HKFE

I recently checkout the cookbook at my public library and upon my surprise were some recipes that my mother used to make. This is a plus for me since my mother is no longer living and we didn't write down some of them. For someone who likes the old time cooking this is a wonderful book.

I love this cookbook! Here's a sampling of some of the recipes you will find within: Down Home Crab Cakes,Southern Barbecue,Turnip Greens,Cheese Grits,Lane Cake,---this book the is the absolute essence of Southern Cafe food! There is an abundance of recipes-some you wouldn't expect-and three Fried Green Tomato recipes.The Buttermilk Biscuit recipe is the best I have ever used.Lots of wonderful antecdotes on Alabama,Hollywood,the Piggly Wiggly,the movie- plenty of old time photos.A class act.Two words of caution: #1.)Ignore Fannie's Ode to Grapico-DON'T try the stuff! It's grape soda that will make your teeth ache for an hour it's so damned sweet! and #2.)These recipe's are NOT for the "calorically challenged"-but buy it anyway! What a great read

It's not a very large book, but it's got a pretty wide range of recipes from several different countries. All the recipes look very tasty, and there are some fabulous pictures to go along with each. Recipes range from the very simple to moderately complex, so this book should offer an entertaining range of challenges to most kitchen savvy people. This would be a good book for people interested in learning about asian cuisine, or those looking for more recipes to try out. All the ingredients should be relatively easy to find, although some will require a trip to a specialty store. If you live anywhere with a chinatown, finding ingredients shouldn't be a problem.

The recipes in this book taste very authentic. The chicken and sticky rice in lotus leaf parcels is the real thing...tasted just like the dim sum resturant. The book is an excellent collection of the most popular or signature dishes of the Asian cuisine ranging from Chinese to Indonesian. It is organized by in the traditional cookbook fashion of appetizers to desserts. Some of the recipes are very simple and some are compound recipes (recipes that rely on the recipe of another dish). It's worth the space on your cookbook shelf and is a good way to sample a variety of different far east ethnic cuisines.

I've been an amateur breadmaker for years, but tend to bake irregularly because of the effort involved. No more! Mark Miller's recipes for bread both plain and exotic, healthful and richly delicious, have rekindled my enthusiasm for bread. I'm baking almost all my own bread now and making breakfast and lunch special occasions. From genuine sourdough, comforting cornbreads, spicy cheesey flatbreads and foccacia, to tempting quickbreads and breakfast treats (try Cream Cheese and Blueberry Bread, or Scottish Scones with honey, cream and Drambuie) No tedious copying of recipes from a library book this time: there are so many delicious recipes (and I've tried a lot of them) that I need to buy this book!

This is chock full of wonderful recipes. Not one that we've tried has disappointed. A batch of Blue Corn-Maple Muffins never lasts long in our house. Nothing out of this book ever does.

Readers whose idea of a French café is (like mine was) little more than the cliché of black coffee and Le Monde at little round sidewalk tables will be very pleasantly surprised by variety revealed in this neat little book by Marie-France Boyer and photographer Eric Morin. From Paris haunts much like the stereotype, to rustic village cafes far outside the metropolis, to the retreats of artists or tradesmen, author and photographer demonstrate that the café is more than a place, but rather an intimate expression of the French lifestyle.

The beautiful photos are by far the most engrossing part of this book. But the writing is valuable too, describing the golden age of French cafes, the rise of important establishments like Momus, Les Deux Garçons in Aix-en-Provence, or the Marly, and the influence of the cafes on French art and culture. And though the book's almost a decade old now, the Guide at the end should still be useful in tracking down many of the cafes featured in photo and text.

In all, whether you're an experienced boulevardier, a traveler with fond memories, or just someone looking to experience French culture vicariously, "The French Café" should inspire many happy thoughts.

