Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa, husband-and-wife chefs and the forces behind the popular blog Ideas in Food, have made a living out of being inquisitive in the kitchen. Their book shares the knowledge they have gleaned from numerous cooking adventures, from why tapioca flour makes a silkier chocolate pudding than the traditional cornstarch or flour to how to cold smoke just about any ingredient you can think of to impart a new savory dimension to everyday dishes. Perfect for anyone who loves food, Ideas in Food is the ideal handbook for unleashing creativity, intensifying flavors, and pushing one’s cooking to new heights. This guide, which includes 100 recipes, explores questions both simple and complex to find the best way to make food as delicious as possible. For home cooks, Aki and Alex look at everyday ingredients and techniques in new ways—from toasting dried pasta to lend a deeper, richer taste to a simple weeknight dinner to making quick “micro stocks” or even using water to intensify the flavor of soups instead of turning to long-simmered stocks. In the book’s second part, Aki and Alex explore topics, such as working with liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide—techniques that are geared towards professional cooks but interesting and instructive for passionate foodies as well. With primers and detailed usage guides for the pantry staples of molecular gastronomy, such as transglutaminase and hydrocolloids (from xanthan gum to gellan), Ideas in Food informs readers how these ingredients can transform food in miraculous ways when used properly. Throughout, Aki and Alex show how to apply their findings in unique and appealing recipes such as Potato Chip Pasta, Root Beer-Braised Short Ribs, and Gingerbread Soufflé. With Ideas in Food, anyone curious about food will find revelatory information, surprising techniques, and helpful tools for cooking more cleverly and creatively at home.

Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption. Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has focused on the role food plays in literary production to a greater extent than recognized at first glance and that its role has become increasingly common only in the last two decades. Still, while there is critical commentary regarding authors’ use of food across the expanse of American literature, there has been a lack of a unifying critical theory to guide these analyses. Birkenstein and Hauhart offer the theory of “significant food”—a method that asks literary critics to evaluate and assess the extent, nature, and role that food plays in literary production. When food and “food moments” are used intensively and “significantly” within the drama, memoir, poem, novel, short story, or other writing, then one can say that it has achieved a status that makes it indispensable to the work at hand.

Hollywood celebrities are doing it. Corporate moguls are doing it. But what about those of us living in the real world—and on a real budget? Author and holistic health practitioner Victoria Moran started eating only plants nearly thirty years ago, raised her daughter, Adair, vegan from birth, and maintains a sixty-pound weight loss. In Main Street Vegan, Moran offers a complete guide to making this dietary and lifestyle shift with an emphasis on practical "baby steps," proving that you don’t have to have a personal chef or lifestyle coach on speed dial to experience the physical and spiritual benefits of being a vegan. This book provides practical advice and inspiration for everyone—from Main Street to Wall Street, and everywhere between. "Finally, a book that isn't preaching to the vegan choir, but to the people in the pews—and the ones who can’t fit in those pews. This is a book for the Main Street majority who aren’t vegans. Once you read this, you'll know it's possible to get healthy and enjoy doing it—even if you live in Paramus or Peoria."—Michael Moore "A great read for vegans and aspiring vegans."—Russell Simmons "Yet another divine gift from Victoria Moran. Main Street Vegan covers it all—inspiration, information, and out of this world recipes. This book is a gem."—Rory Freedman, co-author Skinny Bitch "Main Street Vegan is exactly the guide you need to make changing the menu effortless. Victoria Moran covers every aspect of plant-based eating and cruelty-free living, with everything you need to make healthy changes stick."—Neal Barnard, MD, president, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and NY Times bestselling author of 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart "A great book for anyone who's curious about veganism. It shows that not all vegans are weirdos like me."—Moby

What was eating them? And vice versa. In What the Great Ate, Matthew and Mark Jacob have cooked up a bountiful sampling of the peculiar culinary likes, dislikes, habits, and attitudes of famous—and often notorious—figures throughout history. Here is food • As code: Benito Mussolini used the phrase “we’re making spaghetti” to inform his wife if he’d be (illegally) dueling later that day. • As superstition: Baseball star Wade Boggs credited his on-field success to eating chicken before nearly every game. • In service to country: President Thomas Jefferson, America’s original foodie, introduced eggplant to the United States and wrote down the nation’s first recipe for ice cream. From Emperor Nero to Bette Davis, Babe Ruth to Barack Obama, the bite-size tidbits in What the Great Ate will whet your appetite for tantalizing trivia.

