Saturday, December 5, 2009

Light the Fire or Simply Shrimp

Light the Fire: Fiery Food with a Light New Attitude

Author: Linda Matthie Jacobs

Features the latest, hottest flavors in fiery foods and focuses on the needs and interest of contemporary cooks with busy lifestyles. Author presents recipes that are full of radiant flavor and enticing taste. Most of the recipes have reduced fat and calorie contents that will fire up any metabolism while satisfying even the heartiest of appetites.



Go to: The Millionaire Real Estate Agent or The Synonym Finder

Simply Shrimp: Fresh, Frozen and Canned

Author: Linda Louise Martinson

This down-to-earth approach to shrimp cookery contains uncomplicated recipes with easy-to-find ingredients for making meals with the most popular shellfish in the world. Shrimp is high in protein and low in calories as well as containing beneficial Omega-3 fatty acids. Features color photographs, index and tips on how to purchase and handle shrimp. Also features a "Common Questions" section. Plastic binding offers easy viewing of recipes while in the kitchen.



Friday, December 4, 2009

Cornucopia or Indian

Cornucopia: Being a Kitchen Enterainment and Cookbook

Author: Judith Herman

The Cornucopia, published to wide acclaim in 1973, is an exquisitely annotated collection of five centuries of European and American culture as seen through the eyes of both the chef and the gourmet. Drawing on more than 150 sources, beginning with The Forme of Cury (1390), through to the 1890s and some of the most beautiful examples of culinary Victoriana, this richly good-humored book tumbles out a virtual treasury of food lore, commentary and opinion, custom and attitude, and more than three hundred delectable recipes, given in their original format.
From a 1598 recipe for "four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie," to an exquisite 1653 Izaak Walton recipe for stuffed pike, to an 1898 formula for a drink improbably named "the Bosom Caresser" (sherry, brandy, sugar, an egg yolk, and a pinch of cayenne pepper), this unique volume is all the food lover could ask for.



Interesting book: The Power of Place or Purity and Exile

Indian

Author: Das Sreedharan

Demystify Indian cooking with a fabulous selection of delicious, easy-to-shop for and easy-to-prepare meals. Find recipes for stir-fries, curries, and rice dishes, plus tips on how to prepare unusual ingredients and special features that highlight favorite recipes. Learn how to capture the warmth, flavors, and colors of great Indian cooking at home.



Thursday, December 3, 2009

Caribbean Rum or Hospitality as Holiness

Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History

Author: Frederick H Smith

Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World on his second voyage. By 1520 commercial sugar production was underway in the Caribbean, along with the perfection of methods to ferment and distill alcohol from sugarcane to produce a new beverage that would have dramatic impact on the region. Caribbean Rum presents the fascinating cultural, economic, and ethnographic history of rum in the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present.

Drawing on data from historical archaeology and the economic history of the Caribbean, Frederick Smith explains why this industry arose in the islands, how attitudes toward alcohol consumption have impacted the people of the region, and how rum production evolved over 400 years from a small colonial activity to a multi-billion-dollar industry controlled by multinational corporations. He investigates the economic impact of Caribbean rum on many scales, including rum's contribution to sugarcane plantation revenues, its role in bolstering colonial and postcolonial economies, and its impact on Atlantic trade. Smith discusses the political and economic trends that determined the value of rum, especially war, competition from other alcohol industries, slavery and emancipation, temperance movements, and globalization.

The book also examines the social and sacred uses of rum and identifies the forces that shaped alcohol use in the Caribbean. It shows how levels of drinking and drunken deportment reflected underlying social tensions, which were driven by the coercive exploitation of labor and set within a highly contentious hierarchy based on class, race, gender, religion, and ethnic identity, and how these tensions were magnified by epidemic disease, poor living conditions, natural disasters, international conflicts, and unstable food supplies.

Foreign Affairs

In his autobiography, Colin Powell recalls that his Jamaican-born parents exclusively served Appleton Estate rum produced on their native island: "To serve anything else was considered an affront." In Caribbean Rum, anthropologist Smith adds knowledgeably to the growing body of commodity-based histories, using rum to elucidate, in this case, the history of the Caribbean. He takes us on a journey beginning with the use of alcohol in indigenous Carib religious rituals, continuing through the impact of the American Revolution on British Caribbean rum makers (very negative), and moving on to more contemporary temperance movements. Depending on the sociohistorical context and the quantities consumed, rum can be enslaving or empowering, a symbol of colonialism or nationalism, commonplace or exotic, killer or elixir, sacred or profane. No single thesis unites Smith's entertaining narratives, although it is abundantly clear that the sugar and rum industries have repeatedly used political leverage and trade preferences — and claims of medicinal virtues — to win market shares from brandy, whisky, and gin.



New interesting textbook: Unlimited Power or How to Master the Art of Selling

Hospitality As Holiness: Christian Witness amid Moral Diversity

Author: Luke Bretherton

Hospitality as Holiness seeks to address the underlying question facing the church within contemporary moral debates: how should Christians relate to their neighbours when ethical disputes arise? The problems the book examines centre on what the nature and basis of Christian moral thought and action is, and in the contemporary context, whether moral disputes may be resolved with those who do not share the same framework as Christians. Bretherton establishes a model - that of hospitality - for how Christians and non-Christians can relate to each other amid moral diversity.



Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Bittersweet World of Chocolate or Hostess

Bittersweet World of Chocolate

Author: Troth Wells

The first chocolate recipe book dedicated to fair trade, The Bittersweet World of Chocolate offers fabulous new ideas for dishes to make with chocolate and cocoa. With savory as well as sweet recipes, this is a unique book that shows the remarkable versatility of this most sought-after ingredient-from chocolate enchiladas to chocolate cake with lemon filling.

While cooking, the reader can also find out about the eventful history of chocolate and how cocoa is farmed and processed today. Through photos and stories, it shows why more and more people are reaching for fair-trade chocolate bars.



New interesting textbook: How to Plan and Book Meetings and Seminars or Pomegranates

Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity

Author: Tracy McNulty

The evolution of the idea of hospitality can be traced alongside the development of Western civilization. Etymologically, the host is the “master,” but this identity is established through expropriation and loss—the best host is the one who gives the most, ultimately relinquishing what defines him as master. In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person—a wife or daughter—as an act of hospitality? In many traditions, the hostess is viewed not as a subject but as the master’s property. A foreign presence that both sustains and undercuts him, the hostess embodies the interplay of self and other within the host’s own identity. Here McNulty combines critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski’s trilogy The Laws of Hospitality with analyses of exogamous marital exchange, theological works from the Talmud to Aquinas, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the theory of femininity in the work of Freud and Lacan. Ultimately, she contends, hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper, affecting the subject as well as interpersonal relations. Tracy McNulty is assistant professor of romance studies at Cornell University.