Monday, November 30, 2009

Offerings from the Oven or Morel Tales

Offerings from the Oven: A Collection of Recipes for Every Occasion

Author: Wendy T Louis

Nothing beats the aromas and flavors of a well-blended casserole bubbling away in the oven, or a specialty pie, or baked bread. The authors cover everything from snacks and appetizers to scrumptious desserts.



Look this: The Science of Getting Rich or Essentials of Investments

Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming

Author: Gary Alan Fin

In this thoughtful book, Gary Fine explores how Americans attempt to give meaning to the natural world that surrounds them. Although "nature" has often been treated as an unproblematic reality, Fine suggests that the meanings we assign to the natural environment are culturally grounded. In other words, there is no nature separate from culture. He calls this process of cultural construction and interpretation, "naturework." Of course, there is no denying the biological reality of trees, mountains, earthquakes, and hurricanes, but, he argues, they must be interpreted to be made meaningful. Fine supports this claim by examining the fascinating world of mushrooming.

Based on three years of field research with mushroomers at local and national forays, Morel Tales highlights the extensive range of meanings that mushrooms have for mushroomers. Fine details how mushroomers talk about their finds—turning their experiences into "fish stories" (the one that got away), war stories, and treasure tales; how mushroomers routinely joke about dying from or killing others with misidentified mushrooms, and how this dark humor contributes to the sense of community among collectors. He also describes the sometimes friendly, sometimes tense relations between amateur mushroom collectors and professional mycologists. Fine extends his argument to show that the elaboration of cultural meanings found among mushroom collectors is equally applicable to birders, butterfly collectors, rock hounds, and other naturalists.

The New Yorker

Nicholas P. Money is wild about mushrooms. "I count myself among the few humans who love fungi, truly, madly, deeply," he writes in Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard, a companionable foray into the realm of stinkhorns, black mold, yeast, and even Malassezia, the dandruff-related fungus that Head & Shoulders shampoo is designed to combat. Money is an English-born mycologist who has spent his life uncovering the secrets and lore of fungi, including varieties that thrive in solid granite, feed on human flesh, assist in crime-scene investigations, and, as in the case of a particular armillaria covering twenty-two hundred acres in Oregon, grow to become the largest organisms on earth.

Of course, the fruiting bodies of various fungi are prized for their epicurean and hallucinogenic properties. In Morel Tales, the sociologist Gary Alan Fine makes an amusing study of the "culture of mushrooming," tagging along with intrepid members of the Minnesota Mycological Society as they perform the "naturework" of plucking such deep-woods delicacies as slippery jacks and bringing them home to sauté. Wild mushrooms, Fine writes, are "culturally mediated objects," and millions of risk-loving Americans now enjoy the weekend thrill of harvesting them.

Peter Jordan's Wild Mushroom is too hefty for your backpack, but perfect for the kitchen. Jordan is a British mushroomer who offers tips on identifying toothsome amethyst deceivers or lethal death caps, recipes for whipping up Hedgehog Mushroom Pancakes or Shaggy Ink Cap Soup, and endless enthusiasm: "Imagine the ultimate triumph of finding your first giant puffball -- its head actually bigger than your own!" (Mark Rozzo)

Booknews

The moral of this ethnographic narrative by Fine (sociology, Northwestern U.) is that the natural world proffers much-needed balance to urbanized lives. He delves into the mystery of how wild mushroom collectors form a sense of community despite secrecy being integral to their quest. Viewing nature as culture- bound, the author conducted three years of field research into the meanings mushroomers assign to their fungus, activities, and "talking wild." Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.



Sunday, November 29, 2009

Mangoes or From Seed To Salad

Mangoes (Quamut)

Author: Quamut

Quamut is the fastest, most convenient way to learn how to do almost anything. From tasting wine to managing your retirement accounts, Quamut gives you reliable information in a concise chart format that you can take anywhere. Quamut charts are:

  • Authoritative: Written by experts in their field so you have the most reliable information available.
  • Clear: Our explanations take you step-by-step through everything from performing CPR to threading a needle.
  • Concise: You’ll learn just what you need to know—no more, no less.
  • Precise: Quamut charts include detailed text, photos, and illustrations to show you exactly how to do just about anything.
  • Portable: Your know-how goes with you wherever your projects lead.

Mangoes, explained.

Everything you need to know in order to buy and prepare perfect mangoes every time, including:

  • The history, anatomy, and nutritional value of mangoes
  • What to look for when buying mangoes, and how to store them after you buy
  • How to prepare and serve mangoes



Read also Eurabia or The Agenda

From Seed To Salad: A Step-By-Step Manual For Backyard Gardening

Author: Frank Salerno

How to turn your backyard garden into a Green Machine.

There is something supremely satisfying about pulling out of the backyard garden a big head of crisp lettuce, a half-dozen ripe, red tomatoes, a basketful of Sugar Snap peas, or any one of the dozen or more fresh vegetables growing there. Well, you too can turn your backyard into a cornucopia of plenty from spring through summer and fall, and you don't need a green thumb. All you need is a little know-how.



Saturday, November 28, 2009

Dictionary of Drink or Drunk the Night Before

Dictionary of Drink

Author: Graham Edwards

Have you ever wanted to know: What the initials AAA stand for? The appellation and style of Chateau Simone? Which chemical is used to decaffeinate coffee? What Ginseng tea is? Who invented the patent still? What Xynisteri denotes?



Interesting book: Whisky and Scotland or Feast and Folly

Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication

Author: Marty Roth

This invigorating work traces the cultural history of convivial drinking before the concept of addiction overshadowed intoxication's reputation as a creative, philosophical, and spiritual force. Marty Roth's Drunk the Night Before illustrates altered consciousness from myth to contemporary life, laying bare the behaviors and beliefs, sacred and secular, invested in intoxication. From the days of antiquity to the twentieth century, Roth follows the often veiled language of intoxication through religion and aesthetics, poetry and art, popular festivals and film. In this sweeping work, he examines the cultural roots of love potions and the fountain of youth, drunkenness in Hollywood cinema, the religious concept of a spiritual high versus the condemnation of intoxication. Roth reinvigorates the currently rebuffed connection between intoxication and artistic creativity, taking up by turn the poet Anacreon and the canon of drink poetry - from classical Greek to the European lyric, Euripides' Bacchae and the figure of Socrates in Plato's Symposium, the heavy investment of Western philosophy in intoxication, and the concepts of the carnivalesque in Friedrich Nietzsche and Mikhail Bakhtin. At once deeply erudite and irresistibly congenial, this encyclopedic work makes critical sense of the long history of alcohol as potion and poison, as pharmakon and catalyst, revealing altered states as the hidden thread in the story of sensation and Western cultural consciousness.