Moshe Basson, chef, food historian and owner of the famous Eucalyptus restaurant in Jerusalem, has finally published his cookbook. Its title is, naturally, The Eucalyptus Cookbook. The foreword is by Claudia Roden, an international authority on the foods of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

I’ve often eaten at The Eucalyptus, and to my delight, I found recipes in the book for dishes I’ve enjoyed there, such as chicken makloubah, Basson’s signature dish. Chicken and vegetables are cooked with rice, then the pot turned upside down on a platter to present a savory cake. I cooked it. It’s delicious, and elicits a “Wow!” from impressed guests. Read a personal interview with Moshe Basson.

The contents begin with vegetable recipes and go on to soups, grain and bean-based foods, meat, chicken, and fish, sweets, cocktails, and condiments and basics.

Peppered throughout the book are beautiful photos of the dishes and the chef himself at work.

There are recipes for all varieties of eaters. Vegans and omnivores alike will find appetizing recipes in the vegetables, soups, and grains and beans sections. Bonus: here’s a vegan maklubah recipe, with portobello mushrooms, cauliflower, and eggplant. It must be said though that the list of meat dishes is the longest in the book. And very delicious they are, as I’ve had occasion to find out.

As the Eucalyptus Restaurant is kosher and serves meat, the desserts don’t include dairy in any form. Almond and soy replace milk and cream. In the few places where butter is listed (a nod to tradition as in the baklava recipe), sunflower oil is the suggested alternative. It must also be noted that there are no artificial ingredients in The Eucalyptus recipes.

The book is a great read for food lovers. Basson loves to tell stories, and you’ll find many there. His recounts vignettes from his childhood in the Judean hills with his Iraqi immigrant parents, and from his travels and present home life. He tells of his early culinary inspirations, often quoting his mother, Spirons. He combines his passion for reviving biblical foods (with delicious variations) with references from Jewish and other historical sources. He meditates on beloved dishes central to family life, especially dishes for Shabbat and holidays, such as the hamine overnight stew, Iraqi style.

Read carefully, and you’ll find little humorous asides, like this tip for cooking Jerusalem artichoke soup: “Don’t lift the cover during the first 25 minutes – Jerusalem artichoke is a crazy vegetable and a draft of cold wind may prevent the tubers from ever getting soft.” He also recommends that when you grind his cilantro pesto with a mortar and pestle, you should “raise your voice in song, because the sound is good for the spices.” Well – that’s if you choose the ancient way over your food processor.

Especially endearing are vignettes like the one in which we see Basson’s mother cooking Aruk chicken fritters and keeping an eagle eye on hungry grandchildren getting ready to filch them. I don’t know if I could resist those savory patties, myself (mouthwatering photos and recipe on pages 136-139.)

Recipes with wild greens cast an interesting light on foraged food. I’ve eaten Basson’s gnocchi based on mallows with much pleasure, and as nettles are just coming up in the backyard, I’ll soon be opening the book to the nettles soup page.

From simple daily foods like humus to sumptuous party dishes like figs stuffed with chicken in tamarind sauce, the Eucalyptus Cookbook offers over a hundred recipes to choose from. Browse its pages, and be prepared to cook.

The Eucalyptus Cookbook

Moshe Basson with Sharon Fradis

Levin Press, Israel

243 pages.  ISBN 978-965-93115-0-7

More ethnic and foraged foods below:

Chef Moshe Basson’s Za’atar Pesto

Turkish vegan bulgur balls in eggplant and tomato sauce

Two dips from the Lebanese cuisine: ful medames and musabaha

Chickpea and Wild Beet Greens Soup

The post The Eucalyptus Cookbook by Moshe Basson – Our Review appeared first on Green Prophet.

The Healthy Jew is an online publication about healthy Jewish living and Israel’s natural world, written by me, Shmuel Chaim Naiman, a health teacher and foraging guide based in Ramat Bet Shemesh, Israel. 

After October 7, The Healthy Jew enlisted to defend the Jewish people – not to fight the war of bodies (with guns and tanks) or minds (online and in the media), but to combat fear, anxiety, stress, and negative drama. Our enemies want us to stop living, caring, and connecting. They want us to see Israel as the “land that eats its inhabitants.”

We win the war for wellness by practicing healthy Jewish living and appreciating Israel’s natural world. In this war, everyone is a soldier.

