Go Barefoot in Paris

Ina Garten is one of my favorite chefs on Food Network.  On her "Barefoot Contessa" shows she prepares tasty meals for her fans, using ingredients she purchases from the stores near her home in the Hamptons.  In her book, Barefoot in Paris, Ina shows readers how to prepare simple, rich French dishes in your own home.  Many of these recipes are classics and share techniques with the recipes.  Barefoot in Paris is also filled with stories of Ina's love of the city, bustling outdoor markets, and variety of shops, from the local charcuterie (butcher shop) to the fromagerie (cheese shop). This book ccelebrates the food that you find on every corner of the city.  The book is filled with beautiful photos and in my opinion, the souffle' pictures are the best ones!  The resources section has great full-color pictures of French ingredients that the reader needs to try, which are included in the book's recipes.  This book is a truly magnificent celebration of French cuisine and how to prepare it.  If you are itching to try your hand at preparing a new style of cooking, this recipe book has great ideas for you to try. 

Heavenly Icebox Pies

Nothing says spring to me like a cool slice of pie!  Tempt your tastebuds (and your culinary skills) with Icebox Pies:  100 Scrumptious Recipes for No-Bake No-Fail Pies!  Author Lauren Chattman's book gives lots of examples of delicious, make-ahead desserts for the beginner to advanced cook.  The recipes are imaginative, fun, and perfect for entertaining, special occasions or as an everyday treat. Besides your usual lemon and chocolate pies, the book includes instructions for making Gianduia Pie (with hazlenuts and nutella), a couscous and apricot pudding pie and a fig and walnut pie!  There is even a handy end section on "Dressing Up" your pie which includes directions on how to make a variety of sauces and fun things such as sugared nuts and nougatine (almond brittle).  With great photos and detailed directions, this book is a sure winner for any pie lover!

Meet James Meredith and Celebrate National Library Week 2013!

Celebrate National Library Week, April 13-19, 2013 at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library!  This year's theme is:  "Communities Matter @ Your Library."  Our featured event this week is a book singing by author James Meredith on Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM.  The program will be a Brown Bag Lunch--you are encouraged to bring your lunch to the event and drinks and dessert will be provided by the library.  Born in Mississippi in 1933, James Meredith was raised on a farm with nine siblings. He joined the military after high school and attended an all-black college before becoming the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962. Meredith graduated with a degree in political science in 1963. He wrote an account of his experience, titled Three Years in Mississippi, which was published in 1966. He went on to receive a master's degree in economics from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and a law degree from Columbia University in 1968.After he graduated, he earned a law degree and became involved in politics. He continues to be active in civil rights and lives in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife Judy Alsobrook.  James Meredith witll be disussing his newest book, A Mission from God:  A Memoir and Challenge for America.  Part memoir, part manifesto, the book is James Meredith’s look back at his courageous and action-packed life and his challenge to America to address the most critical issue of our day: how to educate and uplift the millions of black and white Americans who remain locked in the chains of poverty by improving our public education system.

Eight Habits of Love

8 Habits of Love:  Open Your Heart, Open Your Mind by Ed Bacon teaches you how to take the first steps on a life-changing journey toward self-discovery, creativity and healing, by celebrating and sharing the love that already lives inside you!  This will help you free yourself from the fear, anger and sadness that causes so much suffering in your life.  Using stories to illustrate his points, Bacon reveals how the reader can create a full and meaningful life by developing the habits of generosity, sillness, truth, candor, play, forgiveness, compassion and community.  By learning how to develop these habits in our daily lives, the reader learns how to reject fear's hold and embrace the power and grace within his/her self.  Author Ed Bacon has served as the rector for All Saints, an urban Episcopal Parish in Pasadena, CA with over 4,000 congregants, for over fifteen years.  His church services have attracted visits from many famous figures and he has been a frequent guest on Oprah's Soul Series on Oprah Radio and been a panelist in the "Spirituality 101" segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show.  Bacon lives in Pasadena, CA with his wife, Hope. 

