A celebration of Southern food and fun with over three hundred recipes and information on seventy-five great events! A food festival is a wonderfully American event that happens in small towns and large cities all over the South, celebrating everything from onions to peanuts, chocolate to chowder. This collection is both cookbook and travel guide, with delicious recipes and festival information on events from Virginia to Texas. Southern food and Southern parties—or rather Southern parties about Southern food—are the very best kind. Featured festivals include: Chicken and Egg Festival—Moulton, Alabama West Virginia Strawberry Festival—Buckhannon, West Virginia Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival—Warren, Arkansas Shrimp and Grits: The Wild Georgia Shrimp Festival, Jekyll Island, Georgia Suffolk Peanut Festival—Suffolk, Virginia Cornbread Festival—South Pittsburgh, TN Houston Hot Sauce Festival—Houston, Texas

This cookbook—inspired by the Asparagus Festival in Stockton, California—packs new prize-winning recipes plus past festival favorites into this scrumptiously inventive pocket-sized collection. Casual fans are destined to become ardent aficionados of this vitamin-rich, mineral-packed, high-fiber, low-sodium, distinctly flavorful, and amazingly versatile vegetable.

This landmark cookbook for America's favorite garden vegetable includes 150 recipes, gardening advice, expert information about seed saving and preservation, and tells how to select heirloom tomatoes for the garden and kitchen.

Grain truly is the staff of life—tasty, versatile, and highly nutritious. This terrific and comprehensive cookbook offers authentic, eclectic, homespun recipes that showcase a variety of different grains at their best, whether on their own or cooked with vegetables or meat. From the familiar oat to exotic ancient crops, The Whole Grain Cookbook celebrates the good eating offered by 20 different whole grains: amaranth, quinoa, corn (maize), wheat, spelt, QK-77, triticale, rye, oats, rice, barley, millet, teff, sorghum, fonio, buckwheat, chickpeas, beans and peas, seeds, and nuts. Also included is information on how to store whole grain and how to grind your own meal and flour with a home milling machine (as with coffee and pepper, freshly ground grains are more flavorful, and less expensive, than store-bought). Appetizing, informative, and uncomplicated, this is a resource you’ll return to again and again.

More than 200 blue-ribbon winning homemade dishes from across the country. Americans love to celebrate and share their unique and delicious regional culinary specialties- from Maine lobsters to Gilroy garlic to Texas barbeque to Idaho mashed potatoes. Now, award- winning chef and food journalist James Fraioli has culled the best recipes from the finest food festivals across the United States to delight and inspire cooks everywhere of every level. The wide range of recipes included here are all simple to make, with basic, easy-to-find ingredients. Complete with photographs and featuring a delightful portrait of the festivals themselves, this one- of-a-kind cookbook is certain to satisfy food lovers.

Louisiana's Chenier Plain is a 2,200-square-mile region of marshes and oak-covered ridges (cheniers) that stretches along the Gulf of Mexico from Sabine Lake to Vermilion Bay. Its inhabitants, some 6,000 people of Cajun and other ancestries, retain strong economic and cultural ties to the land and its teeming wildlife. They call it paradise...but it is a vulnerable paradise. In this multifaceted study, Gay Gomez explores the interaction of the land, people, and wildlife of the Chenier Plain, revealing both the uniqueness of the region and the challenges it faces. After describing the geography and history of the Chenier Plain, Gomez turns to the lifeways of its people. Drawing on their words and stories, she tells how the chenier dwellers combine modern occupations with traditional pursuits such as alligator and waterfowl hunting, fur trapping, and fishing. She shows how these traditions of wildlife use provide both economic incentives for conservation and a source of personal and place identity. This portrait of a "working wetland" reveals how wildlife use and appreciation can give rise to a stewardship that balances biological, economic, and cultural concerns in species and habitat protection.