Archives for May 2024

This time around, a potluck of new cookbooks is selected for your perusal. Inside each book, there is a little something for most everyone to enjoy. Happy adventurous eating!

Valerie Bertinelli’s latest cookbook “Indulge” is an invitation for us to enjoy what we eat as if it is a special occasion. She shares stories and life lessons in her warm and friendly style alongside a nostalgic collection of much-loved recipes. These include Maple Pecan Scones, Sausage and Olive Cheese Bites, Beverly Hills Chopped Salad, Mom’s Hero, Shrimp Scampi Pasta with Herb Bread Crumbs, and Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with a scoop of No-Churn Buttermilk Vanilla Ice Cream.

Brining, drying, smoking, pickling, curing, and freezing are some of the methods cooks use to preserve a variety of foods at their peak of flavor. These larder-building techniques and more can be found within the pages of “Cured” by Steve McHugh. Steve also includes 150 recipes to try such as Chipotle Marmalade Chicken Wings, Baked Rice with Shrimp and Chorizo, Kimchi Bloody Mary, Freezer Yeast Dough, plus Brown Butter Lemonade Blondies.

Alyse Whitney is elevating our party dip spread with her cookbook, “Big Dip Energy.” Inside the pages of this colorful and fun book are 88 sweet and savory recipes along with lists of recommended dippers both store-bought and homemade. Trade up your onion, bean, and ranch dips for Cincinnati Chili Dip, Green Goddess Hummus, Pizza Your Way Dip, and Spicy California Roll Guacamole. Graham crackers, shortbread cookies, and waffle cone pieces can be used to scoop up a bite or ten of Strawberry Shortcake Dip, Holy Cannoli Dip, chocolatey Dirt Pudding Dip, and Whipped Peanut Butter Cup Dip.

At Sugar Taco, an LA plant-based restaurant, diners are treated to Mexican food favorites that are bursting with traditional flavors and free of any animal ingredients. Some popular dishes are Carne Asada Fries, Al Pastor Bowl, Jackfruit Barbacoa Tacos, Gorditas and Cinnamon Sugar-Coated Churros. To cool the heat of a spicy bite, there are refreshing drinks like Passion Fruit Margaritas, Palomas, creamy Horchatas, and Watermelon Agua Fresca. Now, you can replicate these dishes and more from their new cookbook “Sugar Taco at Home” by Jayde Nicole, Nia Gatica Campos, and Alan Campos.

I recently lost a friend who had been in poor health for quite a while—a delightful lady who made me smile. This week (May 19-26) is National New Friends, Old Friends Week, a time set aside to remember how vital friends are to our emotional and physical health and well-being. Celebrating friends of any and all kinds seems an appropriate way to honor my friend, especially in the form of books, because she loved them and our library so.

The month of May, a time when we strive to bring awareness to our mental health, furthers the theme of the connection between friendship and health. At one time or another, most of us are in need of some kind of special care with life’s challenges and illnesses. Whether we are suffering from the effects of (in no particular order) grief, a broken heart, stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, addiction, autism, ADHD, OCD, schizophrenia, etc., we need, at the very least, some kind of guidance and kindness to get us through. Though we need to be aware that professional help may be required, the concern of a friend or a friendly stranger, or just a sincere smile on a face can often make all the difference.

Visit us, your friends at Smiley Public Library, if you need to locate resources for help, including finding some helpful books in the area of concern, even it’s just to hear another’s story. Here is a small sampling from our new book collection.

“The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” is a dramatic, yet unfortunately, an increasingly common version, of how mental illness can spill over from the sufferer to those around him. The memoir, a Pulitzer Prize finalist of 2023, recounts author Jonathan Rosen’s investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend from success and great potential to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand–and fail to understand–mental illness.

On a lighter note, another memoir, “I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes: (and Other Tales from My ADHD Brain),” is a collection of heartwarming and humorous essays by Emily Farris. Using her own experience as a woman diagnosed with ADHD at age 35, she addresses the topic of neurodivergent thought processing and the emerging discovery of its previously undiagnosed effects on girls/women. At its core, Farris’s account is about not quite fitting in and not really understanding why–something we’ve all felt whether we’re neurodivergent or not.

“Stand By Me: A Guide to Navigating Modern, Meaningful Caregiving” focuses on the very special friends we find in unpaid, untrained, usually family, caregivers. Author and clinical psychologist Dr. Allison Applebaum is the founder of the only devoted Caregivers Clinic in the country, as well as someone who has been on a personal journey as the primary caregiver for her own father, composer Stanley Applebaum. With this volume, she empowers caregivers to provide their loved one with the best quality of life and care possible, while promoting their own well-being.

Ultimately, in whatever we’re going through, we usually have to get to know ourselves better in order to begin healing. You may remember Julia Cameron’s 1992 classic “The Artist’s Way,” designed to provide tools to access artistic creative recovery. This year Cameron has released a supplement, “Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity: A Six-Week Artist’s Way Program.” In it she shares an additional technique, ‘writing for guidance,’ as a way to connect with the intuitive power within ourselves and trusting the answers we receive. Cameron details how writing for guidance can help readers quell anxiety, “slow down” amid life’s stressors, and surrender control. As if to bring our discussion full circle, she describes how she and other artists use the tool in practice by grounding her meditative guide with chapters “Believing Friends” and “The Inspiration of Friends.”

As you have probably no doubt guessed, dear reader, I have a huge fondness for poetry. Poetry allows us to say the things we normally find unsayable. And in doing so, we can better connect, not only to ourselves but to each other. So here are some of our latest poetry books to aid in your quest to say the unsayable.

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is the latest work by writer Nam Le. Le explores the diaspora as a result of the Vietnamese war, and the lasting effect on those that have been displaced from their homeland. Centering on the concept of identity, Le shows how detrimental it is to have your concept of self stripped away, and replaced with another’s idea of you. Le mocks the mask that is forced upon him, forcing the reader to contend with their own assumptions and prejudices. Le plays with form, taking the standard concepts and breaking them to create a new way of looking at language itself. Le’s work is an exploration of how one can reclaim an identity dismantled by colonialism.

Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi, is another writer exploring diaspora, this time looking through the lens of the Gwangju uprising. Choi uses her father’s photographs and personal recollections to inform of a time that has been glossed over. Choi’s father, a photographer working with reporters during this time, saw the violence first hand and came close several times to experiencing it himself. Choi takes this knowledge and bridges it to the present in her own struggles to understand herself and the land her family had to leave. Dealing with her own sense of self, Choi investigates her past to ground herself in the present and reconnect with who she might have been.

With My Back to the World is another stellar work by Victoria Chang. Using the abstract paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, Chang delves into the matter of identity itself. Chang is trying to answer the question of who she is and what it means to be a woman while dealing with her own depression and the subsequent death of her father. Martin’s work allows Chang to delve deeper into her own mind and understand how art is a conduit to understanding ourselves. Chang’s poems seem to question what lies at the crossroads of being a woman and being Asian and how to honor both in a society that values neither.

Enjoy these new poetry books and discover much more at your local library.