eating well

It's about a month or so into the New Year and if one of your resolves was to eat healthier, here are four cookbooks to think about perusing while menu-planning.  Anna Getty's Easy Green Organic features basic organic living tips along with recipes -- and some especially delicious soup offerings.  There's also a dessert treat that involves dipping olives into dark chocolate; if you're among the olive lovers of the world, these two ingredients combined will most likely delight rather than disconcert.  I was lucky enough to find a flawless copy of Didi Emmons' Vegetarian Planet for 50 cents at a thrift store and became a big fan upon making the Ratatouille with Soft Basil Dumplings.  With 500+ pages of other creative recipes, Vegetarian Planet really puts a fun spin on vegetarian (but not vegan) cuisine.  Another nice thick cookbook full of tasty and healthy variations on vegetarian/pescetarian themes is The Moosewood Restaurant Favorites, which I was also lucky enough to win a free and autographed copy of.  If you can't get to Ithaca, NY to dine there in person, you can bring Ithaca to your own kitchen (two favorite recipes of all-time are the Moosewood's variation on the Mulligatawny theme and their Indian Stuffed Eggplant).

And finally, A Painter's Kitchen compiles recipes from the surely very uncluttered and tidy home and hearth of artist Georgia O'Keeffe.  Authored by Margaret Wood, who was O'Keeffe's companion and mentee when the artist was in her nineties, A Painter's Kitchen includes classic yet distinctive recipes (meat included) with the same rich simplicity of O'Keeffe's artwork.  Organic long before it became trendy, O'Keeffe had a large garden at her New Mexico ranch.  As Wood details:  "Miss O'Keeffe owned a small mill for stone-grinding her flour, and most of her bread was homemade.  She bought eggs and local honey from various neighbors and preferred to use herb salt rather than the commercial iodized variety."  The White Fruit Cake from A Painter's Kitchen is delicious and a lighter, tarter version of the traditional holiday staple, using lemon juice and golden raisins and pecans instead of molasses and candied fruit and walnuts.

"There were rows of squash and corn and tomatoes, lettuce and peppers...raspberries, apples for applesauce, peaches and pears.  What was not eaten in the summer was put up for the winter, just as had been done in the kitchen at Sun Prairie sixty years earlier."  From Georgia O'Keeffe:  A Life -- Roxana Robinson

(Pictured:  Two Pears -- Georgia O'Keeffe, 1921)

tarot cuisine

Technically a Tarot deck isn't a book, but if you find Tarot cards intriguing and you have a dash of culinary passion, The Epicurean Tarot (U.S. Games, 2001) will be a great addition to your cookbook shelf.  The Epicurean Tarot's creator Corrinne Kenner has concocted 78 inventive and tasty recipes that take their own special meaning from each traditional Tarot card, and this particular deck is functionally oversized and laminated for hands-on kitchen adventures.  Also included is a companion booklet for more detail on both the cards and recipes, with the only problem being is that a quick survey of Amazon and Barnes & Noble shows that The Epicurean Tarot is out of print and the copies currently out there for purchase are pretty pricey.  Good news if you want to part with your boxed set and sell it, but not so good if you're looking for an Epicurean Tarot of your own -- especially if you want to whip up some of Death's Stuffed Mushrooms and The Devil's Deviled Eggs (what else?) for your Halloween party.