Simple Food for the Good Life

Simple Food for the Good Life
Author: Helen Nearing
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9781890132293

Fifty years before the phrase "simple living" became fashionable, Helen and Scott Nearing were living their celebrated "Good Life" on homesteads first in Vermont, then in Maine. All the way to their ninth decades, the Nearings grew their own food, built their own buildings, and fought an eloquent combat against the silliness of America's infatuation with consumer goods and refined foods. They also wrote or co-wrote more than thirty books, many of which are now being brought back into print by the Good Life Center and Chelsea Green. Simple Food for the Good Life is a jovial collection of "quips, quotes, and one-of-a-kind recipes meant to amuse and intrigue all of those who find themselves in the kitchen, willingly or otherwise." Recipes such as Horse Chow, Scott's Emulsion, Crusty Carrot Croakers, Raw Beet Borscht, Creamy Blueberry Soup, and Super Salad for a Crowd should improve the mood as well as whet the appetite of any guest. Here is an antidote for the whole foods enthusiast who is "fed up" with the anxieties and drudgeries of preparing fancy meals with stylish, expensive, hard-to-find ingredients. This celebration of salads, leftovers, raw foods, and homegrown fruits and vegetables takes the straightest imaginable route from their stem or vine to your table. "The funniest, crankiest, most ambivalent cookbook you'll ever read," said Food & Wine magazine. "This is more than a mere cookbook," said Health Science magazine: "It belongs to the category of classics, destined to be remembered through the ages." Among Helen Nearing's numerous books is Chelsea Green's Loving and Leaving the Good Life, a memoir of her fifty-year marriage to Scott Nearing and the story of Scott's deliberate death at the age of one hundred. Helen and Scott Nearing's final homestead in Harborside, Maine, has been established in perpetuity as an educational progam under the name of The Good Life Center.

Literary Eats

Literary Eats
Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2014-04-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 078647548X

This is a comprehensive collection of authentic recipes, some 500 in all, for drinks and dishes that more than 150 American authors since the late 18th century are known to have enjoyed. The book should appeal to amateur chefs and so-called "foodies" who may want to test some of the recipes in their kitchens; to American literature instructors and scholars who may use it as a teaching tool; and general readers who will read it for pleasure. In effect, this is a celebrity cookbook to which many literary celebrities, living and dead, have contributed, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Benjamin Franklin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, Lafcadio Hearn, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gertrude Stein, Onoto Watanna, Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, and Gerald Vizenor.

Honey, I'm Homemade

Honey, I'm Homemade
Author: May R. Berenbaum
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2010-10-07
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0252090047

Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World showcases a wealth of recipes for cookies, breads, pies, puddings, and cakes that feature honey as an essential ingredient. Noted entomologist May Berenbaum also details the fascinating history of honey harvesting and consumption around the world, explains the honey bee's extraordinary capacity to process nectar into concentrated sweetness, and marvels at honey's diverse flavors and health benefits. Honey is a unique food because of its power to evoke a particular time and place. Every time it is collected from a hive, honey takes on the nuanced flavors of a particular set of flowers--clover, orange blossoms, buckwheat, or others--at a certain point in time processed and stored by a particular group of bees. Honey is not just a snapshot of a time and place--it's the taste of a time and place, and it lends its flavors to the delectable baked goods and other treats found here. More than a cookbook, Honey, I'm Homemade is a tribute to the remarkable work of Apis mellifera, the humble honey bee whose pollination services allow three-quarters of all flowering plant species to reproduce and flourish. Sales of the book will benefit the University of Illinois Pollinatarium--the first freestanding science outreach center in the nation devoted to flowering plants and their pollinators. Because so much depends on honey bees, and because people have benefited from their labors for millennia, Honey, I'm Homemade is the perfect way to share and celebrate honey's sweetness and delight.

Wise Words for the Good Life

Wise Words for the Good Life
Author: Helen Nearing
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1999
Genre: Conduct of life
ISBN: 1890132411

As one of the leading twentieth-century practitioners of self-sufficient living, Helen Nearing found illumination and solace in the sayings of predecessors who had sought their own versions of "the good life." By grouping the wisdom of the ages into categories that are quirky yet eminently sensible, she brings to life the contemporary relevance of some of the most profound chroniclers of our rural heritage.