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 Flour Power: The complete guide to 3-minute home flour milling
ASIN: 0970540108
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: The Most Amazing Book Ever!
Comments: Flour Power is simply the most amazing book and read I have ever come across. I love bread I love baking bread. However, until getting this book I only made white breads. Now, I am a whole meal bread lover.
Not only does this book cover why you should eat more whole grains, it tells you about the different grains, how to choose and buy a grain mill for milling your own flour at home. It has recipes, a listing of mill sellers and manufacturers, grain sources and more.
Once I started reading, I just couldn't put it down. I read it from cover to cover in one night. I have to tell you that doesn't happen often. If you bake bread by hand, bread machine, mixer, or whatever you have to have this book. ORDER IT NOW!
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 Easy Beans: Fast and Delicious Bean, Pea, and Lentil Recipes
ASIN: 0969816200
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: Beans in California
Comments: I have a bookcase full of cookery books, BUT, "Easy Beans" and "More Easy Beans" are two of my top favorites. All the recipes I have tried are delicious, and best of all for a busy professional, quick and easy to make when I come home tired at the end of the day. As an MD interested in nutrition, I can heartily recommend the recipes in these books for the good of your heart. Well done, authors!
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 More Easy Beans: Quick and Tasty Bean, Pea and Lentil Recipes
ASIN: 0969816219
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: I never thought bean dishes could be this tasty
Comments: I have never been a bean lover but am a vegetarian. So when I discovered More Easy Beans and found so many great recipes, especially for appetizers, I was hooked. I truly believe this is the best bean book I have ever used. Some recipes call for meat, but of course, everyone has a friend who likes red meat. What I really found helpful was the recipes all use a can of beans or allow you to make the beans from scratch. All the recipes I have tried are right on with the cooking times. Other books I have used produce bean mush at the end. I highly recommend More Easy Beans.
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 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains
ASIN: 0452276543
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: Super book - demystifies beans and rice!
Comments: I'm a returning student and eating out was one of the things I had to give up to survive on my smaller budget. This cookbook helps because I can make meals that I like better than most restaurant food with little fuss and cheap ingredients. The recipes are easy to follow and the introductory content helped me understand the basics of bean preparation so I don't have to rely on over-priced, high-sodium content canned beans!
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 Going Against the Grain: How Reducing and Avoiding Grains Can Revitalize Your Health
ASIN: 0658017225
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: Revolutionary Book and Indispensable Resourc
Comments: Going Against the Grain is the most comprehensive resource on the hazards of consuming grains. It is thoughtfully written and easy to read yet incredibly thorough. The detailed information that helps deepen understanding is there, as well as the broader perspective and contextual information. I don't think a book on this subject could be better written. Melissa Diane Smith explains the hazards of a grain-based diet referencing scientific studies and interpreting them in an easy to read fashion. Then after a full discussion of different types of grains and their physiological effects she goes on to provide
menus, recipes and shopping suggestions referencing products made with acceptable ingredients. She even included manufacturer contact information so people can go to the source with questions.
Certainly Going Against the Grain will become an indispensable resource for people fighting celiac disease, but it should also be read by any and all people interested in true nutrition. It's common knowledge that the food pyramid is obsolete... get caught up with the times and read Going Against the Grain.
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 The Splendid Grain: Robust, Inspired Recipes for Grains With Vegetables, Fish, Poultry, Meat, and Fruit
ASIN: 0688166121
Customer's Rating: 5
Summary: Award-winning cookbook celebrates the jewels of the fields
Comments: Where was I when The Splendid Grain won the James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Julia Child Cookbook Award? Usually I am waiting with bated breath to see who wins these awards and I have read and digested all the cookbooks in the running. It is like the Academy Awards for the cookbook world. "The Splendid Grain" by Rebecca Wood did win the award and deserved it. It is filled with text that engages and recipes that have kept us cooking since I first discovered it about three years after it came out.
My only excuse for not having found it earlier is that I had one year old twins who never slept and all I did was nurse, look about with bleary eyes and try to make noodles for the fifth night running. I guess The Splendid Grain would have been of no use to me then. I would have cried when I read it. All these recipes for bagels made with barley flour and Strawberry Blue Corn Waffles that I could not cook because I was on the floor baby-proofing the outlets or cleaning up oatmeal from the baseboards.
