a little something on the side

COOKING

Ed Smith's new cookbook, On the Side, addresses the perennial question, what do I serve for sides?
The author has a online website, Rocket and Squash, which is a food journal regularly updated with restaurant reviews and recipes. Sadly, it mostly refers to restaurants in London!
The book is organized into chapters of types of sides, for example greens, leaves and herbs, or roots, squash and potatoes, ect. A nice directory included for the cook is a list of main dishes, such as steak, and what goes with them. In the case of steak he lists 20 sides that would go with, including carrots with brown butter and hazelnuts, dijon-dressed green beans, and sherry cherry tomatoes. MMMM

DESIGN

Design by Nature by Erica Tanov is a beautiful book! The nature references abound, such as the chapters being divided into wood, water, weeds, ect. There are beautiful pictures of rooms and the scenes of nature that inspired them. Artists are also spotlighted throughout the book. Fabric designers, weavers and print makers are featured. This book is more inspirational than a straight ahead how-to book. The photographs are spectacular and well worth spending an hour "leafing" through this book.

In the days before cheap air travel, families didn't so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them--from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn't believe in bathroom breaks.
 Now, decades later, Ratay shows how family togetherness was eventually sacrificed to electronic distractions. In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot "land yachts," oasis-like Holiday Inn "Holidomes," "Smokey"-spotting Fuzzbusters, 28 glorious flavors of Howard Johnson's ice cream, and the thrill of finding a "good buddy" on the CB radio. A rousing Ratay family ride-along, Don't Make Me Pull Over reveals how the family road trip came to be.