Spring into Good Cooking with These Books
Whole-Grain Mornings
If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, why do we find ourselves settling for store-bought cereal so often? Megan Gordon, author of Whole-Grain Mornings (Ten Speed Press, 2013) is on a quest to solve that predicament. Her recipes, organized by season, are easy and healthy alternatives to typical breakfast fare.
Do you have questions about which seasonal fruits to look for? Unsure about millet’s cook time? Yearning for delicious clumps in your granola? Gordon answers these questions and more. Within each season, the recipes are divided into groups based on preparation time, so it’s easy to distinguish between a quick weekday recipe and a time-consuming brunch endeavor. And of course, there are the basics—recipes like homemade yogurt, nut milks, infused honeys and granola. If you’re savvy enough to find the unusual ingredients Gordon suggests, it won’t be long before you’ll be discarding your store-bought cereal boxes.
— Eleanor Duke
Eat Your Vegetables
Whether you’re a lifelong vegetarian, a recent convert or an omnivore looking for a more veggie-filled diet, Joe Yonan’s Eat Your Vegetables (Ten Speed Press, 2013) has something for you. Designed for people who are cooking for one, it advises how to creatively and efficiently be a solo chef. The recipes can also easily be multiplied, if necessary.
Sections are based on type of dish and mode of preparation, with recipes that range from the simple (like the delicious kale and caramelized onion quesadilla) to the involved yet gratifying (try the homemade curried mushroom bean burgers). Perhaps the most useful section is the “recipes for the fridge, freezer, and pantry.” As any single chef knows, it is imperative to have things on hand to eat in a time crunch.
Yonan empowers the single chef, and provides recipes so good that you might not be cooking for one much longer.
— Eleanor Duke
Eat Drink Vote
It’s no news that food is political. But try to explain why, and suddenly terms like “food system” and “agribusiness” become opaque stand-ins for a nebulous web of overlapping issues. Marion Nestle’s Eat Drink Vote (Rodale Books, 2013) is an illustrated book that uses comics to distill the messy debates surrounding food.
While some core issues are conspicuously absent from Nestle’s analysis, Eat Drink Vote should serve as a simple taste of the complex issues at hand—from school lunch to farm subsidies.
Nestle has been teaching and writing about food politics for decades and she knows that it would not be a book on politics without controversy. Eat Drink Vote is a call for action: to vote with our forks but even more to challenge our political status quo. Nestle hands the reader the blueprint and says: Now that you know how the system works, you can start changing it.
— Anna Rotman
