Entrée Recipes to Die For Entrees, Vegetarian, Vegan Leek and Red Onion Rice Platter Sometimes I drizzle the tahini on top of this dish so that it looks like frosting. Read Recipe Entrees, Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Soup Chilled Minty Cucumber-Melon Soup The perfect and refreshing snack for a hot day! Read Recipe Dips and Sauces, Entrees, Vegetarian, Vegan Mashed Cauliflower and Acorn Squash I like to mash veggies from my Friday roasted veggie tray and try different combos. Read Recipe Entrees, Vegetarian Cold Sesame Noodles The perfect recipes for a picnic lunch! Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Vegan, Entrees Spinach-Lentil Soup Need iron? This delicious soup will do the trick! Read Recipe Vegan, Vegetarian, Entrees Mango-Avocado Salad Serve as shown in sections in the bowl because it looks awesome. Then mix at the table. Read Recipe Entrees, Gluten Free Dover Sole with Roasted Butternut Squash and Capers A perfect meal for a date night in! Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Vegan, Entrees Sweet Potato Black Bean Soup Add an avocado for garnish or sprinkle with a little cheese for the perfect dish! Read Recipe Entrees Easy Skillet Chicken with Mushrooms, Scallions and Red Peppers I make this dish a lot because I usually have the ingredients in the house. I often use cooked, leftover boneless breasts... Read Recipe Entrees Sage-Mint Chicken If the question is "How quickly can I get dinner on the table?" then this is the perfect recipe for you. Read Recipe Entrees Lemon-Leek Chicken She opened the refrigerator and freezer, mulling her options. Lemon-leek Chicken seemed like a good idea. Read Recipe Entrees, Vegetarian, Vegan Oven-Baked Sweet Potato-Black Bean Empanadas Ruthie dropped off a tray of frozen sweet potato-black bean empanadas. Read Recipe Soup, Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Entrees, Vegan Alene’s White Gazpacho She blended a white gazpacho and served it with homemade rolls for lunch, then let the kids lie in her bed watching... Read Recipe Entrees, Gluten Free Pecan-Pistachio Chicken Breasts This is a versatile recipe – no pecans in the house? Use only pistachios. Read Recipe All Recipes Baking Breakfast Cakes, Pies, & Icing Cookies & Brownies Dips & Sauces Entrees Gluten-Free Muffins & Breads Soup Vegan Vegetarian Load More

< Back Blue Hours Daphne Kalotay September 17, 2019 It’s 1991, and recent college graduate Mim wants to be a writer, but for now she is folding clothes at Benetton. She notices the trash-filled streets and befriends exotic Kyra, who joins Mim’s disparate group of roommates, all squeezed together in a crumbling NYC apartment. Their relationship gets closer, and Mim meets Roy, the man Kyra plans to marry. Then, the anguish of another of the roommates, a veteran of the Gulf war, becomes unbearable, and Mim returns home to Boston. She loses track of Kyra for twenty years. Now it’s 2012, Mim is married, a successful writer and raising an adopted child when she learns that Kyra has disappeared in Afghanistan. Mim’s journey to find her old friend forces her to confront her choices, herself, and her understanding of America’s ability to change the world. Join me today as I talk to Daphne Kalotay about her new novel Blue Hours (Triquarterly, 2019). Kalotay is the author of the critically acclaimed collection Calamity and Other Stories , which was shortlisted for the 2005 Story Prize; the award-winning novel Russian Winter --a national and international bestseller--and the novel Sight Reading , winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. She received her M.A. from Boston University's Creative Writing Program, where her stories won the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, before earning her Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Daphne has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and MacDowell. She has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton University, University of Massachusetts, Middlebury College, Boston University, Skidmore College, Harvard University and Grub Street. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and in her spare time, tries to keep rabbits out of her vegetable garden. She also likes to take long urban walks, from one neighborhood into another. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Arroyo Chip Jacobs May 22, 2020 Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. The original Nick, who starts out working on an ostrich farm, is drawn to the Colorado Street Bridge and manages to meet some of the great personalities of the period: Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair and Adolphus Busch all meet Nick. He parlays an idea for lighting into a job on the bridge and survives the lethal collapse of one of its arches during construction. Eighty years later, on the anniversary of the bridge’s inauguration, the second Nick Chance is pulled into rectifying the mistakes of the past. Pasadena, which had a millionaire’s row even back then, is nothing like the original, romanticized version of the town. There’s some magical realism, lots of fascinating historical detail about Pasadena and southern California, and lots of eating. Today I talked to Chip Jacobs about his new book Arroyo (Rare Birds Books, 2019) Jacobs is a Los Angeles Times bestselling author and journalist. Chip Jacobs is a Los Angeles Times