Paula Deen Celebrates!: Best Dishes and Best Wishes for the Best Times of Your Life Review

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(More customer reviews)Just in time for the holidays, I got this book.I love Paula Deen's show and her cookbooks always have amazingly simple dishes to prepare.

The author's personal stories and remembrances are what really made this book for me.As a girl from the south, these recipes are like things your Mammaw and Mama used to cook up for the family for a special occasion.

These recipes aren't necessarily things that you would eat in your everyday meals; they're for celebrations.If you're looking for a Southerner to eat tofu and bean sprouts for Thanksgiving, you've got it all wrong and would do better with buying another book.I prefer my tofu marinated in soy sauce and stir fried with pea pods and broccoli, but I'd rather have a turkey and all the trimmins for Thanksgiving.

The recipe book, and I hesitate to call it that because it's more of an entertaining book, has wonderful meal planning recipes and ideas for celebrating with your family & friends.Although I'd have loved more entertaining ideas, maybe next time, Paula?

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A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances Review

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(More customer reviews)After reading A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, I couldn't help but feel a little ashamed about my own everday interaction with food.For example, every week I buy all the needed ingrediants for a salad or to use in my juicer and sure enough, one week later I'm throwing everything out, pratically untouched.This book was a kick in the pants of how lucky we are today to have such conveniences as fresh fruit and vegetables and sliced bread.It also showed me how much I take these items for granted.There are personal recollections and stories passed on through generations in this book that are absolutely fascinating and tell how people got by back in the day when not everything was so readily available. It also takes you through key moments in history.For example, During WWI and WWII the importance of planting Liberty and Victory Gardens.Another story talks of how in one particular Chinese family it was more important to a father that his little girl knew how to wash rice properly, considered a principal accomplishment of any Chinese female, than to go get an education. Another theme came up over and over again was the power of women's voices as mothers and homemakers who demanded fair pricing, strict sanitary guidleines, government funded programs to feed the poor.On top of all this there are recipes scattered throughout the book that are related to each era.Some you'll want to try and others....not so much.Great pictures included as well!Hope you enjoy!

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Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia Review

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(More customer reviews)"My place, in the midst of this abundance of nature, is back in a mountain hollow on a bad dirt road surrounded by forest, wild blackberries, mountain critters, wildflowers, a few neighbors, and a passel of 'dawgs.'"

So writes Joan Aller, author of this season's must-have cookbook, "Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia."

And it's not like Joan Aller is an East Tennessee native who's walked the Appalachian trail with the likes of Bill Bryson or South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. She's from the West, and might be living there still but for urban sprawl and environmental ugliness. So she first moved to Nashville, which is very much a city, and then further East.

Joan Aller is an artist by profession and fearless by nature. No soon had she painted her mailbox than she was off, photographing barns and bridges and learning the ways of her new neighbors. That led quickly to food --- and five years of research. At the end, she had gorgeous photographs of Southern Appalachia, luscious photographs of Southern food, and 8,000 pages of recipes and history.

The good news is that Ms. Aller and her editors put her work on a diet. The result is a 212-page book that was extravagantly handsome until my wife and I started dog-earing the pages. Silly us --- we want to cook almost everything here. Our only non-starters: Appalachian wine, root beer and --- no kidding --- moonshine.

See if just the names don't make you look at your watch to see if it's time for some meal or other:Kentucky "hot brown" (turkey-bacon-Colby cheese sandwich drenched in Tabasco-spiked milk gravy), Mississippi Sin (French bread, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, cooked ham, sour cream, accented with sweet onion, bell pepper and Worcestershire sauce), Butternut Squash Soup with Sweet Tea and Ginger, George Washington Carver's Sweet Potato Pie, Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Cob Jelly, And a dip made of equal parts chopped sweet onion, grated cheese and mayonnaise, baked for 25 minutes at 350.

And....but you see the problem --- with the possible exception of boring old blue cheese balls, this book rocks like the Allman Brothers.

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Product Description:
There are many cookbooks about Southern cooking, but precious few celebrate the southern Appalachian food that has sustained mountain folk past and present. Thankfully, we now have Joan E. Aller's Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.
Featuring more than 150 recipes for down-home, soul-satisfying dishes, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly is more than just a cookbook. Complete with passages on the history, places, and people of southern Appalachia, along with lush full-color photography of the food and scenery of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly serves as both a cookbook and a guided tour of the local lore, traditions, and culture of this uniquely American region.

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