Blog
Tag: Food
Win a copy of the World’s Best Street Food
by Natalia
Food & Drink + Travel / April 09, 2012
The street is where you'll find the heart of a cuisine and a culture—somewhere among the taco carts and noodle stalls, the scent of wood fires and the hubbub of fellow diners. It's the most democratic food in the world, gratifying and completely delicious!
Head on over to Zoomer where you can win a copy of Lonely Planet's The World's Best Street Food. View some of the tempting treats you could be enjoying here!
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My Favourite Books of 2011: Matt (Sales)
by Matt
Fiction + Food & Drink + Kids / December 21, 2011
As the holiday season has already shown, “just one more”, seems to have become my motto. I’ll try and break this habit in choosing from the smorgasbord of delectable books distributed by Raincoast in 2011, difficult as that may be considering my…appetite.
You would think this means I would start with a cookbook, and it does. I will. Two of them actually, both beautifully designed and produced by Chronicle Books.
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Yotam Ottolenghi’s (love that name), Plenty, has fast become the must-have foodie cookbook of the year. It is filled with stunning visuals and consistent recipes that promise to sway even the most ardent eaters of faun and fowl into dedicated vegetarians. Five words; Caramelized fennel with goat cheese. Much like with my wife, I fell in love when I saw this book. That love has developed and deepened as I have cooked. Awkward metaphor? Yes. Great cookbook? Definitely.
Ruhlman’s Twenty taught me more about salt and water than a day trip to First Beach. I am a better cook for having read, and re-read this book, and you will be too.
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Owing to my four year old nephew and six year old niece, both of whom have developed a taste for my next pick, I have read and reread Herve Tullet’s, Press Here, more times than I care to admit, more times than I have the Lord of the Rings. That is saying something. It’s not often a book can elicit visceral responses from me within the first few pages. Even rarer are those books that can engage the reader, young or old, to pick it up, shake it out, turn it sideways, push on brightly painted circles and alternate between clapping, laughing, clapping faster, and laughing noisily in a rising crescendo as the book nears its end. The answer to TV and the internet is in this 8x8 board book, published first in France in 2010, and then picked up by Chronicle Books and brought to the Canadian market in 2011.
Grandpa Green is Lane Smith’s newest children’s title after It’s a Book. It is a memoir, a personal narrative on growing old and on being young, on imagination and forgetting, on the ingenuity of telling a story, whether your own or someone else’s, in a way that remains true to the heart. This book has my heart in its pages, for the beauty of the story and the images both. It’s one I’ll read to my child and savor for myself in the quiet moments.
Among Others, by Jo Walton treads softly, using echoes of the fantastic and a decidedly non-urgent magic to tell a fictional tale that could be otherwise completely more or less mostly real. It is a fairy tale and an elegant curtsy to the great stories and writers of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Thanks to Dan for pointing this book out to me – I’ve never read anything quite like it. Here is what I emailed him after I was finished: “The way in which she weaves magic into the fabric of her life, and the story reminds me of the film Pan's Labyrinth, where, as the audience you aren't sure if magic really does exist or if her telling is something that is purely fantastical and without truth. The complexity of that question has kept me gnawing at it the last few nights, it's definitely a book I'll pass on to some friends for discussion when I'm done. PS — I think I saw a fairy this morning.”
Lastly, Paula Scher MAPS, Published by Princeton Architectual Press, surprised me with its beauty and with its complexity. Whether you take to this book for its visuals or prefer to delve into the theory behind the project, there is no doubting its resonance as an artifact of modern culture, and a remembering of an art form quickly becoming anachronistic. Sher uses language to (re)create her maps; some familiar and some less so. They are drawn from, “memory, from impressions from media, and from general information overload”, and her brief introduction, titled “All Maps Lie” outlines how all maps are fallible objects influenced by factors as trivial as personal preference, inaccurate information, and imagination. The maps themselves keep me coming back to them with new questions in mind, curious as to how the world looks through her copious and particular lens. Every page engages and invites us to follow along and recognize the unfamiliar in what is quite clearly a familiar landscape.