You can plan a trip accross France with this book as your only guide. Walking from "bistro" to café from Nice to Paris, Loire-valley to Nantes and Mont-Saint-Michel. Most of the places mentioned here are typically french. No stranger ever thought of pushing the doors. Eric Morin, photographer, knows well this subject. He lives in the Bastille district of Paris. He knows well the most hidden and most fashionable places. Because he spent some happy week-ends in Château du Verger in Anjou (close to Nantes), he collected great pictures from La Cigale and Trentemoult fishing harbour of Nantes. Did you ever dream of becoming a café tender in rural France? would you like to become the "manager" of a warm café where french workers will start the day drinking a Muscadet at 7 am? Marie-France Boyer, as usual, gives practical advices together with inspiring pictures. She will tell you how and where to buy cafés in France, what are "listed historic monuments" in France (some cafés are). A lot of cafés names and addresses are given at the end of this joyful and useful guide to real France. If you really love cafés, you should also buy "The cafés of Paris" asin:1566562783 and "Literary cafés of Paris".

University Press books are most often expensive, somewhat boring, and serve a relatively small audience. Not this one. From the Sin e is not only affordable, it's quite readable too. Wall's work is spare yet clear, and he informs us well, not overbearingly. The book is a bit of a conundrum - part remembrance, part criticism, part travelogue, part creative exposition, yet all of it quite interesting. Wall understands the psyche of the nascent "Irish-American" identity. It's made to be read in pieces, which some might consider a flaw, as there's no real cohesion to the parts.

University presses, presses period, unfortunately shy away from essay collections, which is what this volume essentially is. They claim such books do poorly on the market; if that's so then the contemporary American readership--at least those with an interest in the American-Irish interface--needs to wake up and smell the coffee at the Sin-e cafe. Every chapter here is, like they say, worth the price of admission. This is a book of poet's essays--Wall has published three extraordinary collections of poems--so if you are devoted exclusively to "unified," thesis-driven works, its wide-ranging, eclectic energy might be off-putting. The book is travel, research, investigation--think Herodotus, but with a drawling Wexford accent. From the Sin-e Cafe to the Black Hills is a work of calm intelligence, good humor, and acute literary cultural observation.

I'm just now finishing reading the last essay in this book. A friend from eastern Germany passed "How We Survived Communism And Even Laughed" on to me last year. I have to say that I found both books hard to put down, though I sometimes felt that Ms. Drakulic's characterizations of ordinary life under communism -and of attitudes and motives of people living in post-communist Europe- seemed very broadly drawn.

While my own experience in post-communist Europe was limited to a year-long 'visit', my suspicions that Ms. Drakulic may sometimes go overboard in the connections she draws between the social psychology of poverty and attitudes toward civic responsibility in this context were somewhat supported by the reactions (to these two books) of friends who had been raised under European communism. The conversations we had about these books were at least, if not more, interesting than the books themselves.

Ms. Drakulic's message is an engaging one, accessible in style and intensely personal (which she openly states in her introduction to this book). Her open and direct approach was very valuable to me as a reader, even when I felt I couldn't really follow her arguments to the bigger conclusions about life (in post-communist countries and in general) that she seems to want to persuade her readers of in "Cafe Europa".

Drakulic delivers another series of short essays, in the style of her earlier "How We Survived Communism". In "Café Europa", the reader is carried from Croatia across western Europe during the few short years since Croatia emerged from war as an independent state, caught somewhere between its Balkan history and its European ambitions. She ruminates on subjects as far afield as her distaste for the word "we" because of its communist overtones, which leads to the verdict that the western concept of "I", of self-reliance and modernity in a civil state, is a notion still to be embraced in eastern Europe. It is for precisely the same reason that she admires Americans their fetish for perfect teeth, because they represent self-respect and independence from shoddy state-sponsored dental care.

Many of the essays in the book deal with the peculiar talent in eastern Europe for hiding and forgetting the past, thereby evading responsibility and missing the opportunity to learn from it. This flair for forgetfulness causes Drakulic's mother to fear for the sanctity of her husband's grave, marked by a communist star vulnerable to those who would destroy symbols of forty years of communism. It is this same talent that allows fascist "Ustasha" symbols from the 1940s to be revived in the 1990s under the guise of nationalism. The same phenomenon that impels each generation of politicians to rename streets and plazas in order to avoid any public recognition of historical figures whose views place them, at least temporarily, on the wrong side of today's political fences. It is this same failure of history that forces a Croatian journalist to mince words and ask facile questions during an exclusive interview with Dinko Sakic, the notorious concentration camp commander.

