Chelsea Green Publishing

Farms with a Future

Dreaming of ditching city life for your own farm share? Before you sign over the cash for those rolling hills, we highly recommend you read Farms with a Future: Creating and Growing a Sustainable Farm Business by Rebecca Thistlewaite, a former vegetarian turned farmer and livestock rancher (she dubs herself a "meat farmer") who is behind the blog Honest Meat and also does consulting work for small farms. We hope she sleeps well.

In the book, Thistlewaite hits more than a dozen small farms across the country and shares some pretty great, no-nonsense advice from farmers who have learned the hard way -- you know, from experience. Among our favorite nuggets: "If you don't like people, don't do a CSA." Hard to argue with that one.

Get ten more start-up tips from Farms with a Future, and our annotations (How could we resist?), after the jump. No desire to become a farmer? No matter. Most are pretty handy for the old life in general.

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Random House

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

Michael Moss' recent cover article in the New York Times Magazine, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, served as a preview for the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter's latest food industry exposé: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. As Moss says, processed foods are a $1 trillion dollar a year business with over 60,000 products on supermarket shelves. That's a lot of bologna.

In the book, Moss recreates secret meetings among industry leaders (Pillsbury, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nabisco, Nestle) and dissects the origins of successful processed products like Lunchables, which he says emerged as a corporate solution to dwindling bologna sales. Healthy school lunch advocates, perhaps there is a lesson here: Kids ate them up, despite the dismal lunch prospects (cold raw pizza, cold hot dogs), largely due to the clever marketing campaign: "All day you gotta do what [adults] say. But lunchtime is all yours."

Moss even successfully entices many former junk food company executives and consultants to discuss their tactics. The parallels to the tobacco industry are loud and clear. Get more after the jump.

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Chronicle Books / Tamara Staples

The Magnificent Chicken

Some get excited over celebrity chef sightings; for us, it's books about chickens. The Magnificent Chicken, a follow-up to Brooklyn photographer Tamara Staples' out-of-print book The Fairest Fowl (2001), truly is magnificent.

Alongside the photos, Staples lists each breed's finer points (a good egg layer; relatively useless but beautiful and quite "pleasant") and the year it was accepted into The American Standard of Perfection (the chicken breeder's "Bible" of show hens and cocks on the competition circuit). The Introduction is an on-air interview Ira Glass did with Staples several years ago for This American Life (he accompanied Staples on one of her farm treks to photograph chickens).

Staples says some of the farmers aren't as enchanted as we are; these are professional breeders who see the bird's flaws -- a twisted comb, a wrinkled wattle, crooked toes (she profiles many of the breeders in Backyard Poultry, an industry magazine). But take a closer look at the photos that follow. Like that Silkie, an ornamental breed with fur-like plumage that Staples tells us are "low-key, gentle, and rather sedentary" (our kind of chicken) and the stunning "Blue Wheaton" Bantam cock look pretty perfect. The latter has not yet been accepted into The Standard of Perfection. But as Staples says, "with examples like this bird, it's only a matter of time."

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Guiliano Della Casa

A Feast of Weeds

Forage much? Chefs do it, Pascal Baudar does it (feel free to join him). Even UCLA professor of Italian and culinary history Luigi Ballerini does it, judging by his latest book, A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Plants, with recipes by Ada De Santis (translated by Gianpiero W. Doebler). Though the book focuses on Italian wild edibles, most can be found in California as well (purslane, stinging nettles, wild asparagus).

Several foraging books have been making the rounds of late, among them Tama Matsuoka Wong and Eddy Leroux's excellent field guide and cookbook, Foraged Flavor. The tone of A Feast of Weeds is noticeably more academic, with its textbooklike format (from bay leaves to wild strawberries) and plenty of "however" pauses and Henry David Thoreau storylines among the recipes for spaghetti with crested warty cabbage (similar to wild radish).

Those wandering academic introductory narratives reveal some of the most interesting cross-cultural wild blueberry stories. (Surprise! Some Italians think American blueberries are fat.)

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Phaidon

Where Chefs Eat

Where Chefs Eat, a new book from Phaidon, is a compilation of the eateries worldwide where 400 chefs like to dine (David Chang, Rene Redzepi Eric Ripert, Daniel Boulud, Anita Lo, Fergus Henderson, among them) what they order, and when they like to go (very early, or very late, most likely). Sound familiar?

Edited by Joe Warwick, the book is a whopping 663 pages. Most of those pages are filled with restaurant addresses and reference info like their opening hours, type of cuisine, price range and credit card policy. Depending on your location for any given dinner, you can play a numbers game and choose the restaurant with the most chef recommendations, like El Cellar de Can Roca in Catalonia, or go with your favorite chef's recommendation (Gabrielle Hamilton recommends Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in Greenwich Village).

