A food lover's guide to all the best ingredients. Do you want to prepare an Asian meal as delectable as those in restaurants? Are you too intimidated by the exotic ingredients to try? And what's inside those mysterious bottles, bags, and boxes in your local Asian grocery store anyway? This handy Take it With You guide provides the answers. Author Linda Bladholm, who has lived, worked, cooked, and dined in locales as diverse as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Korea, Laos, and Vietnam, takes you on a tour of a typical Asian grocery store and expertly describes what you'll find. Make Your Next Shopping Trip a Successful and Fascinating Journey. Peppered with over 400 illustrations, plus stories about the ingredients used in every major Asian cuisine, this guidebook identifies and tells you how to use the vast array of meats, fruits, vegetables, noodles, tofu, rice, and delicacies. A bonus section of the author's favorite recipes will help you create savory, authentic dishes that will impress everyone-- and it will open a window onto the remarkable civilizations of the Orient.

A food lover's guide to all the best ingredients in the traditional foods of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Once upon a time we only had a few choices when it came to fine dining. There was American home-cooked, pretentious French cuisine, practical Italian, and Chinese takeout. These days, Indian restaurants are popping up everywhere, and for good reason. The food is amazing! But how can you replicate the Indian dining experience at home? There are thousands of Indian grocery stores to shop in, but what should you buy? How do you prepare it? That's where this Take It With You guide comes in. With 700 entries and over 200 illustrations, plus traditional stories and personal anecdotes about many of the ingredients unique to Indian cuisine, this guidebook identifies and tells you how to use the vast array of spices, rice, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods at over 9,000 Indian grocery stores in America. A bonus section of the author's favorite recipes will help you create delicious, authentic dishes that will satisfy anyone's hunger and sense of adventure.

With 400 entries and over 200 illustrations, plus stories about the ingredients used in every major Latin cuisine, this guidebook identifies and tells you how to use the vast array of herbs, chilies, fruits, sauces, meats, beans and prepared foods at your neighborhood mercado. A bonus section of the author's favorite Latin recipes will help you create delicious authentic dishes.

This book uses food as a lens through which to explore important matters of society and culture. In exploring why and how people eat around the globe, the text focuses on issues of health, conflict, struggle, contest, inequality, and power. Whether because of its necessity, pleasure, or ubiquity, the world of food (and its lore) proves endlessly fascinating to most people. The story of food is a narrative filled with both human striving and human suffering. However, many of today's diners are only dimly aware of the human price exacted for that comforting distance from the lived-world realities of food justice struggles. With attention to food issues ranging from local farming practices to global supply chains, this book examines how food’s history and geography remain inextricably linked to sociopolitical experiences of trauma connected with globalization, such as colonization, conquest, enslavement, and oppression. The main text is structured alphabetically around a set of 70 ingredients, from almonds to yeast. Each ingredient's story is accompanied by recipes. Along with the food profiles, the encyclopedia features sidebars. These are short discussions of topics of interest related to food, including automats, diners, victory gardens, and food at world’s fairs. This project also brings a social justice perspective to its content—weighing debates concerning food access, equity, insecurity, and politics.

"Essential for anyone who talks, eats, or thinks about food." —Bev Bennett, Chicago Sun-Times The New Food Lover's Companion is an indispensable resource for everyone from home cooks to culinary professionals. This widely praised and highly esteemed reference guide has been updated with new information to reflect the way we eat in today's world, taking into account our healthier lifestyles and more diverse palates, including: Over 500 new cultural listings, including Korean, Persian, and South American additions Definitions and explanations for cooking tools and techniques A microwave oven conversion chart An extensive breakdown of food labels and nutritional facts Suggestions for substituting recipe ingredients Among the myriad of foods and culinary subjects defined and explained are meat cuts, breads, pastas, and literally everything else related to good food and enjoyable dining—a veritable food bible for the novice home-cook, culinary student, or the self-proclaimed foodie. The New Food Lover's Companion is a reference guide—not a cookbook—but it includes hundreds of cooking tips plus an extensive bibliography of recommended cookbooks. More than 7,200 entries plus line art are included in this seminal work. "As thick and satisfying as a well-stuffed sandwich." —The New York Times

Based on B.E.S. popular and authoritative The New Food Lover's Companion, this enlarged and enhanced reference volume was written for discerning home chefs and everybody else who wants to become more knowledgeable about good food and elegant dining. This second edition has been updated with new information to reflect the way we eat in today's world. The authors have taken into account our healthier lifestyles and more diverse palates to include: More than 500 new listings, including entries relating to Indian and Southeast Asian ingredients, plus expanded coverage of South American, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern cuisines Updated information for hundreds of existing entries A blood alcohol concentration chart for men and women An extensive breakdown of food labels and nutritional facts Department of Agriculture recommendations for a 2,000 calorie per day food plan More than 7200 entries plus line art are included in this seminal work. Miniature glossaries are interspersed throughout the text. Sidebar features throughout the book offer quick tips on food purchases, as well as Fast Facts and advice on preparation, serving, and dining. Handy appendices cover many topics including suggestions for substituting recipe ingredients, a microwave oven conversion chart, recommended safe cooking temperatures for meats and fish, and much more! The deluxe hardcover binding with dust jacket includes a ribbon place marker and golden-tipped page edges, making this gorgeous book as much a showpiece as it is an indispensable reference.

How many otherwise well-educated readers know that the familiar orange carrot was once a novelty? It is a little more than 400 years old. Domesticated in Afghanistan in 900 AD, the purple carrot, in fact, was the dominant variety until Dutch gardeners bred the young upstart in the seventeenth century. After surveying paintings from this era in the Louvre and other museums, Dutch agronomist Otto Banga discovered this stunning transformation. The story of the carrot is just one of the hidden tales this book recounts. Through portraits of a wide range of foods we eat and love, from artichokes to strawberries, The Carrot Purple traces the path of foods from obscurity to familiarity. Joel Denker explores how these edible plants were, in diverse settings, invested with new meaning. They acquired not only culinary significance but also ceremonial, medicinal, and economic importance. Foods were variously savored, revered, and reviled. This entertaining history will enhance the reader’s appreciation of a wide array of foods we take for granted. From the carrot to the cabbage, from cinnamon to coffee, from the peanut to the pistachio, the plants, beans, nuts, and spices we eat have little-known stories that are unearthed and served here with relish.

This expanded and updated edition of the local bestseller takes food lovers and serious home cooks on a tasty romp into Chicago's secret culinary corners to find everything they never knew they needed. Includes information on over 2,000 ingredients, little-known stores and grocers, helpful hints, and recipes.

Ever since his first book, Simple Cooking, and its acclaimed successors, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, and Pot on the Fire, John Thorne has been hailed as one of the most provocative, passionate, and accessible food writers at work today. In Mouth WideOpen, his fifth collection, he has prepared a feast for the senses and intellect, charting a cook's journey from ingredient to dish in illuminating essays that delve into the intimate pleasures of pistachios, the Scottish burr of real marmalade, how the Greeks made a Greek salad, the (hidden) allure of salt anchovies, and exploring the uncharted territory of improvised breakfasts and resolutely idiosyncratic midnight snacks. Most of all, his inimitable warmth, humor, and generosity of spirit inspire us to begin our own journey of discovery in the kitchen and in the age-old comfort and delight of preparing food.