100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by William Woys Weaver. Algonquin Books, 2000

The title pretty much says it all; the book tells us about 100 vegetables, what they taste like, where they are from, and how they are prepared. What the title doesn’t tell us is that these vegetables are special; they are some of the tastiest plants on the planet. Consider golden corn salad from Italy, whose large leaves make a salad beautiful; or the Petaluma Gold Rush bean, which when used dried keeps a marvelous meaty taste and texture. The Re Umberto tomato is a paste tomato that is incredibly productive and has an unmatched flavor. Some plants are included mainly because they are different and pretty, but most are included because of flavor. Being both gardener and foodie, I found myself looking up seed sources and bookmarking them numerous times while reading.

The prose is chatty and an easy, fast read. Nice line drawings illustrate the veggies. My only problem with the book is that an awful lot of these wonderful plants won’t grow in my short season area!

<iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=tf_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=mancatman-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=1565122380&asins=1565122380&linkId=bea08b54f492c981875664b2961d0e2e&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff">
    </iframe>

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents.

This in no way influenced my review. 

Stargazer lilies

What with being sick for so long and everything in the garden going faster this year, I've missed taking pictures of most things. That is a shame, because many of the plants have been not just early for extraordinary.

 Take the Stargazer lilies; most years they only have a couple of buds, and about the time they are starting to open, the deer eat them all gone. This year, for some strange reason, the deer have allowed them to bloom! They haven't been eating my roses yet, either, and some of them bloomed like crazy. The grasshoppers, on the other hand, have been fruitful and multiplied this year and are eating the leaves and stems of the vegetable, annuals, and even some perennials. When you walk outside, they are all over your legs, taking off and crashing into you. I see no way to get rid of them, sadly, that doesn't involve chemicals I don't want to use. Next year I'll try and remember this and get some of the organic grasshopper bait early; you have to start early in the season for it to start.

The Art of Faux: The Complete Sourcebook of Decorative Painted Finishes, by Pierre Finkelstein. Watson-Guptill Publications, 1997

I have several faux finishing books I’ve accumulated over the years (I used to do a good bit of faux and fancy paint finishes), and this is the best one I’ve found. His great strength in this book is various types of fake stone: marble, semiprecious stone, limestone and sandstone. He devotes a lot of space and step by step photographs to stone. A lot of it is fairly advanced, but there is also some easy ones like lapis lazuli. There is one magnificent faux inlaid panel he shows us; a vase of flowers of inlaid semiprecious stones. The finishes most people would start with, especially on large walls, like patinas and distressing, are in there, as well as the high complex art of trompe l’Oeil- painting fancy moldings on walls and doors. Finkelstein is the first author I have seen actually demonstrate *how* to draw the moldings and paint them, complete with shadows and highlights. Other books show a couple of them to you and “And then a miracle occurs!” they don’t bother to tell you how to do them. Trompe l’Oeil is the one faux that always defeated me. Now I almost feel like I could do it, and I happen to have a couple of flat doors that need painting… 

<iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=tf_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=mancatman-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0823008584&asins=0823008584&linkId=7933cd27781ec9a04feae976b3fd66cf&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff">
    </iframe>

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. This in no way influenced my review.

Two great older cookbooks

Mediterranean Light, by Martha Rose Shulman. William Morrow, 1989

The Victory Garden Cookbook, by Marian Morash. Alfred A. Knopf, 1982 

I lucked out at a used book store in Pullman; they had a selection of cookbooks on their sale shelf this time. I found two that really appealed to me.

“Mediterranean Light” takes recipes from all around the Mediterranean Sea; Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, north Africa, even France, and reduces the calorie content of them all. While admitting that olive oil is good for one’s health, she cuts the amount of oil in the recipes down drastically. There are almost no dairy products included, and red meat is super scarce. Even chicken doesn’t make very many appearances. There are some fish recipes, and a couple of egg ones. So it’s a good book for the near-vegetarian. The part I love, though, is that the recipes are all well flavored with herbs and spices, so that one never feels like one is eating ‘diet’ food. It’s a complete way of eating. I can’t wait to try the Moroccan Chick-pea soup, among others.

The second book is ‘The Victory Garden Cookbook”, by Marian Morash. Most people are aware of the PBS TV show “Victory Garden”, named after the vegetable gardens people were encouraged to plant during WW 2 to help with the food shortage. Originally a gardening show, it added cooking as viewers wrote in, asking how to cook the vegetables they had grown. Arranged with the vegetables in alphabetical order, from asparagus to turnips (zucchini are dealt with under “Squash (Summer)”), it’s easy to find what you want. The author tells us how to pick them from the garden, what the preferred methods of cooking them are, some simple methods, the yields, how to store and preserve, and hints; and then we get the recipes, both simple and more complex. Note that this book *does* use heavy cream, cheeses, sour cream, and butter; this is not a diet book but more like a farm cookbook. But it isn’t that hard to substitute lower fat ingredients for those. This cookbook may have just pushed my old vegetable cookbook favorite, the Farm Journal one, into number two status.  

<iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=tf_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=mancatman-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=039470780X&asins=039470780X&linkId=dcf8a9ec9f37bfafb90d667ca516744f&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff">
    </iframe>

 

<iframe style="width:120px;height:240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=tf_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=mancatman-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0688174671&asins=0688174671&linkId=793f901d341e460f8ca8057799d7762b&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff">
    </iframe>

The above are affiliate links. If you click through and buy something - anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. This in no way influenced my reviews.