Surviving Disaster

The Disaster Diaries by Sham Sheridan explores how he learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse.  Sam Sheridan has traveled the world as an amateur boxer and mixed martial arts fighter; he has worked as an EMT, a wilderness firefighter, a sailor, a cowboy at the largest ranch in Montana, and in construction under brutal conditions at the South Pole.  If he isn’t ready for the apocalypse and the fractured world that will ensue, we are all in a lot of trouble.  And yet, despite an arsenal of skills that puts many to shame, when Sam became a father he was beset with nightmares about being unable to protect this son.

With disaster images from movies, books, and the nightly news filling his head, he was slowly driven to distraction:  If an earthquake hit tomorrow and the power grid went down, how much food and water would you need for your family?  If you’re forced outside the city limits, what would it take to survive in the wilderness?  And let’s not even talk about plagues, zombie hordes, and attacking aliens.  Unable to quiet his mind, Sam sets on a quest to learn the things that just might come in handy if our world takes a turn for the worse.

The problem is that each possible doomsday requires a different skill set.  Trying to navigate a clogged highway when everyone has the same bright idea to leave town?  Better prepare by attending the best stunt driving school in the country.  Need to protect your family but have run out of ammunition?  Better learn how to handle a knife.  Is your kid hurt or showing signs of serious mental stain?  Better brush up on emergency medicine and study the psychological effects of trauma.  From training with an Olympic weightlifter to a down-and-dirty apprenticeship in stealing cars with an ex-gang member, from an intense three-week-long gun course in the hundred-degree heat of Alabama to agonizing lessons in wilderness survival, Sam leaves no stone unturned.  Would it be enough if a meteor rocked the earth? Who’s to say?  But as Sam points out, it would be a shame to survive the initial impact only to die a few days later because you didn’t know how to build a fire.

Explore New Family Traditions

The Book of New Family Traditions by Meg Cox examines how to create great rituals for holidays and every day.  Quality family togetherness—everyone wants it, but it seems increasingly harder to get.  In a busy world where kids and parents are bombarded with all sorts of distractions, family rituals can offer a sense of home and identity that is good for the whole family.  In this expanded and updated edition, Meg Cox has gathered hundreds of memorable, meaningful traditions that can make very day special, providing inspiring ideas for mealtimes & bedtimes; problem-solving rituals that soothe squabbles and stop tantrums; milestones, birthday and holidays.  As well as:  tech tips for using social media and other technology to bring the family together; special considerations for divorced families and stepfamilies, and fun craft activities. This book is for a whole new generation of families, and is an essential resource for sparking the fun into family life.

In leafing through this book I read some of the best ideas and wished I had known some of these sooner, most especially in the Hello & Good-bye Rituals.  The Day Care Drop-off Magic Words would have been great when taking my nephews for the weekend.  In the Chore Rituals sections, I loved the mix a duty with a privilege  and the Monster Spray in the Section on Bedtime—pure genius!

Get Cooking with the Pioneer Woman

Many of you might be familiar with the "Pioneer Woman Cooks" show on Food Network.  I have to admit, I was a little reluctant to watch it---I was trying to figure out what I had in common with a woman who lives on a ranch and cooks for hundreds of people????  Fear not--the Pioneer Woman is just like your or I!  the Pioneer woman, (aka, Ree Drummond) has an interesting story.  She lived for years in Los Angeles, and then made a pit stop in her small Oklahoma hometown on her way to a new, exciting life in Chicago.  On one fateful night during her visit, she met the Marlboro Man, in her words "a mysterious cowboy with steely blue eyes and a muscular, work-honed body"...and before she knew it, she was in love.  They married and moved to his ranch in the middle of nowhere, where Ree was thrust into taking care of animals, four young children, and often a host of hungry ranch hands.  Ree Drummond calls herself an "Accidental Country Girl and Ranch Wife," and her new book, The Pioneer Woman Cooks is a collection of photos, rural stories and lovely recipes that have defined her experience in the country.  The recipes have full color photos and step by step instructions all with the goal of helping you, and other urban cooks, slow down, remember the joys of family, nature and great food and enjoy life.  Check out more from the pioneer woman at her blog,  www.ThePioneerWoman.com