I read an article on bread by Laurie Colwin back before I had children. Wisdom wasted on the uninitiated. In it Laurie Colwin said that she found a bread cookbook when her daughter was young and she read it as fiction because that is what bread baking is to people with babies. This is not just to let me off the hook for missing a great cookbook when it came out but to say buy it even if you have no kitchen because it makes such a good read.
The recipes in "The Splendid Grain" are easier than they appear. I made bagels with my three kids and a few assorted extras over on play dates. We made the dough in a few minutes and then let it rise while we kept the dog from scaring one child and we forgot about the dough all together by the time the dog was on a leash and the child pacified. When we came back to the dough it had a strange gray color from the barley flour but this was a plus for the under seven set.
Making the bagel shapes was easy enough for three year olds. Boiling was fun and baking easy and we were done. The dozen were gone immediately. I had one that I split with my husband. They were an eerie Halloween gray but had a complex taste from the barley. I forgot about them in my rush to try the next recipe from The Splendid Grain. I was informed at school a few days later that my son's friend, the one who is scared of the dog, was never coming over again if I did not stop upstaging her mom by doing things like making these great homemade bagels. I guess they did not forget about the bagels for a while.
We made waffles, and breakfast cakes; winter squash potage was the hit of a Hanukkah party for which we promised to make Matzoh Ball soup but I just couldn't leave old Rebecca Wood to do it. No one missed the Matzoh Balls, and I make excellent Matzoh Balls. We had cornmeal mush instead of oatmeal. Real Vietnamese Spring Rolls are the plan for dinner tonight. She makes it look so easy. On the still-to-try list is a Rye and Cauliflower Casserole and Quinoa Soup Saigon Style.
The Apricot Millet Breakfast Cake is what brought the book to my attention. I would like to thank my friend Jeanie for the cake I finished before I could share it with the kids as intended. Jeanie was a chef and cake baker extraordinaire before kids. I trust her food judgment and envy her huge Hobart mixer and professional range. She gave us a piece of this cake as I was picking my son up from a play date. Jeanie showed me "The Splendid Grain." "You've seen this, right?" I hadn't. I wanted to borrow it but she wouldn't let it go--a sentiment I appreciated.
So I went out and bought the book. That was about six weeks ago. I slept with it next to my bed. Read all the fascinating information about each kind of grain and read the recipes, as Laurie Colwin taught me, as a good novel and not a cookbook. Then I started making grocery lists for all Rebecca Wood weeks. This has continued for at least a month and no one has stopped eating long enough to thank me. But I want to thank Jeanie publicly. This gift of "The Splendid Grain" does not raise her in my esteem, it simply reminds me of how highly she is held (even though she would not lend me her copy).
You do need to add a salad or some steamed vegetable to the all Splendid Grain menu. But no protein need be added as she has every combination of chicken, prawns, tofu, you name it in the recipes. It is just a little light on salads or some kind of green stuff.
I have a mind to call Rebecca Wood and thank her for this book. She researched so thoroughly and cooked so plentifully for us, her readers. Rebecca wood covered it all. Ancient food from the Americas to a Norwegian friend's mother's recipes. From macrobiotics to blinis with caviar and Christmas Hen. Normally I am wary of someone trying to cover the whole world and every grain. Things tend to get diluted and hodge-podgy. Not so in "The Splendid Grain." Each recipe is crisp and novel.
I am grateful. It is the week after Christmas as I am writing and Hanukkah has passed into the winter. I have been made aware this year of how the traditions I find around me all stress this time of year as a time to bring light and warmth into your heart in this darkest time of the year. Rebecca Wood's book feels like a warm hearth to me, and a good friend cooking for you. I am grateful that I am out of the dark woods of parenting early childhood. I am grateful to Jeanie for bringing this book and a lot more into my life. The Splendid Grain came to me through a warm friend and I have shared it with my friends over the winter. I am grateful for the feeling of warmth and the book that has helped inspire me to share it.
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 The Bread Machine Cookbook IV: Whole Grains and Natural Sugars
ASIN: 1558670491
Customer's Rating: 2
Summary: A bit disappointing
Comments: I have her first book and this one, and I must say that she must be running out of good recipes. These are mostly disappointing.
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