Just For Fun

Description: Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Here she tells of the unconventional journey taken through the many kitchens of her life on her way to where she is now.

Description: Elizabeth Minchilli has been eating her way through Rome since she was 12 years old. Eating Rome, based on her blog Elizabeth Minchilli in Rome, is her homage to the city that feeds her, literally and figuratively. Her story is a personal, quirky and deliciously entertaining look at some of the city's monuments to food culture. Join her as she takes you on a stroll through her favorite open air markets; stop by the best gelato shops; order plates full of carbonara and finish the day with a brilliant red Negroni. Coffee, pizza, artichokes and grappa are starting points for mouth-watering stories about this ancient city.

Description: Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet ("choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover") and decrying the worst offenders ("kale is the early morning of foods"). Now he will give fans what they really crave--hundreds of pages of his thoughts on all things culinary(ish). Insights such as: why he believes coconut water was invented to get people to stop drinking coconut water, why pretzel bread is #3 on his most important inventions of humankind (behind the wheel and the computer), and the answer to the age-old question "which animal is more delicious: the pig, the cow, or the bacon cheeseburger?"--Excerpted from publisher statement.

Description: "A beautifully written memoir that follows one woman from her childhood in a dysfunctional Midwestern family to becoming a chef in New York City and finally her triumphant return home to reclaim and redeem Midwestern cooking. Amy Thielen, author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table, traces her journey from Park Rapids, Minnesota, to cooking professionally under some of New York City's finest chefs--including David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten--and thenback home again. A love of food and an overwhelming desire to get the hell out of small-town America drive Thielen to New York to seek out its intense culinary world, which she embraces enthusiastically, while her boyfriend finds success in its fickle art world. After years of living in the city, with frequent trips back home in the summertime, the couple eventually chooses life deep in the woods in a cabin Thielen's husband built by hand. There Aaron can practice his craft while Amy takes the skills shelearned cooking professionally and turns them to undoing years of processed foods to uncover true Midwestern cooking, which begins simply with humble workhorse ingredients such as potatoes and onions. Give a Girl a Knife offers a fresh look into New York's fine dining scene while also acknowledging a universal nostalgia for home--and a yearning to remake that home so it's even better than you remember."-- Provided by publisher.

Description: It's the story of Rachel (cookbook writer) Samstat and Mark (syndicated columnist) Feldman, whose happy marriage - well, Rachel always assumed it was happy - is breaking up. (It's breaking up in New York, its breaking up in Washington, and of course, it's breaking up on the Eastern Shuttle.)