Walters, Terry. Clean Food: a Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source With More than 200 Recipes For a Healthy and Sustainable You. New York: Sterling, 2009.
A friend gave me a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. Happy birthday to me! Except I have a weird relationship with B&N. On the one hand, I’m a librarian through and through. I borrow my books. Sending them back is in my blood because I really don’t have the space for keepers. Wait. Let me rephrase. I am picky about my keepers because my space is limited. There. That’s more honest. Quite simply, I do not have the luxury of holding on to every book. When I was a child my father and I belonged to a mail-away book club. Every month we would pour over the selections, pick out a few we thought we could read in 30 days and then wait anxiously for their arrival. The package would come, heavy with books, complete with a postage-paid return label as well as a crisp, new padded envelope to send everything back in. Even in high school I couldn’t keep my books. I had to pass them onto my younger sister in an effort to save the family some money. In college I returned my textbooks to pay the phone bill. You could say I’ve never been comfortable with book ownership.
But! But. But, when it comes to gift certificates to book stores I make exceptions. I make exceptions, but there are rules. I can keep books I will use over and over again (like cookbooks). I can keep books I consider educational, something I can learn from each and every time I pick it up (think reference).
The book I purchased with my gift certificate exemplifies both attributes of my exceptions: Clean Food is a cookbook and a reference book. It goes beyond vegetarian eating. Probably the best thing about Clean Food is that it will put an end to struggling to use all the produce we get from the farm share. Every year it’s the same thing – what do you do with 15lbs of bok choy? There’s only so much stir fry one can eat!
~*LunaSea*~ 