For the past 4 months, The Healthy Jew has been waging war with two free weekly newsletters:

• Healthy Jewish (Wednesday) shows you how to defeat terror with healthy Jewish living strategies that are particularly useful for times of crisis. We won’t allow the enemy to stop us from living, caring and connecting. Israel needs healthy Jews!
• Natural Israel (Sunday) invites you to exchange, if only for a moment, Israel’s current images of pain and fear with pictures of purpose and health. The failed spies said Israel is “the land that eats its inhabitants”; we’re joining Yehoshua (Joshua) and Calev’s (Caleb) response: “The land is very, very good!”

Now you can read many of The Healthy Jew’s best ideas and advice in  new book, published this week together with Yeshivas Lev Hatorah: Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness.

The first part of Land of Health builds on Natural Israel’s posts about the healthy body of the Jewish people – the Land of Israel.

The second part, based on Healthy Jewish posts, offers practical strategies for healthy living during challenging times.

Finally, Land of Health presents The Healthy Jew’s mission and programs for teaching healthy Jewish living and discovering Israel’s natural world.

Land of Health comes with dozens of stunning pictures of healthy living throughout Natural Israel.

The book is available in bookstores throughout Israel, on Amazon, and directly from the author. Reach out.

Shmuel Chaim Naiman is a health teacher and foraging guide in Ramat Bet Shemesh. He writes about healthy Jewish living and Israel’s natural world, teaches the nightly Healthy Jew class at Yeshivas Lev Hatorah, guides popular foraging walks, and offers personalized health coaching. He recently published a book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness, which is available on Amazon and in bookstores (in Israel). Learn more at healthyjew.org, and contact him at scnaiman@healthyjew.org.

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A Soft Day in a Moist Country?  If there is a climate for writing, Ireland has that climate. “Soft day” (Lá bog in the Irish language) is a greeting and acknowledgment of the damp mist that drifts down from low clouds onto the fields and forests. On soft days this island’s climate avoids extremes. It is the weather of poetry such as Austin Clarke’s “The Lost Heifer”: “…And her voice coming softly over the meadow/ Was the mist becoming rain…”

Irish weather can also be brutal with monstrous waves and a howling wind that can push north Atlantic spray vertically 600 feet straight up the cliffs of Moher (watch me Wim Hoffing in the cold). The screech of Irish storms became the voice of the Banshee, the legendary faeries who would foretell of death or steal a child as in Yeats poem “The Stolen Child.” 

Change is the most persistent feature of Irish weather. Stone-splitting sunshine alternates with wind-driven rain almost hourly on some days, leaving the rainbows and mossy-green this emerald isle is known for.

But then Covid-19 and its lockdowns brought an unfortunate irony. Day after day of sunshine and cloudless blue skies came when Irish people were limited to travelling no further than 3 miles from their homes. Dublin airport went from many tourist flights per day to only enough to carry medical supplies and other essentials. The buzz of the motorway and roar of jet aircraft disappeared into a Wadi Rum desert silence. The deep blue sky was unmarred by cloud or contrail.

Weather Before Contrails

Had such perfect weather ever before visited this damp island? I turned to an unlikely source. The author James Joyce wrote the novel Ulysses to commemorate June 16, 1904. This was the day he and his future-wife Nora Barnacle went on their first date. The book tells the fictional adventures of a thrice-baptized Irish-Jew named Leopold Bloom on his journey around Dublin on that single day. Joyce wrote with such detail that he claimed that if the city should ever be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from his book.

And here it is a perfectly sunny day in Dublin Ireland more than 100 years ago: ”Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets… Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.”

Later in the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses, Joyce compares the February 1903 storm that uprooted 3,000 elm trees in Dublin’s Phoenix park to the drought that persisted on June 16, 1904:
“Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.

“Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness.”

Records, annals and tree-rings going back more than 1000 years reveal many Irish droughts including the years 536-550, 1050, 1804, 1887, 1893, 1904-1912. 

A 1984 Guinness ad played with the words drought and draught and suggested that young people don’t remember droughts. Ireland has had fewer droughts since the mid-1970s. Could it be that transatlantic travel has made Ireland wetter and that droughts were more common in Leopold Bloom’s Dublin, only 6 months after the Wright Brother’s first flight? 

Do Contrails Affect the Weather?

The internet is full of wonderfully silly theories about chemtrails that any crop-duster could debunk after flying barely above corn-detasseling altitude. Contrails don’t contain brain-altering drugs or other subversive substances. They are composed of water ice mixed with carbon dioxide(CO2), soot, nitrogen oxides(NOx) and other pollutants. These pollutants and the jet’s pressure wake can produce the conditions for forming contrails which can become cirrus clouds. 

