The East Bay has always remained true to itself. It includes Oakland, the most ethnically diverse population in the nation; Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement; the island of Alameda, with its artisan breweries, wineries, and distilleries; and the Livermore Valley, one of California's oldest winemaking regions. East Bay Cooks is an impressive collection of eighty signature dishes from forty of the city's leading restaurants. It's a region that's got you covered, no matter what the craving. An uncomplicated taco with the power to stir the soul? A nourishing bowl of authentic Singaporean laksa? Shrimp and grits with layers of flavors never imagined? It's all here, and designed with home cooks in mind, so that re-creating signature dishes from the area's favorite chefs has never been easier
A fun and playful cookbook featuring retro, decadent, and kid-friendly mac-and-cheese recipes from the popular Oakland restaurant Homeroom. Macaroni and cheese is one of America’s favorite comfort foods, beloved by kids and adults alike. But there’s no need to rely on prefab mixes—all you need is a handful of kitchen staples, some tasty cheese, and a little insider advice courtesy of Homeroom restaurant. This perennially popular Oakland, California, eatery—with its entire menu devoted to mac and cheese—now shares its secrets for the best-ever mac recipes that will help you think outside the box! These inventive dishes offer something for everyone: nostalgic homestyle recipes like Tuna Mac, international varieties like Sriracha Mac, decadent delights like Truffle Mac, and even the logic-defying Vegan Mac. You’ll also find recipes for quick veggie sides like Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and old-school desserts like frozen Peanut Butter Pie. With a basics section on perfecting mac sauce, choosing the best noodles, and customizing add-ins and toppings, plus an emphasis on quality ingredients and simple techniques, this fun, playful cookbook shows cheese-loving readers how to take this comfort-food staple to creative new heights.
The most thorough guide to Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure A great destination and thorough preparation are what make a wonderful vacation, and The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2019 makes Disneyland one of the most accessible theme parks in the world. With advice that is direct, prescriptive, and detailed, it takes the guesswork out of the reader’s vacation. Whether you are at Disneyland for a day or a week, there is a plan for your group or family. You can enjoy the rides, activities, and entertainment instead of spending your time in lines. The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland authors Bob Sehlinger, Seth Kubersky, Len Testa, and Guy Selga, Jr., present the information in a comprehensive way that permits easy comparisons and facilitates decision-making. There are detailed plans and profiles of hotels, restaurants, and attractions that are presented in “at a glance” formats that provide for near-instant communication of the most salient information. Profiles are supplemented by indexes. In short, we’ve got a plan for every reader. The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland’s research team is a multidisciplinary group consisting, among others, of data collectors, computer scientists, statisticians, and psychologists. Their singular goal is to provide a guide that lets you get it right the first time and every time. With their help, advice, and touring plans, the reader will have a one-up on anyone not using The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland. The book is the key to planning a perfect vacation in a great destination location.
Flavors of Oakland will take you on a culinary tour through one of America's most vibrant cities. In each of the 20 chapters you will meet an Oakland resident who shares their story and a treasured recipe from their culture. Magnificent photos of the people and recipes bring the Flavors of Oakland to your own kitchen wherever you may be.
Brown Sugar Kitchen is more than a restaurant. This soul-food outpost is a community gathering spot, a place to fill the belly, and the beating heart of West Oakland, a storied postindustrial neighborhood across the bay from San Francisco. The restaurant is a friendly beacon on a tree-lined parkway, nestled low and snug next to a scrap-metal yard in this Bay Area rust belt. Out front, customers congregate on long benches and sprawl in the grass, soaking up the sunshine, sipping at steaming mugs of Oakland-roasted coffee, waiting to snag one of the tables they glimpse through the swinging doors. Deals are done, friends are made; this is a community in action. In short order, they'll get their table, their pecan-studded sticky buns, their meaty hash topped with a quivering poached egg. Later in the day, the line grows, and the orders for chef-owner Tanya Holland's famous chicken and waffles or oyster po'boy fly. This is when satisfaction arrives. Brown Sugar Kitchen, the cookbook, stars 86 recipes for re-creating the restaurant's favorites at home, from a thick Shrimp Gumbo to celebrated Macaroni & Cheese to a show-stopping Caramel Layer Cake with Brown Butter–Caramel Frosting. And these aren't all stick-to-your-ribs recipes: Tanya's interpretations of soul food star locally grown, seasonal produce, too, in crisp, creative salads such as Romaine with Spring Vegetables & Cucumber-Buttermilk Dressing and Summer Squash Succotash. Soul-food classics get a modern spin in the case of B-Side BBQ Braised Smoked Tofu with Roasted Eggplant and a side of Roasted Green Beans with Sesame-Seed Dressing. Straight-forward, unfussy but inspired, these are recipes you'll turn to again and again. Rich visual storytelling reveals the food and the people that made and make West Oakland what it is today. Brown Sugar Kitchen truly captures the sense—and flavor—of this richly textured and delicious place.
