How would you like to cook delicious, deeply nourishing dishes from a gorgeous large format cookbook that is so much fun to read that you can really enjoy it even when you're not cooking?
Cooking with the Muse, a winner of over a dozen culinary and literary awards, offers 150 nutritious international recipes for everyone -- whether you're gluten free, a vegetarian, paleo, an omnivore, an occasional cook, an avid cook, or any kind of food lover. It also features a plenitude of imaginative poetry about food and ingredients, along with enlightening literary and historical essays, playful and informative culinary and historical notes, and 200 beautiful full-color photographs. Here's a feast of words and images, with easy-to-follow steps for preparing amazing individual dishes and truly satisfying whole meals.
**Highlights fresh, local ingredients and encourages the use of seasonal produce, wild seafood, traditional fats, and healthy meat from pasture-raised animals. (And almost all of the dishes are or can be made gluten free.)
**Revels in flavors that are complex and global, ranging from Middle Eastern and Turkish to American Southwestern, from Vietnamese and Japanese to Italian and Indian.
**Offers a delectable feast for the locavore or omnivore, novice cook or experienced chef -- a food lover's literary anthology and a book lover's cookbook.
**Includes an anthology covering 3000 years, along with the equivalent of a complete book of original poems and poetic prose by authors Massimilla and Kornfeld, and a complete book of the authors' original essays explaining key culinary poems and traditions.
Omnivores, Vegetarians, Gluten-Free, and Paleo eaters will all be excited by the dishes offered here! The broad range of recipes includes Blackberry Parfait; Hominy, Tomatillo, and Pepper Stew Baked in a Pumpkin; Cranberry-Glazed Roast Turkey (or Tempeh); Shepherd's Pie with Colcannon Topping; Ruby Red Cabbage Kraut; Goan Green Coconut Fish Curry; Fudgy Nibby Brownies; Warm-Hearted Pea Cakes with Sesame Crust and Garlic Piquillo Pepper Sauce; Sping Onion Tart; I-Sold-My-Birthright Lentil Soup; Seared Tuna with Purple Potatoes and Cherry Tomato Sauce; Peach-Indigo Blueberry Crisp; and Chocolate "Cherry-Ripe" Espresso Mousse Parfait.
The book includes a vast array of classic and contemporary poems, each perfectly paired, like a fine wine, with each dish. In addition to an abundance of poetry and poetic prose by Massimilla and Kornfeld, pieces included here represent such authors as: Homer, Lu Tong, Rumi, Chaucer, Basho, Keats, Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Claude McKay, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Galway Kinnell, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Tom Robbins, Lucille Clifton, Wendell Berry, Michael Ondaatje, Billy Collins, Jorie Graham, Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, and a great many others.
"Prepared dish photos" by Michael Grimaldi; illustrations by Francis Estrada; and "market/ingredient photos" by Massimilla and Kornfeld.
Both a literary and a culinary achievement, Cooking with the Muse is a feast for the heart and the senses, a delectable journey that nourishes the body, mind, and spirit.
Cooking with the Muse has received very enthusiastic reviews in over 70 national and local publications and won well over a dozen awards, including the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, the Living Now Book Award, the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award, the New England Book Festival Award, the USA News Best Book Award, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, and many others, including prizes and citations not only in the Cookbook category, but also in the Nonfiction, Anthology, Poetry, Coffee Table Book, Holiday, Green Book, and Photography categories. It was also selected as a "top pick" by publications ranging from Bella Magazine to Epicurus.
Myra Kornfeld is a chef, educator, and the author of three previous cookbooks,
The Healthy Hedonist, The Healthy Hedonist Holidays, and
The Voluptuous Vegan. She teaches in the graduate nutrition program at the Maryland University of Integrative Health and at the Natural Gourmet Institute, and she is head chef for the website myfoodmyhealth.com. She specializes in cooking parties and team-building events. For more info: Myrakornfeld.com and Cookingwiththemuse.com
Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, and painter. Acclaim for his books includes a Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize; the Bordighera Poetry Prize; the Grolier Poetry Prize; and a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications. He holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches literature, food ethics, and writing at Columbia University and The New School. For more info: Stephenmassimilla.com and Cookingwiththemuse.com
