The Vegetables Dishes I Can’t Live Without by Mollie Katzen is a great cookbook for anyone looking for fresh and healthy ways to jazz up vegetables on the dinner table.

Growing up my parents had a large garden and I enjoyed the flavor and texture of a variety of vegetables and fruits. My mom is a great cook and I learned a lot from her about canning and cooking vegetables. However, since our vegetables were so delicious and fresh, my mom rarely put a lot of seasoning on them.

Mollie Katzen’s new book fills the gap . . . giving me easy new ways to spice up veggies whether fresh or straight from the can.

Some yummy recipes I tried and loved:

Artichoke Heart and Spinach Gratin
Sweet and Sour Red Cabbage with Cranberries and Blueberries
Stir-Fried Carrots, Red Peppers, and Red Onions

Vintage International (2006)

“A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.”

[The Road, excerpt from rear cover sleeve]

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The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s tenth, and most recently published novel (2006). It is, without any doubt, my favorite piece of literature I’ve discovered this year. It is also the most thought-provoking work I’ve become entranced with in some time. Once you have entered into McCarthy’s frightening masterpiece here, you will never forget it.

The story follows a father and son, through a crude, life and death struggle in a bleak, and terrifying, post-apocalyptic world. The situations they encounter along this road reveal what man is truly capable of when stripped of his moral boundaries.

There is a stark, yet unexpected, sense of realism that the author portrays for the reader in this achromatic world. The author masterfully strips away the names of the primary characters the reader becomes immediately entrenched with. The vivid imagery we see of our present world–nature and man’s presence in it–is reduced to an ashen, almost hopeless non-existence. When the father and son encounter what few humans are left in this shrouded world, they see how man will go to almost any lengths for survival–no matter how depraved. Once civilization is reduced to almost nothing, the line of distinction between man and beast becomes nightmarishly blurry.

Though many of the author’s images will brand themselves into your memory, one glimpse of hope I encountered in this book has yet to leave my mind:

“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

This story will haunt you, and it will burn itself into your consciousness. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and Cormac McCarthy truly merits this accomplishment from his creation here.

“Every culture needs beauty,” American expatriate photographer Miguel Gavin says. “And every culture defines what ‘beauty’ is.”

Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston by Robert Hudovernik is a truly stunning photographic assemblage of the Ziegfeld girls. Indeed, Johnston bewitches, fascinates and enchants the viewer with his subjects- dancers and performers- real beauties of the Jazz Age, trained to reveal a mesmerizing “line of beauty”: chin held high and confident, gaze aloof, posture elevating and long.

In addition to scores of photographs, the book also provides the reader with background on the creation of the Ziegfeld Follies as well as stories and captions about the many girls who were trained to embody Ziegfeld’s vision of beauty. Certainly Ziegfeld had his own formula of beauty which cast aside any woman of “ethnic type” and promoted the Anglo-Saxon woman. Furthermore, Ziegfeld forbade suntans and promoted the “protection of whiteness.”

Despite Ziegfeld’s narrow vision of beauty, one cannot help but admire the craft of these young women. While many of the photographs are nudes, they are not photos exposing skin for the sake of exposing skin. These women were highly trained in their craft, every aspect of the photo–scene drapes, costuming, posture, gaze and poise–designed to present a “cathedral of beauty,” dimming the uncertainty, struggle and pain of World War I.

The store is abuzz with excitement as we anticipate the arrival of Alton Brown to sign his new book Feasting on Asphalt. Raymond Reeves has a great article about Brown in The Clarion Ledger today that includes an interview in which Alton raves about his experiences in Misssissippi. When Reeves asks the chef about his general take on our state he responded:

“Mississippi was actually my favorite, I think. That’s why I have three stops there on my book tour, more than anywhere else, because I enjoy myself in Mississippi so much. My favorite restaurant on the entire trip, my best, most favorite experience, was in Greenville at a place called Jim’s Cafe. I ended up working with the cook to invent a new dish, my favorite dish of the trip, which was barbecued pork ribs on pancakes. There were times that you were just blown away by a place and the people that were in it, (like) Jim’s Cafe and Doe’s Eat Place and Joe’s White Front Cafe, which burned down and is gone now.”