Drakulic is a bit exasperated when, on a visit to Israel, she is barraged with questions about Croatia's fascist role during World War II. "To grow up under communism means to live forever in the present. Once the final social order had been established, there was no need to look backwards - or forwards, for that matter.... Perhaps this is the reason why we are now, with this recent war, sentenced to live in the past. Sometimes I ask myself whether this is the punishment for our lack of interest in history, for our fear, silence and irresponsibility towards ourselves. For our ingnorance." She realizes that Croatia as a society has failed to examine and integrate the lessons of its fascist period, and this failure, this willful forgetfulness, is itself a type of evil complicity perpetually spawning new crises, including the high-tension ethnic conflicts that yielded the 1991-1995 wars.

The only jarring note is the essay titled "Why I Never Visited Moscow", in which Drakulic bemoans the fact that she has been categorized as an eastern European writer. This seems a bit hypocritical given that all of "Café Europa" including the very cover blurbs, much like her previous books, is premised on the fact that she is a particularly talented eastern European writer and astute social critic who has interesting and insightful things to say about the region. Perhaps Drakulic, who has won awards, fame, and money with her admirable accounts of eastern Europe, is being a bit self-righteous when she complains about being viewed as an eastern European writer.

The once unimaginable became reality in 1989, and for many people what was a large problem was seemingly solved. Almost a decade later, however, the freedom and hope that the end of Communism in Europe had proven itself to be a shallow Western ideal that has little relevance to Eastern Europe. Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian-born novelist and journalist, discusses the tribulations of a "freed" Eastern Europe, and the legacy that its sordid past has left for the new Europe to deal with.

The post-Communist Europe has shaped up to be nothing close to what many people, especially the Eastern Europeans, expected it to be. The allure of the West, with its wealth and Capitalist spirit, were stark contrasts for most to what their reality was. Under the rule of Communism, Eastern Europeans lived day-to-day with shortages and lower quality technology.

For Drakulic, her situation was a little better than the rest. Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia, had shirked Communism for his own style of dictatorship, one that allowed for contact with the West. But, as Drakulic explains, Yugoslavia and the West were still worlds apart.

When the Iron Curtain fell, the Eastern Europeans began to integrate the Western way of life into their own. But this transition was not easy or desired; the end of Communist rule did not mean the end of Communist thinking, not did it change the general worldview of many who did not easily renounce their Communist past. Mixed with the re-emergence of decades old animosities, Eastern Europe began to diverge from the path it was expected to take. Within a few years, it became evident that prosperity was not to be had for all. And now, with a decade having past, the truth remains: the East and West are still worlds apart.

This is a dichotomy that has troubled Europe and, more recently, the entire Western world. As has been evident in the continued tension over NATO's expansion, the perspectives of these two halves of Europe are significantly different and essentially incompatible. Throughout her essays, Drakulic makes this evident, discussing in detail the culture-shock she experienced those first few years. Now having lived and worked in Western Europe, she sees the fundamental differences between the two Europes and reflects on the causes and effects of this dichotomy. In the process, she reveals and explains the situation currently facing Europe.

One of the most noticeable aspects of the post-Communist era is the re-emergence of old hatreds and rivalries. And this is no more evident than in the Balkans, where a number of brutal ethnic conflicts have taken place. On occasion, Drakulic delves into the absurdity and pointlessness of these wars, but never fails to mention the circumstances that surrounded them, and the roots they had in recent history--an aspect which is sometimes overlooked in the West.

With such circumstances, another theme becomes evident. In the Balkans and most other parts of Europe, identity is a significant aspect of everyday life. In the essay "People from the Three Borders," Drakulic talks about a neighbour of hers in Isteria who at any given moment with claim to either be a Croat or an Italian. And there is another friend who holds three passports so as to get around more easily in the national patchwork of the Balkans. "'It is a matter of survival,' he says, 'one never knows what will happen here.'"