Time For An Afternoon Chocolate Break?
by Crystal
Health & Wellness / July 18, 2011
It's time for our afternoon chocolate break here at Raincoast Books. We like the good stuff here. My favorite is the Organic Fair Trade Canadiana Bar from Organic Fair. I can't help thinking when I tear this package open "Do I deserve this chocolate?"
Having worked with New Harbinger Titles for a few years now and in particular being familiar with one of their star authors, Dr. Susan Albers, I now know that it is ok to eat chocolate, as long as I am eating it mindfully- AKA I don't scarf down the entire bar while going through the pile of emails that are sitting in my inbox. Instead I should take a few moments and really enjoy every single second of the one or two pieces of chocolate that I eat. Being mindful of the way it melts on my tongue, the flavor and creaminess that coats the back of my throat. Yum. Well, at least I hope that is what she is going to tell me in her new book But I Deserve This Chocolate: The 50 Most Common Diet-Derailing Excuses and How to Outwit Them.
Make sure to check out the book trailer for But I Deserve This Chocolate and preorder the book (coming in August) at your local independent bookstore, Indigo.ca or Amazon.ca.
Happy reading... and chocolate eating.
Crystal
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Meat and One Veg
by Dan
Food & Drink / June 13, 2011
If you're a designer and you love meat (and that's got to put you in a pretty big category, right?), Bacon Ipsum is the website for you.
Bacon Ipsum? Indeed.
Basically, Bacon Ipsum is an online text-generator that spices up the boring old lorem ipsum placeholder text used for design mock-ups in publishing and graphic design by inserting a whole lot of meat-related words. Text options include 'All Meat' and 'Meat and Filler'.
Here's an 'All Meat' example:
Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet ham tail bacon headcheese chuck flank. Tenderloin jowl meatball chuck tongue t-bone. Bresaola sausage chicken meatloaf jowl pancetta. Hamburger pancetta ribeye pork belly biltong pig, bresaola ham hock. Jowl brisket bacon pork chop ground round shank. Pancetta cow chuck bacon andouille, boudin tri-tip bresaola beef ribs hamburger ground round pig pastrami brisket salami. Shankle flank chuck, tail swine shank tongue.
Beef hamburger tenderloin ham hock. Bresaola bacon pork chop ball tip rump, headcheese salami spare ribs venison tail drumstick boudin short ribs short loin. Sirloin bresaola short ribs, bacon boudin tail pork ham andouille ham hock rump sausage ball tip pastrami. Drumstick pork loin cow, pork boudin sausage strip steak corned beef ground round pastrami short ribs brisket. Ham tongue swine chicken. Jerky tenderloin rump, meatloaf shank short ribs pancetta sirloin ribeye tongue spare ribs boudin ham hock chicken turkey. T-bone boudin tail brisket chicken.
As I'm sure you'll agree, that is a whole lot meat! And it just go to show that everything really is better with bacon. Even Latin.
And why do I mention this now?
Well, it is the season to be grilling, and there is that tiny matter of Father's Day this weekend, and as a dad (and a dude) my mind does tend to wander towards the BBQ (even if it isn't close to lunch time yet).
So, on the off chance you're looking for meatier BBQ recipes, or just to happen to be looking for
But if you (and your dad!) can wait until September, you might also want to check out Whole Beast Butchery (available for pre-order from your local indie and Chapters-Indigo and Amazon online), in which San Francisco chef and self-taught meat expert Ryan Farr demystifies the butchery process. That, also, is a whole lot of meat right there...
Of course, there is the merest possibility that this might just be too much meat for one blog post, so just to tip the scales back towards a semblance of a balanced diet for one minute, I thought I would also mention Plenty — a favourite in our office since it was published by Chronicle Books in March.
Written by restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi, the book collects 120 vegetarian(!) recipes inspired by Yotam's Mediterranean background and his unapologetic love of ingredients.
Funnily enough though, Yotam is not a vegetarian himself... (I wonder if he thinks everything's better with bacon? Hmm... Perhaps not...)
