Suzanne Zeidy grew up in a household that loved to cook. Every Friday her Aunt Alba would round up the extended family for a huge Egyptian-style supper, where they would gossip, laugh and feast on traditional home-style cooking. In Cairo Kitchen, Suzanne shares the classics that ignited her love of food, as well as her more modern recipes. A combination of authentic street food and delicious home-style cooking, this is modern Middle Eastern food, all set against the exotic, vibrant backdrop of Cairo. Try her stuffed vine leaves, home-style beef kofta stew and age-old recipes for breads. Her modern dishes are classics reinterpreted in a fresh and original way: try quail on quinoa tabboula or seared sea bass on baba ghanoush and a rice kofta served on vermicelli noodles. The chapter on pickles and preserves will transform any dish into a mouthwatering Middle Eastern-style delicacy, and the sweets, such as Halawa truffles, are truly irresistible. Middle Eastern food is made for sharing, and Cairo Kitchen is filled with standout recipes, perfect for any gathering. Illustrated throughout with stunning pictures by award-winning photographer Jonathan Gregson, this stylish cookbook triumphs the culture and cuisine of Egypt's finest city.

"As [four characters] converge on the city of Cairo ... a portrait [develops] of a marriage, a jigsaw puzzle of loyalty and betrayal against a dangerous world of political games, where allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed"--Dust jacket flap.

South Wind Through the Kitchen is the best of British cookery writer, Elizabeth David. Selected from her nine books, here are classic essays on the food of Provence and of Paris, on Italian fish markets and Middle Eastern herb gardens. There are nearly 200 recipes: appetizers, soups, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, vegetables, sauces, breads, preserves, and desserts. Whether discussing the pains of rolling puff pastry or the ease of making pizza, railing against the practices of English bakeries or praising the sausage rolls at the Hôtel du Midi, David always speaks her own mind. Best of all, she's a contagious enthusiast: she makes you want to rise from your chair to travel, shop, or try your hand at an omelette. "Reading her," writes Julian Barnes, "you have a strong sense of a person whose cardinal principles are truth and pleasure. Perhaps it is not absurd to compare her effect on a certain sector of tired, hungry, impoverished '50s Britain with Kinsey's effect on America."

Lying in a pool of blood following a skiing accident at Vail, Secretary of State George Milam repeatedly mumbles a seemingly incoherent phrase. Using a memo recorder, a member of Milam’s skiing party documents his curious vocalizations. The secretary of state’s nonsensical ramblings will soon shake the world. Immediately upon analyzing the recording, Dr. Judith Miller3⁄4a talented linguist with the National Security Agency3⁄4realizes that Secretary Milam is speaking in the flawless Arabic of a native Egyptian speaker. Contrary to Milam’s dossier, the secretary of state is clearly not who he claims to be. Neither, she soon discovers, is the undersecretary of energy, Peter Laval. Using computerized voice spectrograms, Dr. Miller identifies fragmentary traces of guttural Arabic consonants in Laval’s otherwise perfect American English. She determines that Laval’s early roots, like Milam’s, are in Cairo. And if Cairo-based conspirators had surreptitiously transplanted both Milam and Laval into the U.S. decades earlier, what other covert Egyptian nationals now held sensitive U.S. government positions? And why had Laval suddenly begun to place so many calls to nuclear power plants? This is the challenge confronting Dr. Noel Parke, the director of the New York region of the Department of Homeland Protection. With the help of the gifted Dr. Miller, Parke must race against time to uncover and dismantle the intricate network of sleeper cells, and uncover the deadly goals of The Cairo Conspiracy.

“Included in the dozen or so kitchens illustrated and written about are the use of inlays, pane decorations, plate and hanging racks, and freestanding dressers and cupboards. A true dream and wish book from a man [honored] as the world’s best kitchen designer.”—Booklist. “Mr. Grey has built dozens of kitchens, some for celebrities like Sting. He is a kitchen design detective and problem-solver, first and foremost.”—The New York Times.

“As a bookseller, I loved Shelf Life for the chance to peer behind the curtain of Diwan, Nadia Wassef’s Egyptian bookstore—the way that the personal is inextricable from the professional, the way that failure and success are often lovers, the relationship between neighborhoods and books and life. Nadia’s story is for every business owner who has ever jumped without a net, and for every reader who has found solace in the aisles of a bookstore.” —Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here “Shelf Life is such a unique memoir about career, life, love, friendship, motherhood, and the impossibility of succeeding at all of them at the same time. It is the story of Diwan, the first modern bookstore in Cairo, which was opened by three women, one of whom penned this book. As a bookstore owner I found this fascinating. As a reader I found it fascinating. Blunt, honest, funny.” —Jenny Lawson, author of Broken (in the best possible way) The warm and winning story of opening a modern bookstore where there were none, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller recounts Nadia Wassef’s troubles and triumphs as a founder and manager of Cairo-based Diwan The streets of Cairo make strange music. The echoing calls to prayer; the raging insults hurled between drivers; the steady crescendo of horns honking; the shouts of street vendors; the television sets and radios blaring from every sidewalk. Nadia Wassef knows this song by heart. In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, she founded Diwan, a fiercely independent bookstore. They were three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Egypt. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Ten years later, Diwan had become a rousing success, with ten locations, 150 employees, and a fervent fan base. Frank, fresh, and very funny, Nadia Wassef’s memoir tells the story of this journey. Its eclectic cast of characters features Diwan’s impassioned regulars, like the demanding Dr. Medhat; Samir, the driver with CEO aspirations; meditative and mythical Nihal; silent but deadly Hind; dictatorial and exacting Nadia, a self-proclaimed bitch to work with—and the many people, mostly men, who said Diwan would never work. Shelf Life is a portrait of a country hurtling toward revolution, a feminist rallying cry, and an unapologetic crash course in running a business under the law of entropy. Above all, it is a celebration of the power of words to bring us home.

Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits—and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream—is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon—and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism. The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors’ foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which “Americanized” foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids. Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans’ multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way we sustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.