     Eat Drink Delta by Susan Puckett is a hungry traveler’s journey through the soul of the South.  According to Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern Cookbook,  “Finally!  A book devoted entirely to the foodways of Mississippi’s Delta—cradle of the civil rights movement, birthplace of the blues, and a confounding culinary region where stuffed grape leaves cozy up to barbecue, tamales to fried green tomatoes, and kibbeh to lemon ice box pie.  Puckett makes sense of it all—town, by town, kitchen by kitchen, dish by dish—in an engaging travelogue that takes the reader to family-run roadhouses, seasonal tea rooms, postmodern bistros, and out-of-the-way juke joints.  In her sojourns, Puckett charmed the best recipes out of the region’s cooks, making this not only the best insider’s guide to the area but a superb Delta cookbook as well.”

     With colorful photos and interesting writing, this is a great book for an armchair traveler.  And since some of the places mentioned are relatively close, I’d have paper and pen handy to make a list so I can get out of that armchair and give them a try.  There is a chapter on Vicksburg covering the city’s favorites along with some recipes.  Alas, the recipe for the glazed carrots they make at Walnut Hills is not included.   Is your favorite listed?  Check it out and see.

Zombies Anyone?

     I have become a fan of the zombie genre and  "The Walking Dead" TV show on AMC is still a few weeks off.  V. Zeto, author of The Return Man (an awesome novel of zombie angst) doesn’t have anything new coming out.   The “World War Z” movie isn’t coming out until this summer.  So what to do, what to do…I find I need something to chomp on and I found it in the YA section!

     The YA section contains books that, according to the ALA definition, are written for readers between the ages of 12 and 18, but they are finding that books are marketed for as low as 10 and as high as 25.  I read from this section myself and often see other adults doing the same.

    The book that caught my attention had a striking cover.  It depicts the bottom half of a girl in a cheerleader outfit holding a bloody, dripping axe and the book is entitled Undead by Kirsty McKay.  The day of the school trip, when the bus comes to a stop at a roadside restaurant, everyone gets off and heads in for lunch.  Everyone, that is, except Bobby, the new girl, who stays behind with Rebel-without-a-clue Smitty. 

     Then hours pass. Snow piles up.  The sun goes down.  Bobby and Smitty start to flirt.  Start to stress.  Till finally they see the other kids stumbling back.  But they’ve changed and not in a good way.  Straight up, they’re zombies! So the wheels of the bus better go round  and round fast, because that’s the only thing keeping Bobby and Smitty from becoming their classmates’ next meal.  It’s kill or be killed in these hunger games.  Heads are gonna roll, and homework is most definitely gonna be late.

The Husband List

I am really not a fan of romance novels--it is the genre I read the least and I usually depend on other staff members for their insight into the "best" romance novels that are housed in our library.  I am, however, a big fan of Janet Evanovich and her Stephanie Plum mystery series, so when our ILL Librarian presented me with Evanovich's latest novel, The Husband List, I reluctantly agreed to read it.   Written jointly by Janet Evanovich and Dorien Kelly, The Husband List is set in New York City in 1894.  Caroline Maxwell, a young American heiress, would like nothing more than to be able to be set free in the world like her brother Eddie and not have to sit at home suffering through endless parties and soirees in order to find a suitable husband to marry.  Caroline successfully fends off every potential suitor until her mother sets her sights on Lord Bremerton, soon to be the Duke of Endsleigh.  Caroline longs for adventure, passion, love and an unconventional suitor, Irish-American bachelor (and Eddie's best friend) Jack Culhane.  What follows is a tangled story as Jack and Caroline fight to be together, fend off bad experiences and somehow navigate the rules of Newport and English society.  The story is fun, the heroine is feisty and I am truly surpised at how much fun I had reading this story!  So go ahead and take some advice from me---try a romance novel like The Husband List---you won't be disappointed!