cider

It's autumn! Time for apples, cider, pie, doughnuts and pumpkins! The orchards and cider mills are now open and offer many attractions from hay rides, apple and pumpkin picking and even haunted houses. All About Apples is a website that lists orchards all through Michigan with descriptions of what the orchards offer. If you need ideas for carving your pumpkin the library has Pumpkin Carving and Great Pumpkins:Crafty carving for Halloween. Are you a fan of pie? The library has books to help you bake with those freshly picked apples and pumpkins. Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, James McNair's Pie Cookbook. Enjoy!

HomeGrown

Ann Arbor’s Homegrown Festival is headed to the Kerrytown market on Saturday, September 12, from 5-10pm. The festival’s website boasts, “The HomeGrown Festival celebrates local food and community and seeks to focus broad mainstream attention on the community-wide benefits (and pleasure!) of eating from our own foodshed.”

In addition to the wonderful food vendors who will be there, there will also be a number of other activities to partake in, including tomato tasting, a beer garden, chef demos, kids’ activities, non-profit booths, and live music. Sounds like good times! Admission is free, food is available for purchase.

Ann Arbor has such a wonderful community with great support in local food efforts. (Think Slow Food Huron Valley.) Celebrate wonderful food and wonderful Michigan farms at this event!

soup

Fall! Soup! The AADL has a wonderful culinary collection and a few titles have been unjustly dusty.
Splendid Soups by James Peterson has such good soup recipes that I can’t decide what to make first! Soups from around the world, bread soups, fish soups and all important soup tips (like improving commercial broth).
Lee Bailey’s Soup Meals has a beautiful calendar format with recipes according to the seasons and some really fab dessert soup recipes.
The Complete Book of Soups and Stews by Bernard Clayton reminds me of the cookbooks my dad liked; good explanations about ingredients and extremely detailed instructions including recommended equipment. It also has an extensive chapter on vegetable soups from the exotic to just plain pea.
James Beard had good things to say about Dorothy Ivens’ Main-Course Soups & Stews. Check in here for main course soups and stews that will have you wishing for cold weather.

Bon Apetit!

truck

The pantry at Food Gatherers is running extremely low on canned goods and other non-perishable foods due to record numbers of hungry families, children and seniors in the area. Food Gatherers regularly provides enough food for more than 7,500 meals a day in Washtenaw County. Please consider donating some non-perishable canned and dry goods that are unopened, in good condition and not expired. Any item is appreciated, but there are many requests for high-protein items, cereal, kid-friendly foods, baby formula, soups, stews, and canned meat/fish. You can drop off goods at the Food Gatherers warehouse or at the People's Food Co-op. The Food Gatherers can also help you organize a food drive at your workplace!

Julie

JULIE & JULIA is based on two true stories. It intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends...until they discovered that with "the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible".

Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbooks and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in her bestselling memoir, My Life in France, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France.

Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook/teacher/writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities.

Nearly 30 and trapped in a dead-end job, Julie Powell, in her delightul memoir*, resolved to reclaim her life by cooking, in the span of a single year, all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking thus risking her marriage, her job, and her sanity.

In theaters August 7th, Julie & Julia is written and directed by essayist, novelist, screenwriter (and foodie) Nora Ephron. Did you see the NYTimes Magazine article about her famous meatloaf, and the nice write-up in USA Today?

* = Starred review

earl tupper

American manufacturer Earl S. Tupper, inventor of Tupperware, was born July 28, 1907 in New Hampshire. In the 1930's, Tupper invented a flexible, lightweight material that was used to make plastic gas masks during World War II. He then turned his attention to consumer products and created Tupperware - a line of plastic, airtight food storage containers. Sales languished in stores until it was discovered that home demonstrations better proved the value of the product, and thus, the Tupperware Party was born. It has since become a global institution in more than 100 countries. Find out the history behind the Tupperware empire by checking out Tupperware : The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America by Alison J. Clarke or by watching the PBS home video Tupperware!, which offers an interesting look at the quirky, and often bizarre, history of this household name.

Photo of my chickens by friend ktpupp used under CC - BY/NC/SA

We've been constantly adding resources to our collection for those thinking (or already) raising chickens. One of the recent additions is the 2009 released The joy of keeping chickens : the ultimate guide to raising poultry for fun or profit.

As the title implies, this book attempts to be the ultimate guide and touches on about every topic you'll likely want to know, even keeping meat birds. As can be expected with a book that does a whirlwind tour if you are interested in in-depth coverage of a specific topic you'll probably want to look elsewhere. While the book covers meat bird, butchering, starting a business, incubating, showing birds and the like, it is generalized and more "things we wish we had known" than an in-depth guide. However, enough is covered to give you a starting point to begin your research and familiarize yourself with the many options out there and what might be involved. Definitely worth the read if you are still in the beginning stages of research on what route you want to take.

All that being said if you are focusing on egg layers then this book is definitely one to check out. The book also sports all color photographs which may inspire you on what colorful breed you want and later chapters include recipes to put your egg bounty to work.

A nice addition to this book versus some others is the use of personal stories to begin each chapter, giving background on why the author chose to raise her own. You can check out one of these stories with an excerpt of chapter 1 on the book's website.

Bring on the pickled eggs!

ladies_canoeing

While testing the recipes in Ann Arbor Cooks you can savor an extra slice of Ann Arbor history: Several recipes, particularly within the 1899 Ann Arbor Cookbook, bear the names of prominent Ann Arbor citizens. On your next visit to Allmendinger Park you can take along Miss E. C. Allmendinger's Quince Tents; or you can enjoy Mrs. W. B. Hinsdale's Cream Puffs at the Broadway Park near the former intersection of 19th century Indian trails mentioned in her husband's book, The Indians of Washtenaw County. Mrs. Junius Beal probably whipped up her Marguerites at her home on the corner of 5th Avenue and William St., now the site of the Downtown library. Mrs. Samuel W. Beakes, whose husband wrote The Past and Present of Washtenaw County, baked Excellent Cocoanut Cookies, and Mrs. Frank Kelsey actually makes Prune Pudding sound...ok.

The names Allmendinger, Hinsdale, Beal, Beakes and Kelsey are frequently cited within the text and image collections of The Ann Arbor Observer: Then & Now, Ann Arbor Founders, The Downtown Ann Arbor Historical Street Exhibit and The Making of Ann Arbor.

S'more

Make a solar s'more oven using a cardboard pizza box, some aluminum foil, and a few other basic materials. If the weather permits, we will go outside, test the oven, then eat some delicious s'mores (no campfire required)! This is science at its most delicious.

Thursday July 2, 2009 | 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm | Pittsfield Branch | Grade 4 thru Adult

TheWayWeEat

Peter Singer and Jim Mason co-authored The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, a book that delves into the morality and ethics behind the food choices we make. Not only does it give the reader an inside scoop on some of the processes it takes for some of the foods we eat to get to us, and describes what some food labels mean, it also looks at the lives and eating habits of three separate families and how they compare. The three families each have different lifestyles and beliefs and thus different food choices. One busy family consumes the "typical American diet" based on meat and potatoes, another family is more concerned with where their food comes from and buys organic when they can, and the last family has the strictest diet of the three families and the entire family has a vegan diet. Who is making the best food choices? Who is being the most ethical? It’s an interesting read and a good introduction to the ethics behind food choices.