Mexican Vegetarian Cooking
Author: Edith Metcalfe De Plata
Authentic national dishes of Mexico, including vegetarian adaptations of Tacos, Enchiladas, and Guacamole, are included in this colleciton of recipes. Here are the exciting flavors of Mexico in an easy-to-use cookbook that features wholefood ingredients at their best.
• While we think of Mexican cuisine as primarily meat-based, in actual practice, most Mexican dishes are vegetarian.
• Includes recipes for beverages, soups, salads, casseroles, and desserts.
• Provides a glossary of frequently-used utensils and ingredients, with an entire reference section devoted to chilis.
Book about: Permanence or The Yoga Minibook for Weight Loss
Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover
Author: Jancis Robinson
Over the last twenty years Jancis Robinson has indeed explored the vineyards of the world, writing eleven books on wine and offering her expert judgment as one of only two hundred Masters of Wine on all aspects of the holy grape. But this is her first personal book about her long and mostly joyous love affair with wine and its attendant pleasures - gastronomic, scenic, cultural and social. "The point of wine," says this refreshingly relaxed author, "is to give pleasure, as much of it to as many people as possible." And so you will accompany Jancis Robinson on her pleasurable odyssey, an adventure that started for her when she took a summer job as a chambermaid in vine-covered Tuscany and began to discover wine's glories. Then, a student at Oxford, she found her passion "ignited by a simple, outstanding, and still memorable bottle." And she knew what she wanted to do with her life.
Publishers Weekly
Although she is not as well known here as abroadreaders may remember her PBS-TV Wine Course of 1996, howeverand her book is perhaps a bit too British with such discussions as wine sales at the Sainsbury grocery chain, Robinson's memoir will nevertheless delight and inform oenologists and those who enjoy armchair travel. This Master of Wine, a distinction she earned in 1984, virtually stumbled into her mtier after she graduated from Oxford in 1970 with a job at a wine and spirits magazine. Robinson is a jaunty writer who imparts her expertise with ease. Here she tours the vineyards of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia and California (where, with a touch of show-biz pizzazz, she visits Francis Ford Coppola's Napa Valley wine estate), and along the way explains the qualities that distinguish the finest wines, introduces winemakers and gossips about major figures in the trade. Robinson also writes a bit about her domestic life with her husband, former London restaurateur Nick Lander, and their three children. The information shared in Robinson's book verifies why this columnist for the Wine Spectator and editor of the Oxford Companion to Wine has become such a popular and respected connoisseur. (Oct.)
Kirkus Reviews
In case you were interested, here's everything you could ever possibly want to know about Robinson's (Oxford Companion to Wine) career trajectory.
Robinson, who has been a fixture in the wine writing establishment for 25 years, teeters precariously, wanting her readers to know that she is both a wine connoisseur—exquisitively sensitive to the historical, geographical, and sociological contexts of wine—and a populist rabble-rouser, bucking received opinion as she champions the wine-drinking pleasures open to Everyman. She quaffs Grands Echezeaux, La Tache, Romanee-Conti, 1847 Yquems, and 1787 Branne Moutons, has "swashbuckling" Harold Evans as her editor at London's Sunday Times, and hobnobs with Hugh Johnson and Edmund Penning-Rowsell, But she also starts up the Drinker's Digest, an opinionated and iconoclastic newsletter dedicated to the principle of the best wine for the best price. Readers will learn the holdings in her cellar, her peregrinations through the wine-trade publications, the many personalities she meets, the astonishing meals she enjoys, and will share her each and every momentous occasion ("I shall never forget my first formal wine tasting"; "My most embarrassing trial by tasting took place. . . . ", etc.). She gets serious now and then—discussing the pros and cons of blind tastings, detailing how Robert M. Parker Jr. has gained his mind-boggling sway over the wine world—but for the most part, this reads like a gossip column that can't turn a decent sentence ("The others are that there are anyway enough people who love Tertre, for it is probably the only Saint-Emilion other than the top-ranking Ausone and Cheval Blanc").
Despite its moments, this autobiography is clunky, desperately self-promoting, and, at best, premature.