Locally? Ricardo Zarate is keen on Akasha for breakfast and Park's BBQ late at night. Matt Molina recommends Vincenti and Peet's Coffee -- and actually, that $2 caffeine jolt seems like an appropriate breakfast follow up to one of this city's finest, and most expensive, Italian restaurants.

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Scout Books

Gin For The Cocktail Hour

When cocktail books are seriously downsized, many make up for the quick flip-through appeal by laying on the syrupy (and silly) cute daiquiri umbrellas. Not so in The Cocktail Hour series, where "pocket-sized" can be taken literally. The contents are no-nonsense, straight-up cocktails from primarily Portland-area bartenders and distillers that you might actually want to make on a Friday night -- and can.

The benefit of tiny pages: Most of the recipes do not, cannot, rely on 12+ steps as so many modern cocktails inventions do today. You'll find a blood orange negroni with an eye-opening splash of cider vinegar (!), and a whiskey and rum cocktail that gets a dash of honey simple syrup and spiced bitters (easy to make by combining Angostura bitters and allspice liqueur). And unlike so many "pocket-sized" books, these 25 (mini) page paperbacks literally fit in your back pocket to serve as a Gin, Rum or Vodka cocktail hour guide, as the titles attest.

Perhaps one reason why the cocktail version works so well: small paperbacks, note-taking booklets and journals are the entire focus of Portland's Scout Books. Get more, and a "Lost Generation" cocktail recipe, after the jump.

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Chef's Press

The mainstream beer cookbooks currently on the market all emphasize the word "beer." It's usually the biggest word on the cover and photos of frothy pint glasses or designs featuring bubbly golden liquid backgrounds are main selling points.

Most of the recipes inside these types of publications reflect this booze-appeal marketing tactic and are usually just regular comfort food findings -- cheese fondue, meatloaf, chili -- that have added a generic call for "beer" as an ingredient.

Thankfully, though, Brew Food -- the latest book from San Diego's beer-loving book company Chef's Press -- goes beyond the novelty of "You can have your beer and eat it too!" and pushes the concept of using beer in food to new, delicious try-it-at-home heights.

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Running Press

Upcycling Celebrations

If you're still in Thanksgiving recipe denial, DIY guru Danny Seo's latest book, Upcycling Celebrations, offers up handy table decoration procrastination options -- particularly for those with "green" oriented Martha Stewart aspirations.

Inside, Seo will show you how to make Thanksgiving place card holders out of leftover Halloween gourds and chipped wineglass tea-lights with paper chandelier lamp shades for "a certain glow and ambiance" for this year's dinner. Even for homemade decorating skeptics, this book is a fun flip-through.

Our favorite, particularly this time of year, is the "extra book seating." It's a pretty clever idea for when you have a few extra stragglers at the table (all the more fun: put a few controversial titles on top). Get the details on how to make that book chair, and more DIY holiday gift wrapping ideas, after the jump.

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University of California Press

Curried Cultures

Looking to up your dinner table conversation? Coffee Life in Japan and Curried Cultures, both published by the University of California Press under its California Studies in Food and Culture branch (and edited by Darra Goldstein), supply plenty of digestif fodder.

Curried Cultures is co-edited by Krishnendu Ray, assistant professor of nutrition/food studies at NYU, and Tulasi Srinivas, assistant professor in communications studies at Emerson College. Together they wrote and edited a collection of essays exploring food culture in South Asia, from the colonial period through today, through a global lens.

"South Asia is a new hub of intersecting global networks nourished by proliferating material and symbolic transactions propelling bodies, things and conceptions across national boundaries," Ray and Srinivas explain in the Introduction. Get more on both books after the jump.

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Robert Rose Publishing

Behold: The Top 100 Napkin Folds

Three star restaurants, cult wines, romantic vacation spots -- now you can add napkins to the Top 100 list fold. We mean that literally, as Denise Vivaldo's new Top 100 Step-by-Step Napkin Folds was recently released.

Sure, the spiral-bound book lays on plenty of country charm with those rosebud napkin rolling techniques. But that "exploding envelope" fold really does look remarkably similar to a wedding invitation stuffed with reply cards enclosures. And Vivaldo happens to be an L.A.-based food stylist and caterer whose napkin-folding resume includes the swanky Governors Ball and numerous television production credits, so you could look at the book as a handy indirect reminder to bring an iron, not just Mortician's wax, when you show up for that food styling apprenticeship.

Fine. Maybe you really don't need 100 folds in your back pocket, but considering the lackluster subject matter, this is a remarkably fun photo-driven book. Get more on the Viking helmet possibilities after the jump.

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