Chances are you or somebody you know is eating vegan. The holidays present quite a challenge if you begin to think about preparing meals and snacks that are free of milk, cheese, eggs, and meat. From New Year’s Eve to Independence Day to Cinco de Mayo to Hanukkah and Christmas, Simpson has outlined simple, no nonsense recipes that anyone can make. If you’re not already a vegan, you might think that it is not all that hard after perusing Quick & Easy Vegan Celebrations.

Whether you’re new to vegan cooking or just need to fill in some knowledge gaps, Simpson has a guide to some of the basic substitutes for non-vegan ingredients. She suggests ginger beer, kelp powder, liquid smoke, silk tofu, soba noodles and even tacks on a vegan source for spirits to name a few. Newbies would be off to the closest whole food store with a list of must-haves.

After looking at recipes for Spicy Seitan Burgers, Red Velvet Cupcakes, Shepard’s Pie, Taco Soup, Chipotle Black Bean Burgers, and Portobella Brisket, I was ready for a party at Ms. Simpson’s house. However, armed with her guidance, I think I could pull a vegan celebration off by myself!

Join us Sunday afternoon at 3:00 for a signing & tasting with Elizabeth Sims of the Tupelo Honey Cafe in Asheville. The cookbook is beautiful! We cannot wait to taste some of the food.

For more info, Click Here.

What’s the first thought that enters your mind after someone utters the term “butter?” Well, if your thought process shares any kinship to mine, then it would most likely be the Queen of Butter herself, Ms. Paula Deen. If you don’t believe in butter, then you probably won’t enjoy Paula’s cooking; however, most Southerners (and the rest of the Food Network nation) are more than happy to testify to the power of that melty, gooey, utterly delicious substance.

Fortunately for all of the butter lovers out there, Paula has recently added another cookbook to her library that is full of appetizing Southern recipes, hence the name Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible. 

When my best friend Britney (whose birthday is coming up on October 18th!) happened to mention that coconut cake was her favorite, I knew the first cookbook that I needed to browse for a recipe was Paula’s. Of course, she had a mouthwatering recipe for coconut cake in the baked goods portion of the new book. After gathering up all of the ingredients at the grocery store, I started home to begin baking this delicious coconut concoction. I snapped a few pictures during the baking process so that y’all could see my progress. Even though you can’t taste it, I just want you to know that I did, and it is definitely worth baking this cake if you are a coco”nut” like me (and Britney.)

Mouthwatering comes to mind, no?

I happened to catch Paula the other morning on the Rachael Ray show and she was making her coconut cake…

by Anna

When I hear about recipes designed for those with special nutritional needs or food allergies, I instantly think that I will never get all the ingredients together. That’s not the case with Allergy Proof Recipes for Kids. Designed by two moms, this cookbook is beautiful, simple and educational.

Every recipe is gluten free and free of other problem foods, such as wheat, dairy products, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, sugar. Most recipes are accompanied by a photograph, tips, techniques and key nutritional information. Also included are suggestions for substitutions so that you can adapt many recipes to fit your child’s needs.

While this cookbook is designed with kids in mind, adults will also find the recipes appealing. Some of my favorites include: crunchy granola bars, turkey rice salad, mini quiches, bean dip, gourmet oatmeal chocolate chuck cookies and chicken noodle soup. With all these yummy recipes, there’s no need to feel intimidated by a food allergy.

Have you ever thought about how you would go about actually making Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper?  I have…quite often.  Meet Heston Blumenthal and his very fantastical cookbook with which you can learn how to make lickable wallpaper, an edible graveyard and all sorts of other crazy edible delights.

“I wanted to create feasts that captured the spirit of their times.  They had to be theatrical and fantastical, stimulating all the senses and conjuring up for my guests all sorts of memories and allusions and associations, as though I had waved a magic wand.  To that end, I explored some strange places and some even stranger ideas.  I ate boar’s eyes, Play-Doh and a lot of Spam.  I went to the walled city in Fes to get tips on cooking camel meat and to snowy Transylvania to find out about a legendary recipe for leeches fed of goose blood.  I tried to make edible bones, lickable wallpaper, floating food, superstringy cheese, a savory Zoom lolly and fake Champagne using a SodaStream.  It was a mad, invigorating, informative, frustrating, funny, shocking and surprising journey-and it’s all here in the pages of this book.”

Within the cookbook you are given six different Feasts; A  Fairy Take Feast, A Gothic Horror Feast, A Titanic Feast, A Chocolate Factory Feast, A Seventies Feast and An Eighties Feast to create and told exactly how to go about doing so.

Take a look at the Fairy Tale Feast.  It includes Cinderella’s Pumpkin (Pumpkin Puree, Langoustine Tail and Osetra Caviar Sprinkled with Golden Fairy Dust), The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg (Chicken Testicle Jelly Beans, White Bean Veloute, Peashoot Beanstalk, Golden Egg and Shredded Goose Leg), Snow White’s Heart & The Wicked Queen’s Apple (Deep-fried Boar’s Ears, Braised Cheek and Tongue, Snout Sausage, Gribiche and Radish Eye Apples with Boar’s Heart Parfait) and Hansel & Gretel’s Edible House (Shortbread Roof Tiles, Marshmallow Bricks, Sugar Stained-glass Windows, Aerated Chocolate Door, Green Moss, Welcome Mat).