Another important aspect of Eastern Europe which Drakulic discusses from time to time is the haunting effect that Communism has on the present day. In "A Nostalgic Party at the Graveyard," she recounts a time in Rumania when she came across a gathering of about 150 people conducting a surreal ceremony at the grave of Nicolae Ceausescu, the country's former Communist dictator. A more personal account is discussed in "My Father's Guilt," in which she discusses her own father's role in the Communist hierarchy. Both essays are powerful and insightful, and reveal much about the current situation in Eastern Europe.

There is, of course, much more to Cafe Europa than this, and on the whole the book maintains a high degree of interest and insight. Drakulic's writing style is light, descriptive and concise. She has an astounding ability to make her stories down-to-earth and easy to grasp while not compromising the seriousness of some of the topics. Cafe Europa is a work of great significance and very much worth reading.

Carson McCullers has a fine collection of stories here. The main story about the Cafe' I found to be brilliant, very thought-provoking and somewhat enchanting. The characters are very unusual, but the author makes them believable and makes you become emotionally part of the story. The stories that followed in this collection are all very well written, but a few lacked substance and I found some of them to be dry and disappointing as a reader in comparison to the first one in the book. The final one in the collection was very creative and inspiring, however, and demonstrates the incredible power of this author. A worthwhile read if you are exploring the writing of great American authors. I enjoyed it.

McCullers' captures the essence and delicacies of love in "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Three highly unusual lovers attempt to understand their feelings and desires. Each lover becomes a beloved and nothing seems to work positively. But look more closely: The real lover is the unidentified narrator, who painfully (as experienced by a lover) tells the story. The other stories included in the book magnify and enhance McCullers' universal concept of love and the loneliness and isolation of every lover. This is truly a book to read and enjoy. Then, think about it!

This is a limpid, beautiful story, wonderfully told. The whole setting exemplifies Southern Gothic from the word go: "The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton-mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two coloured windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long."

I was hooked by the beginning, evoking dilapidation, isolation, heat, distress and latent fear/weirdness. Much has been written on McCullough's "lover and beloved" theme, well explored here. The characters are an unforgettable collection of weirdos, still, somehow, typically American; the descriptions are poetic. In general the writing rings true, is economic yet lyrical - nothing is wasted.

Great as "The Great Gatsby", in its way. Much better than "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". It lives up to its title, truly a "ballad" - a songlike story. And the ballad of the mixed-race chain gang that ends it ties the story to the South.

I was sorry to finish it! Utterly compelling.

I was surprised to read all the good reviews for this book. I was not impressed though I read the entire book. From what I could gather, Hallie wasn't in town long enough to form any great relationships with anybody. It was a bit on the cheesy side. And everything worked out just a little too smoothly all the time. From the moment she walked into the cafe she had a job, a beautiful home to stay in, a decent vehicle to drive and money. Course, she had the perfect kids and everything went along perfectly and the neighbors were instantly all her friends. I didn't feel any real chemistry between the two main characters and I thought the plot had a lot of holes. The big climax with her ex-husband was boring and I thought it was ridiculous when she left. I am a Miller fan, but this just didn't do it for me.

I really would give this 4 1/2 stars. The story of Hallie and Chance is wonderful. The passion between the two of them smolders and explodes!! And who says a cowboy has to be the aloof type? Chance is caring, giving, generous, and selfless. Not to mention the dream lover. I now know the answer to the question "Where have all the cowboys gone?". They are in Primrose Creek, and Chance is the standard by which they should be judged!!

The modern people of Primrose Creek still possess that timeless quality that helped to build the fictional town during the pioneer days from Women of Primrose Creek. They embrace Hallie and her two precocious twins Kiley and Kiera, even though Hallie possesses a dangerous secret that could bring turmoil and heartache to the close knit community.

The story of Chance and Hallie has romance, adventure, humor, intrigue, and mystery. This is a good book to curl up with on a rainy day and get lost in the mystique of The Last Chance Cafe.

