Hide 

The greatest invention since sliced bread may well be the machine that makes the loaves everyone dreams of slicing into — right in home kitchens at the touch of a button. The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook bridges the gap between great taste and convenience, with more than 300 glorious recipes for bread machines. The automatic bread machine makes it possible to enjoy fresh and signature loaves of bread without the time and expense usually involved in bread baking or purchased artisanal breads. Today’s bread machines are versatile, affordable, safe and efficient, turning out perfect loaves time after time.

Try croissants or banana bread for breakfast, lunchtime sandwiches on honey whole wheat bread or tomato bread, a loaf of garlic focaccia or a sage and onion bread-stuffed roast for dinner, or even candied chestnut panettone and pumpkin cloverleaf rolls for the holidays. Classic white loaves, hearty whole-wheat breads, sweet breads, swirled breads, pizza doughs, quick breads, and even jams are easy to make right in the bread machine. Renowned bread baking expert Beth Hensperger’s best bread recipes yield great results — just add the ingredients, and let the machine knead, rise and bake loaf after loaf of fragrant, delicious fresh bread.

Hide 

These 150 quick-and-easy recipes turn bumper crops into mouthwatering pickles and relishes, using little or no salt. All techniques meet current USDA guidelines.

New recipes for today's cooks include:

• Freezer pickles that can be prepared in less than half an hour
• Salt-free pickles for dieters
• Sweet Pickled Pears
• No-Salt Hot Sesame Parsnips
• Sunshine Pickles
• And more!

Hide 

In this new book, Ann Lovejoy exuberantly consolidates her gardening and cooking expertise into a year-round feast of fruits, vegetables and herbs, complete with color photographs. Her simple, uncluttered recipes emphasize bright flavors and a creativity centered on an abundance of fresh produce, from the familiar to the exotic.

Fresh from the Garden will appeal even to readers who don't have a vegetable garden or orchard in their backyard. Thanks to the ever-expanding farmers markets and popular community-supported agriculture programs in the Pacific Northwest, fresh, organic produce is always easy to come by.

Hide 

The latest buzz is that anyone from 8 to 80 can learn and enjoy the popular hobby of beekeeping. Whether you live in an apartment with just a small balcony or you have a farm with acres of land, this book will teach you how to get started. Find out where to locate your bees, how to get them home, where and how to house them, and the methods for collecting their wax and honey. Whether you want to start a home-based beekeeping business or simply enjoy a new hobby, you'll become an expert in no time at all. Learn the history of bees and beekeeping and get the best advice available for safely collecting the honey and wax from your bees.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, MOTHER EARTH NEWS is recommending books to readers. For 40 years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

Hide 

For today’s health-, budget- and eco-conscious omnivores, Almost Meatless offers ingenious ideas for creating delicious, nutritionally balanced meals in which meat is an enhancement rather than the centerpiece. From all-American comfort food to global favorites, you’ll find more than 60 satisfying, easy-to-prepare main dish recipes that go light on the meat, including:

• Beefed-Up Bean Chili
• Eggplant and Chicken Puttanesca Stacks
• Shrimp and Slow-Roasted Tomato Risotto
• Sweet Potato Chorizo Mole
• Tofu-Turkey Sloppy Joes

Hide 

With a catalog of 150 different culinary herbs and their varieties, more than 30 recipes, step-by-step photographs on how to plant, nurture, harvest and store, and flavor charts that list the best herbs to partner with popular ingredients, The Cook's Herb Garden shows you how to grow your own supply of herbs whether on a window ledge, in pots, on the patio, or in a vegetable garden.

Hide 

Rather than cover hundreds of plants in abbreviated accounts like the typical field guide, author Samuel Thayer has chosen a smaller selection of species to discuss in exhaustive detail, including only those plants he has eaten 50 times or more. This book contains as many as 10 high-quality color photographs of each plant. These have been painstakingly selected to facilitate identification and depict the plant parts at exactly the stage of growth in which they should be harvested. The accompanying text is accurate and thorough, giving readers of any experience level the confidence to harvest wild plants for food. Botanically, the text is accurate — yet it remains accessible to the layperson by using technical terms only when necessary.

The Forager’s Harvest has many unique features that will appeal to naturalists, hikers, campers, survivalists, homesteaders, gardeners, chefs, Native Americans and whole-food enthusiasts. The book contains a calendar of harvest times for wild produce, a step-by-step protocol for positive identification, an illustrated glossary tailored to the needs of foragers, a recommended reading list, plus special sections on conservation, safety, nutrition, harvest techniques, preparation methods and storage. While The Forager’s Harvest is not a regional guide, it will prove most useful to readers in the eastern US and Canada, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest.

Hide 

This definitive month-by-month guide brings gardeners into the delicious world of edible landscaping and helps take a load off the planet as we achieve greater food security. Full of illustrative color photos and step-by-step instructions, The Zero-Mile Diet shares wisdom gleaned from 30 years of food growing and seed saving with comprehensive advice on:

• Growing organic food year-round
• The small fruit orchard and backyard berries
• Superb yet simple seasonal recipes
• Preserving your harvest
• Seed saving and plant propagation
• Dirt-cheap ways to nourish your soil
• Backyard poultry — it's less time-consuming than you think
• Growing vegetables in the easiest way possible
• A-Z guide to growing the best vegetables and herbs

Hide 

The Herb Companion Guide to Healing Herbs is packed with valuable and illuminating information on more than 136 favorite herbs for growing, cooking and healing.

A 100-page guide is filled with articles on herbs that help you save money and help you stay healthy throughout the year. Articles cover everything from skin-soothing herbs to herbs that help with cold and flu.

Other articles include:

• Don't Break the Bank: Discover 15 herbs that will save you money on medical bills
• Beat Winter Colds: Treat and prevent winter colds with natural remedies
• Lower Your Blood Pressure: Help correct hypertension with four effective herbs
• Soothe Psoriasis: Control this skin condition with natural remedies

Hide 

Cathy Erway's timely memoir of quitting restaurants cold turkey speaks to a new era of conscientious eating. An underpaid, 20-something executive assistant in New York City, she was struggling to make ends meet when she decided to embark on a Walden-esque retreat from the high-priced eateries that drained her wallet. Though she was living in the nation's culinary capital, she decided to swear off all restaurant food. The Art of Eating In chronicles the delectable results of her 24-month experiment, with 30 original recipes included.

What began as a way to save money left Erway with a new appreciation for the simple pleasure of sharing a meal with friends at home, the subtleties of home-cooked flavors, and whether her ingredients were ethically grown. She also explored the anti-restaurant underground of supper clubs and cook-offs, and immersed herself in an array of alternative eating lifestyles from freeganism and dumpster-diving to picking tasty greens on a wild edible tour in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Culminating in a binge that leaves her with a foodie hangover, The Art of Eating In is a journey to savor.