No matter how busy you are, at the end of the day you want fresh, flavorful meals that are easy to prepare. And you want lots of choices and variations—recipes that call for your favorite foods and take advantage of excellent (and readily available) ingredients. In the first book from the award-winning magazine Everyday Food, you’ll find all of that: 250 simple recipes for delicious meals that are quick enough to make any day of the week. Because a change in weather affects how we cook as much as what we cook, the recipes in Everyday Food are arranged by season. For spring, you’ll find speedy preparations for main-course salads, chicken, and poached salmon that minimize time spent at the stove; summer features quick techniques for grilling the very best burgers and kabobs as well as no-cook pasta sauces; for fall, there are braised meats and hearty main-course soups; and winter provides new takes on rich one-dish meals, roasts and stews, and hearty baked pastas. Finally, a chapter on basics explains how to make year-round staples such as foolproof roast chicken, risotto, couscous, and chocolate sauce. Designed in a contemporary and easy-to-read format, Everyday Food boasts lush, full-color photography and plenty of suggestions for substitutions and variations. With Everyday Food, even the busiest on-the-go cook can look forward to meals that bring freshness, nutrition, and a range of flavors to dinner all week long.

For those ready to follow their foodie dreams (or at least start thinking about it), this book provides the tools to decide if creating a specialty food business is right for you. Whether the goal is selling a single product online or developing a range of gourmet foods for grocery chains, this handbook helps hopeful food entrepreneurs become experts in everything from concept and production to sales and marketing. The author uses real-life examples from more than 75 successful individuals and businesses to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a food enterprise, providing links to useful charts and worksheets to simplify the process and keep entrepreneurs organized and focused.

Two seasoned food professionals--one a cookbook editor and the other a caterer--match wits here to solve the kitchen dilemme of the '90s: how to serve imaginative, lively food without spending hours fussing or compromising on soul-satisfying flavor. Their solution is just to look to the great cooks--from Julia Child to James Beard to Diana Kennedy--for the simple dishes that are hidden away in even the most complicated cookbooks. They've assembled a treasury of superb recipes that depend on perfectly balanced flavors. The range is broad, from favorite American classics like spoon bread, corn fritters, and the only really delicious oven-fried chicken to exotic new tastes like Moghul Lamb, Bangkok Chicken, and Pasta with Vodka. For each recipe the editors offer tips, variations, suggests, and down-to-earth commentaries about how to work with exciting new ingredients as well as giving their own tried-and-true favorite recipes, simple winners they've cooked for years to great applause. Altogether there are 119 master recipes with 81 variations and 34 Editors' Kitchen recipes, a true culinary gold mine. In their pursuit of the secrets of true flavor, Frances McCullough and Barbara Witt come up with some unusual approaches, rethinking some of our basic ideas about how to prepare roasted chicken and turkey (in a very hot oven), pasta (one method lets it sit in hot water off the flame), and baking potatoes (they're particularly wonderful baked to death). Here you'll find a lot of nitty-gritty information about entertaining, a refresher course on how to make a really good green salad, lists of canapes and tidbit desserts, a collection of quick breads, and microwave notes. In a warm, intimate, encouragingly frank style, McCullough and Witt constantly encourage cooks to improvise by offering a range of variations, to start them experimenting with foods and flavors to develop their own recipes. This is a unique, user-friendly book that works for beginners who are reasonably sophisticated eaters as well as for experienced cooks. It will become the contemporary cook's favorite sourcebook for distinctive food.