I'm not much of a murder mystery book lover, but I do like books that tend to have a bit of mystery mixed in with a love story. A fluffy book that won't scare the heck out of me! That's exactly what the Last Chance Cafe was...a good love story with a bit of a murder mystery in there.

It is the story of Hallie and her twin daughters. They are on the run from people who murdered her stepfather. Her car breaks down in a snow storm and she finds the Last Chance Cafe...and a wonderful cowboy. The story goes from there...love, trust, murder, and thrills. It's a good, quick read. Especially if you're looking for a light-hearted mystery romance!

Though this book may seem for the "common people", it is really a waste of money. I think Socrates would be embarrased to have his name on a book of a sophist.

The only people who won't like this book are academics who have made their discipline irrelevant and sophists who have made their discipline a laughingstock. They'll feel threatened by the new and invigorating and exhilarating life Phillips breathes into philosophy. Phillips shows in a way that I have not seen before in a modern philosophy book that philosophy isn't merely about asking certain questions -- What is truth? What is being? -- in the way questions are asked. So it is that via his mesmerizing version of the Socratic method of philosophical inquiry, Phillips explores in a profound and yet sweeping way in "Socrates Cafe" such questions as "Why is what?" "How can an intelligent, sensitive person get stuck in a lousy job?", "What is home?" and "What is silence?" He has recaptured the tradition of unendlingly novel and illuminating philosophical exploration that sadly has gone by the wayside for the most part since Socrates' lifetime. This book is for everyone who wants to push their thinking, for everyone who wants to better answer such questions as "Who am I?" and "Who can I become?" Thank you Christopher Phillips for bringing philosophy back to the people and for having the courage of your convictions in presenting such a compelling alternative to the narrow, unimaginative thinking that passes for philosophy today in books by academics and sophists.

This book provides us with an easey forum to run through some of the life's most basic and yet not so often thought or talked about questions. What is home? Granted it touches on some philosophical subjects which certainly have been covered in more depth in 'proper' philosophy books, however this format allows the reader to think about the questions and have a private discourse by reading what others have said and thought. Its a very friendly book on philosophy, and thats what philosophy on the surface should be.

I loved and and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in having an entertaining yet thought provoking time with some of the people at the Socrates Cafe.

I was beyond excited to receive this cookbook after my wife and I had the intense pleasure of dining at Chez Panisse for our anniversary. However, while it contains fascinating background information on both the history of the Cafe and its purveyors, its recipes seem unduly impressed with themselves and somewhat precious. The esoteric nature of many of the ingredients provokes a cumulative eye-rolling effect, and to tell the truth, some recipes (Spaghetti with Herb Meatballs) that you would expect to elevate the mundane end up tasting... well, mundane. Great for reading, so-so for cooking. I love you Alice Waters, but I think I'll stick to eating your food.

My foodie friends in Berkeley jokingly refer to Alice's books as "food porn". I have actually cooked a couple of the recipes and, while they are correct, they are exhausting. In Berkeley, CA, where the author's restaurant is thriving, it is easy to get the interesting and seasonal ingredients that are described in the book. However, the complexity of preparation of the recipes makes the book less acessible to most readers and home cooks.

The illustrations are lovely, as are the narratives. It is fun to just read the book and fantasize about being a hemp-clad, kinder version of Martha Stewart. However, it is not the most practical cookbook to stick in the cookbook holder when putting the family's meal together.

The real lesson behind this book is that foods that are in season taste better, are less expensive, and are fun to eat. Changing the menu as the seasons change keeps the experience of dining and cooking interesting and entertaining. Also, buying seasonal food is better for the environment than flying foods out of season from another hemisphere.

Take that wisdom, go to your store and get seasonal fruits and vegetables and use an easier and more accessible cookbook like, "The Joy of Cooking". But do keep this one on the coffeetable for those days you want to fantasize about being a world class hippie chef.