I suggest you pick up a copy of Heston’s Fantastical Feasts and get to cookin’.  Enjoy.

by Zita

Eat Greens: Seasonal Recipes to Enjoy in Abundance

by Barbara Scott-Goodman and Liz Trovato, Running Press, 2011.

I’m scanning a shelf of cookbooks and you cannot imagine my delight when I see the title Eat Greens. Yes, Eat Greens! It’s a cookbook about growing, cooking and eating everything green. I have been obsessed with spinach salads for a couple of years now, and we’ve been growing cabbages (plus some greens, zucchini, okra, and cucumbers) successfully for several years now. In short, I have become a green vegetable snob, thinking what is the point of eating a vegetable if it is not green. Well, I am sure there is a reason to do so, and there is something to be said for variety in the diet.

Eat Greens is a delightful cookbook because in addition to the great recipes organized by vegetable, it also lists the nutritional breakdown of every green vegetable. Most green vegetables provide the most concentrated nutrition of any other food. They contain vitamins A, C, K, E and many of the B vitamins as well. If that weren’t enough, they also provide iron, potassium, magnesium, and they’re a great source of fiber, too.

Whether you are trying to increase your love for the green or simply want to learn how to cook your green veggies a new way, this is a great book. And you can reward yourself and your family by talking about all of the wonderful nutrition at the dinner table.

I’m quite particular about cookbooks, so when I found this one, I was thrilled!

Power Foods contains 150 delicious recipes with 38 of the healthiest ingredients. When flipping through a cookbook, pictures are very important to me. With a picture for each recipe, they got this format right. There’s nothing worse for me than flipping through a book with 1,000 recipes and no pictures. Especially if the font is illegible blue and yellow curly Q!

Power Foods also educates on the benefits of these power foods (chick peas, kale, smoothies, nuts, beans) and how to use them to feel great.

I’ll take the challenge and POWER UP!

Check out this great idea: Lentil, Carrot, and Lemon Soup with Fresh Dill. The fiber in lentils helps to lower cholesterol and regulate blood sugar. French green lentils cook more quickly and retain a firmer texture than the more common brown ones.

Here is the recipe to try it for yourself:

1.5 cups of French green lentils

4 carrots, peeled and sliced .5 inch thick (1.5 cups)

4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (1-2 lemons)

.5 cup coarsely chopped fresh dill, for garnish

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Combine lentils with carrots, garlic, and 1 teaspoon salt in a medium saucepan. Add enough water to cover by 2 inches (about 6 cups), and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, and cook (uncovered), stirring occasionally, until carrots are tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Stir in lemon juice and season with pepper and more salt, as desired. Add about 2 tablespoons chopped dill to each bowl just before serving. Per serving info: 261 calories; 0 mg cholesterol; 49.2 g carbohydrates; 15.9 g protein; 538 mg sodium; 12.6 g fiber.

I also liked this idea for Savory Stuffed Sweet Potatoes and many, many more recipes.

Power Foods by the Editors of Whole Living Magazine, forward by Martha Stewart (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2010)

-Peyton

by Kelly Pickerill

When I went home for Thanksgiving my dad told me he’d been trying his hand at bread baking. His loaves, a sort of sourdough born of the book Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, came out golden, with a crunchy crust and a crumb that was both chewy and fluffy. In other words, he had done what many have tried and failed to do: make a consistently good bread by hand. It looked easy.

So I got back to Jackson anticipating coming in to Lemuria to get a copy of it myself, only to have my eyes caught by another of Reinhart’s: Whole Grain Breads. Hey, if my dad can bake a white bread with minimal practice, why can’t I go just one tiny step further and bake, with maybe one or two deflated loaves, a whole wheat challah?

Reinhart begins his cookbook with a command to read his introductory material before delving in, which I’m okay with, because I love reading cookbooks. As I read the first chapter, though, where Reinhart relates the germ of his idea to write the cookbook, followed by a lengthy description of the bread seminars he went to, the multiple testers he had working on his recipes, the amount of times he failed to get his loaves just right, I started to get nervous. Just exactly what is a biga? I have a better idea now that I’ve read through his intro and his chapter on equipment and starters, mashes, and soakers, on the history of the wheat kernel, and on the basics of enzyme activity during bread baking.

I never realized, to use Reinhart’s term, how much “drama” goes on inside bread dough. He says, “As we connect the dots of the intricate patterns and roles these ingredients play, we can see how their various aspects and properties participate in the great dance of bread baking.”

I’ve done my reading, but I haven’t baked a loaf yet. I’m going to start with a sandwich loaf, a recipe Reinhart says is relatively simple, and my starter is getting ready as I write this. I’ll let you know how it goes.