Marissa Guggiana spent months on the road, interviewing, travelling, photographing, and sharing staff (or family) meals at more than fifty of America’s top sustainable restaurants from coast to coast. For every lunch or dinner service, there is a staff meal. The best chefs in the best restaurants take their limitations—affordability, ingredients, and time—and create meals worthy of their compatriots. Ranging from small plates to multi course extravaganzas, the concept is simple: A well-fed staff is a happy one. Guggiana looked for chefs that sourced locally, thoughtfully, with a big eco-picture in mind and a well-fed staff at their heart. The result is simply unprecedented: a no-holds-barred trip behind the kitchen door, introducing you to every chef, sous-chef, line cook, server, bus boy, bartender, hostess, sommelier, dishwasher, and manager—all of whom you will come to adore. Off the Menu, an homage to cooking with love and leftovers, makes accessibility a delight. Lush, colorful, homegrown, and delicious, it is packed with lessons, tips, substitutes, anecdotes, and American wine and beer suggestions. At Vetri in Philadelphia, we get a family recipe from Chef Marc Vetri’s father and at Anne Quatrano’s Bacchanalia, we are whisked into the adjoining Star Provisions, described as a “culinary dream shop,” for bahn mi sandwiches. We go from gumbo to hot dogs, chicken and biscuits to duck and lettuce wraps, Tuscan kale salad to Chile Verde. It’s all here. The icing on the cake is the chef’s profile: Guggiana’s own Escoffier Questionnaire, is a playful epicurean take on the Proust questionnaire. Who better to recommend the best coffee shop or the perfect restaurant for a splurge, than the top chefs in the country? Find out where Paul Liebrandt of Corton goes for an after-work meal and the go-to-guilty-pleasure treat of Chef Michael White of Marea. The restaurants included vary from vegetarian to rustic, old-world Italian cuisine, from Asian-fusion to contemporary Mexican, from Scandinavian to Oyster bar. These are the meals that make a staff a family and family part of the staff. Inside Off the Menu you will find 100 recipes from more than 50 of the nation's top restaurants. Each entry includes profiles of the restaurants, Q&As with the chefs, behind-the-scenes trips to the kitchens, and dining out tips, restaurant tricks, and cooking techniques from the cream of the culinary crop. Pull back the curtain on the staff meal, and find new, exciting ways to feed your family from the best in the business. • More than 50 Profiles of America’s Top Restaurants. • "Escoffier Questionnaires": Interviews with America’s Best Chefs. • Behind-the-scenes at America's best restaurants, featuring tips and tricks from the nation's best chefs. • More than 150 delicious, affordable, family-style recipes refined for the home cook. • More than 150 photos. A selection of the Good Cook Book Club.

Asian American Christianity is one of the fastest-growing forms of American Christianity, and it has already proven to be one of the richest and most innovative movements in North American religion. With a deep understanding of their roots in classic Christianity as well as the diversity of Asian culture, these theological voices have contributed some of the freshest and most provocative work of recent decades. This volume brings together women who are searching for authentic Christian dialogue in a world of hybridity and changing context, and it represents one of the most significant areas of growth and vitality in contemporary Christianity.

font size="+0.5"'Absolutely delightful, surprisingly useful and pleasingly absurd' - Rachel Parris font size="+0.5"'Tessa and Stevie are two of the funniest people I know' - Nish Kumar font size="+0.5"'A must-read for anyone struggling to be a convincing grown up' - Richard Herring font size="+0.5"'Bloody funny and genuinely informative' - Ellie Taylor Trying to get your life together? Got three dead houseplants, no debit card, and an exploded yoghurt in your bag? Useful, funny and life-affirming, Nobody Panic is an instruction manual for anyone with absolutely no idea what they're doing. From the creators of the critically acclaimed podcast comes a series of How To guides for everything from job interviews to leaving a WhatsApp group, from understanding the oven to dealing with your best friend's new (astoundingly dull) partner. There's also a poem about taxes. Comedians and professional panickers Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin are here to help you learn from their many, many mistakes, and remind you that when it comes to life, we're all in this together - so nobody panic. Praise for the podcast: font size="+0.5"'Hilarious and brilliant' - Grazia font size="+0.5"'Witty, smart and oh-so-relatable' - Evening Standard font size="+0.5"'Jaunty' - The Times

"Burglar Junior Bender may just be our favorite literary P.I."—Entertainment Weekly It’s three days until Christmas and Junior Bender, Hollywood’s fasttalking fixer for the felonious, is up to his ears in shopping mall Santas, Russian mobsters, desperate holiday shoppers, and (’tis the season) murder. The halls are decked, the deck is stacked, and here comes that jolly old elf. Junior Bender, divorced father of one and burglar extraordinaire, finds himself stuck inside the Edgerton Mall, and not just as a last-minute shopper (though he is that too). Edgerton isn’t exactly the epicenter of holiday cheer, despite its two Santas, canned Christmas music, chintzy bows, and festive lights. The mall is a fossil of an industry in decline; many of its stores are closed, and to make matters worse, there is a rampant shoplifting problem. The murderous Russian mobster who owns the place has decided it takes a thief to catch a thief and hires Junior—under threat—to solve the shoplifting problem for him. But Junior’s surveillance operation doesn’t go well: as Christmas Eve approaches, two people are dead and it’s obvious that shoplifting is the least of the mall’s problems. To prevent further deaths, possibly including his own, Junior must confront his dread of Christmas—both present and past.

Organized like a cookbook, Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal is a collection of American literature written on the theme of food: from an invocation to a final toast, from starters to desserts. All food literatures are indebted to the form and purpose of cookbooks, and each section begins with an excerpt from an influential American cookbook, progressing chronologically from the late 1700s through the present day, including such favorites as American Cookery, the Joy of Cooking, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The literary works within each section are an extension of these cookbooks, while the cookbook excerpts in turn become pieces of literature--forms of storytelling and memory-making all their own. Each section offers a delectable assortment of poetry, prose, and essays, and the selections all include at least one tempting recipe to entice readers to cook this book. Including writing from such notables as Maya Angelou, James Beard, Alice B. Toklas, Sherman Alexie, Nora Ephron, M.F.K. Fisher, and Alice Waters, among many others, Books that Cook reveals the range of ways authors incorporate recipes--whether the recipe flavors the story or the story serves to add spice to the recipe. Books that Cook is a collection to serve students and teachers of food studies as well as any epicure who enjoys a good meal alongside a good book.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 'I don't think I've ever read a book that has made me cry with laughter as much as this one. It was very difficult reading it in public as I looked like a madman' - Richard Herring James Acaster has been nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award five times and has appeared on prime-time TV shows like TASKMASTER,MOCK THE WEEK, LIVE AT THE APOLLO and WOULD I LIE TO YOU? But behind the fame and critical acclaim is a man perpetually getting into trouble. Whether it's disappointing a skydiving instructor mid-flight, hiding from thugs in a bush wearing a bright red dress, or annoying the Kettering Board Games club, a didgeridoo-playing conspiracy theorist and some bemused Christians, James is always finding new ways to embarrass himself. Appearing on Josh Widdicombe's radio show to recount these stories, the feature was christened 'James Acaster's classic scrapes'. Here, in his first book, James recounts these tales (including never-before-heard stories) along with self-penned drawings, in all their glorious stupidity.