This book is, at the very least, a feast for the eyes due to the hauntingly Art Nouveau woodcut illustrations by David Lance Goines. This, together with Alice Water's substantial reputation sets the bar of expectations very high for this book.

Waters has established a niche for herself in the culinary world, which is not unlike that of Martha Stewart. She is the flag bearer for a culinary style which endorses using fresh local produce for both their health benefits and the economic benefits to small, artisinal farmers, ranchers, and fishermen, followed by a loving handling of these ingredients in the kitchen in order to draw out their best properties. Her similarity to Miss Martha is that both are vocal in their support of their lifestyle choices, yet they are not necessarily the most gifted craftsmen in their chosen fields. Both enhance their own standing by hosting true stars in the culinary world. Martha does it on her TV show with Mario and Eric and Jean-George and Daniel and a long line of other justly famous chefs. Alice does it in her kitchen where she has launched the careers of Jeremiah Tower and Paul Bertolli.

Ms. Waters' efforts may not have been as lucrative as Miss Martha's, but Alice has succeeded in establishing a leader's reputation in her field with no blemishes other than a few for possibly hogging a bit more credit than may be her due for the success of Chez Panisse and the creation of 'California Cuisine'.

This book seems to answer one question puzzling me about California Cuisine. I have always wondered whether it was Miss Alice or Wolfgang Puck who first installed a pizza oven and started selling pizza in a distinctly un-Italian venue in California. Alice herein claims that Wolfgang got the idea from a visit to Chez Panisse. If Alice had any regrets about the glamorous Austrian's stealing her thunder, she can get satisfaction in having referred her incompetent German oven bricklayer to Wolfgang.

As I indicate in my title to this review, the book contains much more than you would expect to find in a conventional cookbook. It's content is much richer than Alice's book on vegetables, for example, in that it opens with a little history of the Chez Panisse Café and its style of service, clientele, and suppliers. The level of detail about the ingredients even matches the more specialized Vegetables book. After a while, it starts to read less and less like a cookbook and more and more like a culinary travelogue, the most famous of which is Patience Gray's 'Honey from a Weed'. The travelogue aspect adds value for the reader, but it is not enough to carry the book to a full five star rating.

The culinary aspects of the book, the recipes, give a loving treatment of their ingredients, making every effort to respect the attributes of each foodstuff. The book does not, however, spell out every little detail of every technique. It does not, a la Alton Brown for example, give you careful steps for dealing with beets. It's mission is not to teach prepping, it is to communicate a knowledge and appreciation for all of the different types of beets available to you, once you have established your connections with local farmers. I have not found any extremely difficult recipes in this book, but an amateur with a fair level of skill will enjoy the book much more than it will by a rank newbie.

Just as with Patience Gray's book, not having a source of nettles for my pasta will not detract from my pleasure in reading about how nettles are prepared. I am truly amazed at the extent to which foraging for 'weeds' continues to this day in some European societies. But back to Alice.

I give this book good marks for giving the name of every recipe, not just chapter titles, in the table of contents. This little feature always enhances the value of a cookbook. This value is further enhanced by listing recipes by major ingredient rather than by course. This fits the style of the earlier book on Vegetables and makes finding an appropriate recipe even easier. This organization is taken to it's logical conclusion in that even pantry recipes commonly put into a separate chapter are slotted by ingredient so that chicken stock is in the chapter on chicken and so on.

The recipes cover the most simple salads to some of the most unusual products such as boudin blanc, a French white sausage of chicken and pork. The range of recipes is simply a result of Alice's staying on message. These are all the recipes made at the Chez Panisse Café, and only recipes made at the Chez Panisse Café.

While several recipes may be beyond the skills, time constraints, budget, or ingredient availability of many readers, the book succeeds in providing great value. As a source of salad recipes alone, the book is first rate. Salads are one of Alice Waters' most passionate subjects. While my title to this review holds back any claim that this is a classic like 'Honey from a Weed', it is the equal to the very similar, recent book 'The Vineyard Garden' to which I gave five stars. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who shares Alice Waters' ideals. I would recommend it to anyone else interested in food and cookbooks.