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bacon bbq cooking dads fathers day food grilling
Dessert Mash-Ups
by Siobhan
Food & Drink / February 15, 2011
Maybe my head's still spinning from eating too many Valentine's chocolates, or my vision is getting blurry from all the sugar in the technicolour anatomical heart cake that our designer Mark brought in, but I'm seeing a lot of mash-ups in the dessert world recently...
Macarons + Cake Pops = Macaron Pops!
Get the scoop on these sweeties from both Bakerella and Tartelette.
Another sweet mash-up...
Whoopie Pies + Macarons = Whoopie Pies disguised as Macarons!
Project Wedding posted a great recipe for these sneaky treats.
And of course the new trend...
Cupcakes + Cakes = Cupcake Cakes!
Gibbs Smith just published a new cute book on Cupcake Cakes.
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I wonder what other desserts could (or should) be combined? Mmmm, the possibilities are endless...
Announcing the winner of our “Cook Bake, Blog!” contest…
by Siobhan
Contests + Food & Drink / January 14, 2011
Finally -- after siome delays trying to catch up after our move -- I'm able to announce the winner of our "Cook Bake, Blog!" contest ... drumroll please ...
Congratulations, Suzie Ridle from Nova Scotia!
Suzie, aka Susie the Foodie, will win $500 (CDN retail) worth of cookbooks of her choice, published by Chronicle Books, Quirk Books or Gibbs Smith.
Check out Suzie's test-kitchen reports from trying out recipes from The Geometry of Pasta here and here (her delicious results are pictured below) -- and also watch this video of Suzie's brave husband concocting a brew of Mad Scientist Mix-Up from Little Monsters Cookbook!
ALSO ... congrats to the fabulous Cadboro Bay Book Company in Victoria, BC, who is the winner of our bookstore cookbook display contest!
A Cookie Exhange and a Cookbook Giveaway
by Siobhan
Contests + Food & Drink / December 08, 2010
Tis the season. The season to turn up the Christmas tunes, don a festive apron and start baking.
To get you started, the little helpers at Chronicle have posted a couple of recipes from their book, Very Merry Cookie Party: Very Merry Cookie Party: How to Plan and Host a Christmas Cookie Exchange... Toffee Squares and Chocolate-Dipped Shortbread, oh my. I don't know about you, but at this point, I'm resigned to gaining that extra five pounds over the holidays.
But here's the good news (besides the delight of ingesting all that delicious sugar), since you're baking up a storm anyway, why not take a quick break to let us know your favourite cookbook published by Chronicle Books, Quirk Books or Gibbs Smith.... You could win $500 worth of cookbooks for your efforts!
Click here to get all the details and to enter. You have until January 1, 2011 to enter.
Mad for Madeleines! A Call for Recipes…
by Siobhan
November 12, 2010
Mmmm.... madeleines. Comme je vous aime...
If you love madeleines too, get out your recipe books and warm your ovens. Chronicle Books is creating their first ever crowd-sourced book (!), and yes, it's all about madeleines (!!). If you have a killer recipe, send it over to the fabulous food team at Chronicle and your recipe might be included within a gorgeous Chronicle cookbook.
Get all the details on how to submit over on the Chronicle blog.
P.S. Speaking of gorgeous cookbooks, check out this post on the Raincoast and enter to win $500 worth of cookbooks from Chronicle and Gibbs Smith!
From Seed to Skillet
by Dan
Food & Drink + Home & Garden / September 20, 2010
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food gardening growing kitchen garden seeds
D.I.Y Delicious Book Trailer
by Dan
Food & Drink / August 17, 2010
Check out this jaunty, oh-so-D.I.Y., book trailer for Vanessa Barrington’s D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food From Scratch:
D.I.Y. Delicious is perfect for crafty green types who have graduated from simple weekend jam and baking activities. The book goes beyond pickling and preserving into fermenting, culturing cheese, and brewing sodas and tonics. A total of 75 recipes and more than 50 step-by-step, colour photographs lead the way to stocking a pantry that uses fewer ingredients to make delicious staples at a much lower cost.
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