bestselling author and journalist. His books include the biography Strange As It Seems: the Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler ; the environmental social histories The People's Republic of Chemicals , and the international bestselling Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles (both with William J. Kelly); the dark-humor true crime caper The Ascension of Jerry ; and the story collection, The Vicodin Thieves . Jacobs has also contributed pieces to anthologies, most recently for the bestselling Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine . His reporting, which has garnered seven Los Angeles Press Club awards, has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Daily News, CNN, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and L.A Weekly, among others. He is currently at work on a follow-up novel and a non-fiction project. Jacobs trusts dogs, plays electric guitar, and is an avid reader, runner, and prankster. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back American Ending Mary Kay Zuravleff December 19, 2023 It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed. The boys quit school to work in the mines along with the dads, and the Old Believers help each get through one challenge after another. When the mine explodes, it’s just another calamity in their lives. Yelena dreams of the fairy tales and fables she grew up hearing in this satisfying tale about family, community, and surviving as an immigrant in America. Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending (Blair, 2023), inspired by her Russian Orthodox Old Believer grandparents who lived in the coal-mining town of Marianna, PA. Her third novel Man Alive! was a Washington Post Notable Book, and she is the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and numerous DC Artist Fellowships. The Bowl Is Already Broken, her second novel, was described by the New York Times as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming.” In fact, Mary Kay worked for several Smithsonian museums for a dozen years, and she will go to any museum on any topic anywhere she happens to be. This has included the Acme Music Museum in Michigan, the Bee Museum in Quebec, and the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back We are All Together Richard Fulco November 29, 2022 Stephen Cane is a guitarist – he’s already walked out on one band to join another one that subsequently falls apart. He gets himself to New York City to try to rejoin his first band, the one headed by his best friend and former bandmate, Dylan John. It’s 1967, drugs and girls are everywhere, Dylan is on the verge of becoming a rock n’ roll star, and Stephen makes some extremely poor choices. When Dylan quits just before a big show, Stephen is given a huge opportunity, but it doesn’t take long before he starts making more bad decisions. He’s in turmoil, as is the entire country, and his choices in love and loyalty cause him to spiral into self-doubt. Is being a rock star worth losing everything he holds dear? Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home S.L. Wisenberg April 4, 2023 As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. In this remarkable collection of essays, she recalls chasing popularity, taking a Neiman Marcus sponsored class about fashion at age eleven. She tells funny but poignant stories about her travels in Paris, Vienna, and Poland, including a numbing visit to Auschwitz. In one essay Wisenberg searches through family records and history books and conducts interviews to learn more about Selma, Alabama, where her great grandparents ended up after leaving Lithuania. In another she describes going through sorority rush when she’s twenty-nine and teaching at the university. This is a moving, sometimes hilarious exploration of love, life, history. As the reviewer in the Southern Review of Books wrote,” This luxe tapestry of stories and ideas creates a vivid image of Wisenberg as a woman, as Jewish, and as a thinker in the world…. This book is at once intellectual, deeply personal, and delightful.” S.L. Wisenberg is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In ; the essay collection Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions ; and a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch . She has received a Pushcart Prize, and awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The former co-director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University, she has taught workshops and read and lectured widely. Wisenberg lives in Chicago, where she edits Another Chicago Magazine . When she's not writing, she's walking through her Chicago neighborhood, fixing a stir-fry, or collecting grocery lists that people leave behind. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Song of the Sisters C. P. Lesley January 19, 2021 Everywhere young Russian noblewoman Darya Sheremeteva turns, someone in her circle of family and friends reminds her that she exists to serve a single purpose: to marry a powerful man selected by her male relatives and bear children, preferably sons, to continue his line. But after years in isolation nursing her elderly father, Darya questions whether marriage and motherhood constitute the best, never mind the only, future for a woman of twenty-five. Should she not instead take monastic vows and surrender her will to the soaring ritual of the Orthodox Church? When a cousin lays claim to her father's estate, Darya's decision acquires a new urgency. Because this cousin will stop at nothing to advance his career, and his most valuable asset is Darya herself. Years ago, C. P. Lesley decided to focus on sixteenth-century Russia. After all, they say, “write what you know,” and as a historian with a Stanford doctorate, that’s what she knew. It was also a time and place filled with exciting and dramatic events, some of which defy belief. The result was a mystery story set in 1530s Moscow about a young couple resolving a series of crimes by combining clues they pick up in the gender-segregated worlds of husbands and wives. Although she didn’t complete that novel, the original idea gave rise to The Golden Lynx , which became the basis of a series called Legends of the Five Directions and led to her becoming the host of New Books in Historical Fiction here on the New Books Network. After almost a decade spent creating an entire world of characters, she couldn’t bear to let them go, and the result is Songs of Steppe & Forest , a less tightly linked set of books that exist in the same story space five to ten years later and feature characters who, for one reason or another, took a back seat in the Legends novels. Songs of Steppe and Forest will answer the question, “What made Ivan the Terrible so terrible?”. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, C.P. Lesley edits other people's manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet. That love of ballet also finds expression in her Tarkei Chronicles series, "Desert Flower" and "Kingdom of the Shades." Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back This Place That Place Nandita Dinesh July 19, 2022 A nameless young woman from This Place, and a nameless young man from That Place are stuck together when That Place, the occupying force, imposes another curfew on This Place. Author Nandita Dinesh never identifies the country, but the two protagonists share a language and much of their culture. They’re also falling in love. The young woman from That Place is a De-programmer, whose job involves interviewing the military troops now patrolling outside the house where she’s holed up with the young man. He is a Protest Designer, skilled at waiting out curfews, although his brother is supposed to be getting married the next day and there’s a lot of conversations about that. While confined with the young woman, the young man explains his strategies for passing time while under curfew. He wonders how his family and neighbors will react if he marries her. Where would they live? They swap stories about their families and respective homelands, and want to imagine strategies for ending the conflict, but nothing seems doable. This is an allegory for military occupations, like what we’re currently seeing in Ukraine, but it’s happened all over the world. This Place That Place (Melville House, 2022) is also a glimpse at what it might be like for hapless citizens to be imprisoned in their own homes. Nandita holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. An amateur cook who loves experimenting with Indian cuisines, Nandita has conducted community-based theatre projects across a range of contexts and in 2017, she was awarded the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy by Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She was born and raised in Coimbatore, India and now lives in San Francisco with her husband and a 90-pound Doberman Mix named Mila. Nandita is currently working on projects across literary genres — a book that lies somewhere between a novel, a memoir, and a play being the next in line! Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Homicide and Halo-Halo Mia P. Manansala February 22, 2022 Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley, 2022) is the second cozy mystery in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery series. Written in first person, baker Lila Macapagal is about to open the Brew-Ha Café in Shady Palms, a fictional town about 2 hours outside of Chicago. Lila, a proud Filipino American who bakes awesome fusions of Filipino and American pastry, is a 25-year-old who has been asked to guest judge a local beauty pageant that she won as a teenager. The first sign of trouble is a threat about the competition, and then one of Lila’s fellow judges is found dead. Cozy mysteries are usually lightweight and amusing – while Homicide and Halo-Halo is written in a light-hearted style, characters grapple with serious issues such as PTSD, fatphobia, fertility and pregnancy issues, predatory behavior, unresolved grief, parental death, and dismissive attitudes toward mental health. Mia P. Manansala is a writer and certified book coach who earned her undergraduate degree in English at Northeastern Illinois University. A 2017 alum and 2018-20 mentor for Pitch Wars, a volunteer-run writing program, Manansala uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck - Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrastibaking , playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho, Max Power, and Bayley Banks (bonus points if you get all the references). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Muffin & Bread Recipes to Die For Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free, Baking, Breakfast Gluten-Free Pancakes We were desperate for pancakes so I tweaked another recipe I was working on to make these. Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Baking, Vegan Gluten-Free/Nut Free/Vegan Banana Bread The recipes uses 2 bananas and a whole small seed apple. Read Recipe Vegetarian, Baking, Breakfast, Muffins and Breads, Cakes & Pies & Icing Chocolate Zucchini-Pear Cake GF Healthy enough for breakfast! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking, Vegan, Gluten Free, Cakes & Pies & Icing Best Chocolate Cake/Muffins GF. V. Didn’t I tell you I was going to be at my Aunt Ivy’s for a barbeque dinner at which I ate purely protein ... Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking Challah Traditional recipes never tasted so good! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Vegan, Breakfast Vegan Sweet Potato or Pumpkin Muffins "There are only six sweet potato muffins left," said Alene. Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Baking, Vegetarian, Breakfast, Cakes & Pies & Icing Chocolate Zucchini – Apple Cake Yes, we eat this for breakfast! Read Recipe Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free Fudgy Chocolate Butternut Squash Muffins No dairy, low-sugar, healthful, delicious! Read Recipe All Recipes Baking Breakfast Cakes, Pies, & Icing Cookies & Brownies Dips & Sauces Entrees Gluten-Free Muffins & Breads Soup Vegan Vegetarian Load More

< Back Dry Land B. Platek October 3, 2023 Rand Brandt, a forester in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, discovers that his touch can grow any plant or tree. In this tale of Magical Realism, he dreams of using his gift to restore landscapes ruined by the lumber industry, but first needs to test his powers. Gabriel, his fellow forester, and secret lover, finds and saves Rand after he’s pushed himself by spending his nights sneaking into the forest instead of sleeping. It’s 1917 and the foresters are drafted to join in the fight in France. An old friend of Rand’s joins the press covering his unit and helps him cover his tracks. A commanding officer learns about Rand’s gift and demands that he grow forests for the wood needed to win the war, but Rand learns that everything he grows will die within days. Now, he’s keeping two major secrets, either of which, if discovered, could destroy him. Ben Pladek is associate professor of literature at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His first novel, Dry Land , appeared in September 2023 with the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s previously published short fiction in Strange Horizons, The Offing, Slate Future Tense Fiction, and elsewhere. As a colleague pointed out to him, his short fiction is often set in the near-future and his longer fiction in the near-past; other recurring interests include ecology, messy relationships, messier bureaucracy, and people feeling guilty. He’s also written an academic book called The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850, that came out from Liverpool University Press in 2019, as well as a number of articles on British Romanticism. Before getting hired at Marquette, he did his PhD at the University of Toronto and taught for a year in the fantastic Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he moved to Wisconsin, he fell in love with the landscape and the state’s fascinating history of conservation, including the writings of Aldo Leopold. Ben and his husband have hiked all over Wisconsin. They especially enjoy the Northwoods, Horicon Marsh, and the southwest “driftless” area. In Ben’s spare time you can find him reading, birdwatching, taking long walks around Milwaukee, admiring wetlands, eating peanut butter, and taking pictures of informational signs at historical monuments that he’ll never go back and read. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Take What You Need Idra Novey March 14, 2023 Today I talked to Idra Novey about her new novel Take What You Need (Viking, 2023). Leah, her husband, and their little son are driving back to where she grew up in the mountains of Appalachia. They are heading to the home where her stepmother fled after leaving Leah’s father, and after the divorce, Jean was no longer allowed to stay in touch with Leah. But she was the mother Leah knew and loved. Now, Jean has died and left Leah her artwork, and when they arrive at the house, Leah is stunned to find giant sculptures welded from scrap metal. During her final years, Jean had needed the help of a troubled young man, a neighbor who has no chance of finding employment and who is squatting without water in the house next door. He’s the one who tells Leah that Jean has died. This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull. Idra Novey earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia University. She’s the author of Those Who Knew , a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Time s Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian , selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Coun­try , a final­ist for the 2008 Fore­word Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor , a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Idra teaches fiction writing at Princeton University and in the New York University MFA program in Creative Writing. When she is not writing or teaching, Idra likes welding and making collages with old literature magazines. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next