never go vegetarian. I'm a meat-and-potatoes person. But eating vegetarian does not have to mean giving up hearty, filling food. With more and more people cutting down on or eliminating meat, vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike need a source for meatless meals that are as flavorful as their meaty counterparts. With that in mind, Robin Robertson has developed 275 recipes for mouthwatering, soul-satisfying dishes that feed the hunger without the meat. The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook will change the way people think about vegetarian food, a cuisine not usually associated with indulgence. Everything is comfortingly familiar: Mushroom Barley Soup, German Hot Potato Salad, Chili con Frijoles, Layered Vegetable Lasagna, Broiled Eggplant Teriyaki, Shepherd's Vegetable Pie, and much more. Roasts, burgers, steaks, stews, meat loaves--they're all here, and they're all delicious and all healthy. There are also plenty of fun and funky appetizers; substantial salads and sandwiches; versatile sauces, marinades, and salsas; and rich, homey desserts.

Raw Food Primer

Eating is more than just taking nutrients in. It's also pleasure, communion, and the taste of life. With the blossoming of raw food as an artistic cuisine, eating is also about discovering intense natural flavors and enticing high palate food lovers to explore new/old ways to eat. As the raw food movement enters the culinary mainstream, Chef Alex is right here to help with The Raw Food Primer as a starter kit. Those who try these succulent recipes will enjoy deep comfort, great nutrition, and fresh paths to glowing health. For many, raw food is already a way of life. But when we try to explain it to friends, family or students who don’t yet know the pleasures and the benefits of eating raw, they may say, You can’t keep up your energy with raw carrots or Yuck! That sounds really boring or I can’t give up my pasta! To answer such remarks, Chef Alex has written The Raw Food Primer. She gently introduces first timers to the concept of raw foods and a vegetarian diet. Encouraging them to add raw food slowly to their diet, she avoids a zealous approach that may frighten off people curious about uncooking but not quite ready to give raw cuisine a full embrace. With her charming, low-pressure style, Ferrara eases the reader into true eagerness to try tasty raw dishes and reap the health benefits like more energy. Many people who have gone raw report that they have a leaner structure, clearer skin and eyes, and they no longer experience problems with allergies or fatigue. The Raw Food Primer is perfect for curious students of this revolutionary food experience or the more experienced raw foodist — or anyone who merely appreciates delicious food.

Heirloom Tomato Cookbook

Whether you say to-may-to or you say to-mah-to, chances are you'll agree there's nothing like the taste of a sun-ripened heirloom tomato—and this beautifully photographed book is a cornucopia for the tomato lover. First there are the recipes: 50 in all, provided by such notable food names as One Market, Caprial's Bistro, Jimtown Store, and DaVero Olive Oil. Perfect for brunch, cocktails, or dinner, tomatoes are showcased in such delicious dishes as Gazpacho with Cucumber Salsa Verde, Cheese and Pesto Fondue with Tomato-Foccacia Skewers, and Grilled Sea Bass with Lemon-Oregano, Tomato Relish. Accompanying each is a wine pairing suggested by Kendall-Jackson, which each year hosts the Heirloom Tomato Festival in Sonoma—the inspiration for this book. Then there's the photographic glossary of the top 25 heirloom varieties, detailed cultivation information, and an invaluable sourcelist of seeds and plants to entice those who want to eat their fruit and grow it too. Add to this, advice on choosing and storing tomatoes and a brief history, and you have a book as vibrant as the tomato it celebrates. Mimi Luebbermann is the author of almost 20 books on gardening and cooking and is a contributor to numerous national cooking and gardening magazines. She lives on a small farm in Petaluma, California.

Growing Unusual Vegetables

Growing Unusual Vegetables is for gardeners who like to try something different. In this book they will find more than ninety unusual plants, all of them edible. The book is divided into sections on greens, roots, fruits, seeds, grains, and flavorings for easy reference. Each plant entry comes complete with comprehensive cultivation instructions, hardiness zones, and fascinating notes on the plant’s origin, history, and uses. With this indispensable guide, you can turn your garden into a unique storehouse of useful and unusual edible plants, many of which are surprisingly easy to grow.