From chef James Syhabout of two–Michelin-star restaurant Commis, an Asian-American cookbook like no other—simple recipes for cooking home-style Thai and Lao dishes James Syhabout’s hugely popular Hawker Fare restaurant in San Francisco is the product of his unique family history and diverse career experience. Born into two distinct but related Asian cultures—from his mother’s ancestral village in Isan, Thailand’s northeast region, and his father’s home in Pakse, Laos—he and his family landed in Oakland in 1981 in a community of other refugees from the Vietnam War. Syhabout at first turned away from the food of his heritage to work in Europe and become a classically trained chef. After the success of Commis, his fine dining restaurant and the only Michelin-starred eatery in Oakland, Syhabout realized something was missing—and that something was Hawker Fare, and cooking the food of his childhood. The Hawker Fare cookbook immortalizes these widely beloved dishes, which are inspired by the open-air “hawker” markets of Thailand and Laos as well as the fine-dining sensibilities of James’s career beginnings. Each chapter opens with stories from Syhabout’s roving career, starting with his mother’s work as a line cook in Oakland, and moving into the turning point of his culinary life, including his travels as an adult in his parents’ homelands. From building a pantry with sauces and oils, to making staples like sticky rice and padaek, to Syhabout’s recipe for instant ramen noodles with poached egg, Hawker Fare explores the many dimensions of this singular chef’s cooking and ethos on ingredients, family, and eating well. This cookbook offers a new definition of what it means to be making food in America, in the full and vibrant colors of Thailand, Laos, and California.
On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—including a food bank with ties to the EU, a social restaurant serving low-cost meals made from supermarket surplus by an emergent immigrant labor force, and a social inclusion program in an urban market with a "zero food waste" pop-up cafe. Alexander argues that these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate wasted food to new publics and produce what she terms a "spectrum of edibility." According to Alexander, these models face challenges—including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status they seek to circumvent. They also mirror the challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet provisioning promises. Yet she finds that they also move the needle forward to reduce food waste across one city, providing an example for major urban centers around the world.
This book addresses the evolving crisis in agriculture and sketches the 'community economy' that grounds agricultural enterprise more accurately than the industrial model. In its current practice, agriculture is (in the United States but increasingly in the rest of the world) unsustainable and destructive. The most immediately unsustainable feature of industrial agriculture is its dependence on the products of petroleum—as feedstock for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, and as fuel for the farm machinery and transport of agricultural products into the cities. The problems of agriculture and in general the food systems to which it is attached range from the vulnerability of monocultures to new and stronger pests to the emerging medical problem of obesity. The need for agricultural reform is widely acknowledged; one part of the new work being done suggests that food production in the cities may solve several of its problems at once. This book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students in agriculture and environmental studies.
Focusing on high-end cuisine, this book examines the flows of culinary knowledge from culturally peripheral locations to two cities at the global center, London and New York. Through the voices of chefs and other professionals in the industry, this book invites readers to rethink our understandings of high-end and ethnic cuisines, as well as the conventions and principles that shape the contemporary field of gastronomy and fine-dining. It examines a broad range of cuisines, including Peruvian, Korean, Mexican, Malaysian, Senegalese, West African, Thai, Chinese, and Indian, and conveys the chefs’ voices as they strive to elevate their cuisines through discursive and material means, including the shaping of menus, and restaurant decor. While the main focus falls on chefs as the producers of high-end cuisines, this book also gives consideration to their consumers, that is cosmopolitan diners in the two global cities, and to the influence of culinary intermediaries judging and legitimizing their high-end status. Theoretically, this book contributes to the debate on cultural globalization. It undertakes a study of hitherto rarely examined cultural counterflows or reverse cultural globalization and analyzes both the precipitants of this occurrence and the effects of cultural counterflows on both Western global cities and the home countries of chefs. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food studies, food cultures, cultural globalization, and culinary studies.