@ Your Library
If you have a vegetable garden your produce is probably beginning to overwhelm. What do you do with all the tomatoes, zucchini, beets that grew this year? Come find a new to you cookbook with ideas for preparing vegetables in new ways or borrow one of our preservation books on putting aside food for winter. I really like Foolproof Preserving by America’s Test Kitchen. This book provides recipes and instructions for small batch jams, jellies, pickles, condiments and more. I often only have enough produce and time for small batches, so this is a great resource. Savory Sweet : simple preserves from a Northern kitchen by Beth Dooley and Mette Nielsen uses produce from the northland to create unique preserves that are delicious.
Enjoying the fruits of one’s garden or even local produce is so delightful. Hot weather also makes me try to avoid using the oven so Some Assembly Required by Julia Dowling Rutland is a wonderful new cookbook for avoiding cooking. Or borrow a book about grilling and barbecuing or be adventuresome and borrow one of our cooking while camping books. Try one of these North Country Cabin Cooking by Margie Knoblauch and Mary Brubacher, New Camp Cookbook : On the Trail bty Emily Vikre or The Backyard BBQ Bible by Oscar Smith.
If the weather isn’t too warm to cook then try Kardea Brown’s Make Do with What You Have for 100 delicious recipes from favorite old school meals. And for families, include the kids in your cooking with Weeknight Wonders for ’52 weeks of fun, themed recipes the whole family can make together’ by Ashley Craft. Cooking and baking are good skills for kids to develop, not only do they learn their way around the kitchen they practice their reading and math skills while having fun.
There are wonderful novels that include food as a major aspect of the novel including the Japanese bestseller, now translated, Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada. It’s basically a book museum as the Night Library only has books by deceased authors and they can only be looked at in the library.
Thrillers continue to be written, published and read by many. Matthew Quirk is the author of The Night Agent, now a series on Netflix. The Method is about a young actress going undercover in a deadly world of espionage to save her best friend and herself. I Did Not Kill My Husband by Linda Keir about a woman trying to prove she didn’t kill her husband even though all the evidence points to her being the murderer.
And if you are still looking for a beach read then pick up Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ And the Crowd Went Wild. High school sweethearts, except she broke his heart are both trying to rebuild their lives in the same place and avoid each other. We all know how that will turn out.