The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean refers both Paula Wolfert's love of great food and the pioneering spirit that has inspired her to travel across the globe many times over in search of the world's best recipes. In all of her remarkable books, she delves with tireless enthusiasm into her research and writing, ensuring each recipe's authenticity and accessibility. In The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, she brings readers and cooks into the kitchens that produce the healthy home cooking that is the trademark of such lands as Macedonian, Turkey, Syria, and the countries on the Black Sea.

Wolfert's food dazzles the palate. Her book begins with recipes for sauces and dips, including two walnut and pomegranate sauces; soups include Anatolian Sour Soup and Macedonian "Green Cream." Meat, poultry, and fish dishes include eleven varities of kibbeh, Duck with Quinces, and Skewered Swordfish. Her sumptuous recipes for vegetables and grains—stuffed eggplants, pilafs, and pomegranate-flavored vegetables, to name a few—reflect the bounty and healthful eating patterns of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Wolfert's Middle Eastern grain salads are healthy and rich with flavor. Paula travels into the kitchens of native cooks to ensure that her recipes are as genuine as they are delicious. She takes us into the home of a friend in the Republic of Georgia, whose mother teaches Wolfert how to prepare Chicken Tabaka; to a mountain village in northern Greece where, with a sister food writer, she searches for fine cheese to complete a savory pie; and to a farm in Turkey, where the country's best bread baker tells her secrets of baking unleavened flat griddle bread.

These delicious, authentic recipes focus on the healthy eating patterns for which the Eastern Mediterranean is increasingly being recognized. Wolfert's recipes are as delightful to read as they are to use. Armchair cooks and travelers will be moved by the descriptive geography and resonate personal stories Paula Wolfert relates along with her fabulous dishes. Wolfert's expertise is renowned among food lovers, amateur and professional, and her joy of discovering new ways to prepare food is infectious to her many devoted readers.

A recipe from Cooking with the Two Fat Ladies

SCONES
Makes about 12

Fresh scones, still warm from the oven, are part and parcel of the delicious teas of our childhoods. No one seems to make them nowadays; instead, they buy terrible things in supermarkets tasting of soda and studded with soggy fruits. Scones take but a moment, so do try them.

1 2/3 cups self rising flour
small pinch of salt
4 tablespoons butter
2/3 cup milk, fresh or buttermilk.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips until it all resembles crumbs. Mix in the milk. Form into a soft dough with a metal spatula. Knead lightly on a floured board, then pat out into a round 3/4 inch thick. Cut into 2-inch rounds with a cutter.

Place the rounds on a greased and floured baking sheet and brush with milk. Bake for 10 minutes until well risen and brown. Cool on a rack, but eat when still warm, with lots of butter, clotted cream, and jam. Yummo.

Variations:
Fruit scones: Add 1/3 cup dried fruit and 2 tablespoons superfine sugar.
Savory scones: Add 3/4 cup grated hard cheese and 1 teaspoon dry mustard, or 1/3 cup minced olives, anchovies, or what you fancy.

In the Matrix of cyberspace, angels and voodoo zaibatsus fight it out for world domination and computer cowboys like Turner and Count Zero risk their minds for fat crumbs. Turner woke up in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him. They let him recuperate for a while in Mexico, then Hosaka reactivated his memory for a mission more dangerous than the one that nearly killed him. The head designer from Maas-Biolabs is defecting to Hosaka, or so he says. Turner has to deliver him safely, and the biochips he invented — which are of supreme interest to other parties, some of whom are not human. Count Zero is human. Indeed, he's just a kid from Barrytown, and totally unprepared for the heavy duty data coming his way when he's caught up in the cyberspace war triggered by the defection. With voodoo on the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the superrich have their virtual hands full already.

Crammed with intriguing details, this illuminating appraisal of vice and excess in the cradle of democracy delivers a fascinating and engagingly written study of the hedonism that ruled Athens. of photos.

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon

Designed to assist the frugal gourmet in capitalizing on seasonal cooking, a collection of 170 recipes arranged in menus covers lamb, cold soups, pasta dishes, stews, desserts, and much more. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

France has long been and remains the stronghold of culinary culture. No other country in the world can boast such an immense richness of specialties or comes even close to offering such an extraordinary wealth of noble restaurants, in which thousands of chefs nurture the tradition of grand cuisine and with notable creativity continue to produce new culinary delights. This gastronomic tour demonstrates how landscape, climate, and culture impact France cuisine. Master chefs from all corners of the country have contributed to a new, up-to-date portrait of this nation of gourmands, which includes something for everyone, whether you prefer to enjoy the tastes of France in person or in your own kitchen, or let yourself be enchanted in an entirely new way by the selection of fabulous photographs, enticing recipes, and knowledgeable texts about French cuisine.