The food pages of "The Des Moines Register", Iowa's highly regarded newspaper, have long reflected the wide-ranging tastes of Iowa cooks, both adventurous and traditional. Now the experts who create these pages present over 300 of their favorite recipes, updated for today's cooks and seasoned with anecdotes gathered from readers over the years. 30 drawings.

With Italian steakhouses, the Younkers Tea Room and Stella's Blue Sky Diner, Des Moines's culinary history is tantalizingly diverse. It is filled with colorful characters like bootlegger/"millionaire bus boy" Babe Bisignano, a buxom bar owner named Ruthie and future president of the United States Ronald Reagan. The savory details reveal deeper stories of race relations, women's rights, Iowa caucus politics, the arts, immigration and assimilation. Don't be surprised if you experience sudden cravings for Steak de Burgo, fried pork tenderloin sandwiches and chocolate ambrosia pie, à la Bishop's Buffet. Author Darcy Dougherty Maulsby serves up a feast of Des Moines classics mixed with Iowa history, complete with iconic recipes.

As the current star of her Food Network show, Valerie's Home Cooking, and co-host of the network's Kids Baking Championship, as well as having spent years acting on television, Valerie Bertinelli has made a name for herself in households across America. But to really know Valerie, is to spend time in her kitchen. Inspired by her family's cooking legacy, Valerie specializes in showing fans how to make dishes their own families will love that are for the heart and soul. As she often says, there's a story behind every recipe and Valerie shares them in this gorgeous cookbook, where home cooks will find more than 100 recipes that are easy to make and innovative--they're just as fresh, vibrant and down to earth as Valerie herself. Many of these classic comforting recipes have an original twist like Bloody Mary Tea Sandwiches, Lobster BLTs, Quick Rotisserie Chicken Gumbo, and S'mores Popcorn. These mouthwatering dishes will become your go-tos, whether you're having breakfast or lunch on your own, friends are joining for last-minute cocktails and small bites, or the whole family is coming together for a hearty dinner and dessert.

Emphasizing easy technique, simple food, and speedy preparation, Everyday French Cooking provides tips, tricks, and shortcuts to make modern French home cooking accessible to any chef.

Beth M. Howard knows about pie. She made pies at California's Malibu Kitchen for celebrities including Barbra Streisand (lemon meringue), Dick Van Dyke (strawberry rhubarb), and Steven Spielberg (coconut cream) before moving back home to rural Iowa. She now lives in the famous American Gothic House (the backdrop for Grant Wood's famous painting) and runs the hugely popular Pitchfork Pie Stand. With full-color photos throughout, Ms. American Pie features 80 of Beth's coveted pie recipes and some of her own true tales to accompany them. With chapters like Pies to Heal, Pies to Seduce, and Pies to Win the Iowa State Fair, Beth will divulge her secret for making a killer crust without refrigerating the dough and will show you how to break every rule you've ever learned about making delicious, homemade pie.

Buxton, Iowa, was an unincorporated coal mining town, established by Consolidation Coal Company in 1900. At a time when Jim Crow laws and segregation kept blacks and whites separated throughout the nation, Buxton was integrated. African American and Caucasian residents lived, worked, and went to school side by side. The company provided miners with equal housing and equal pay, regardless of race, and offered opportunities for African Americans beyond mining. Professional African Americans included a bank cashier, the justice of the peace, constables, doctors, attorneys, store clerks, and teachers. Businesses, such as a meat market, a drugstore, a bakery, a music store, hotels, millinery shops, a saloon, and restaurants, were owned by African Americans. For 10 years, African Americans made up more than half of the population. Unfortunately, in the early 1920s, the mines closed, and today, only a cemetery, a few foundations, and some crumbling ruins remain.

"The story of a young man from small-town Iowa who decided to take his own life rather than continue his losing battle against the traumatic brain injuries (CTE) he had sustained as a no-holds-barred high school football player, and at the same time a larger story about the hot-button issues that football raises about masculinity and violence, and about what values we want to instill in our kids"--

In this debut collection, award-winning poet and baker Kate Lebo redefines everything we thought we knew about pie. An eclectic mix of prose poems, fantasy zodiac, and humor, A Commonplace Book of Pie explores the tension between the container and the contained while considering the real and imagined relationships between pie and those who love it. Expanding on Lebo's successful chapbook of the same name, this volume includes new poems as well as more than two dozen Americana-themed illustrations by artist Jessica Lynn Bonin. Bonin's art adds a sense of nostalgia alongside Lebo's modern style, and together with the text, puts pie and the art of baking in a fresh, contemporary context. Kate Lebo makes poems and pies in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, and Poetry Northwest. When Kate is not creating poems, she is hosting her semi-secret pie social, Pie Stand, around the US, teaching creative writing at the University of Washington and Richard Hugo House, and pie-making at Pie School, her cliche-busting pastry academy. Jessica Lynn Bonin is an illustrator and mixed-media artist whose work adds a modern twist to familiar images of American culture. Bonin's murals are displayed in New York,Oregon and Washington state. She lives and works in a former hardware store and lumberyard in Edison, Washington.

From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s. Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid." Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends. Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.