According to scientists at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the diurnal (night to day) temperature difference over the US increased by 1.1 degrees celsius during the three-day US flight ban after September 11, 2001. This is higher than had been in the previous 30 years. UW-Whitewater’s lead scientist David Travis told CNN, “I think what we’ve shown are that contrails are capable of affecting temperatures… Which direction, in terms of net heating or cooling, is still up in the air.”  

Wouldn’t it be convenient if contrail-generated cirrus clouds reflected away exactly the right amount of sunlight to cool the earth and perfectly balance the heat-trapping effect of its CO2?

In 2011 Ulrike Burkhardt and Bernd Kärcher’s published Global radiative forcing from contrail-induced cloudiness in the international society for optics and photonics. They found the net heating effect from contrail-induced cloudiness and other emissions added to and exceeded the heating effect of CO2!

Eunice Newton Foote first discovered that CO2 and water vapor could trap heat in 1856. But unlike relatively inert CO2, the effects of water are difficult to predict. CO2 is transparent to incoming light and relatively opaque to outgoing longwave infrared energy.

The water vapor and ice in contrails blocks both incoming light and outgoing infrared energy but in different amounts depending on time of day, other cloud cover, season, local climate and other factors. The global reduction in air-traffic during Covid-19 provided opportunities to study these factors. Schumann, Pol, Teoh, Koelle et-al published Air traffic and contrail changes during COVID-19 over Europe: A model study in 2021.

Figure 8 from this study shows average optical thickness of contrails March-August 2019 (a) and the difference 2019-2020 (b). In (a) we see heavy contrail thickness over northwestern Europe. This makes sense because more contrails form where there are many flights and where the stratosphere is relatively cool. In (b) we see a drastic reduction in contrail thickness during the pandemic.

Figure 9 shows radiative forcing (RFnet) in watts per square meter from March-August 2019 and again in 2020. Colors from yellow to red mean there is a net heat input to earth and the blue end of the spectrum means there is a net loss of heat to the earth. Note that the areas of northwestern Europe which had high contrail thickness in 2019 also had a higher (redder) radiative forcing heat balance in 2019.

This and related studies are complex but fascinating to read or to pass along friends and family when they say things like, “Well I was cold when I was up to the lake last weekend so that whole climate change thing is B.S.” People devote their careers to studying climate science and the vast majority of these people are warning us to be careful about uncontrolled experiments with our atmosphere.

Bloomsday 2020

Bloomsday happening tomorrow is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first intimate encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protabloomgonist Leopold Bloom.

In 2020, Covid-19 shortened the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. Venice ended Carnival early, Pope Francis gave a blessing to an empty St Peter’s square. The pandemic impacted the Hajj and religious celebrations throughout the world. Ireland cancelled Saint Patrick’s day parades and most Bloomsday celebrations.

But Bloomsday 2020 had something in common with the day Nora Barnacle and James Joyce met in 1904. Ireland’s drought ended after sunset on June 16, 2020 just as described in Ulysses:

“…But by and by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the pour came.”

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Every Turkish kitchen produces dishes that began somewhere in Central Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe or the Balkans. Even with natural regional variations, there’s something characteristically Turkish in every bite you take. It’s the sweet/sour taste of pomegranate molasses, the tang of sumac, yogurt flavored with mint or dill, and Turkish pepper paste. So many flavors to intrigue and tease the palate.

The south of Turkey is especially famous for its dazzling variety of luscious foods, and Özlem Warren, food writer, teacher and blogger (www.ozlemsturkishtable.com), shows you shows you how to cook them yourself. Beginning her own family’s story, the book moves through Turkish culinary history and in particular, the world of southern Turkish cuisine.

We’re introduced to two essential Turkish condiments that appear over and over again throughout the recipes: red pepper paste and pomegranate molasses. I made the red pepper paste, and it wasn’t hard. I admit that I balked somewhat at making my own pomegranate molasses, but luckily every grocery store carries bottles of it where I live. There is a recipe for za’atar blend, which I was intrigued to see includes ground, cooked chickpeas. We love za’atar: see a version of za’atar pesto here.

Another thing you can count on in Turkish food is how healthy it is. There are infinite ways to cook vegetables and grains. People are eating more meat than formerly, but still prefer a relatively light touch of it in everyday foods. And most Turks still prefer to eat at home. You don’t hear moaning about fast-food taking the culture over, because everyone’s too busy cooking and eating foods made from scratch.

Özlem’s Turkish Table carries you through authentic recipes for soups and dips, a variety of mezze, and salads. Sections on the Turkish breakfast and savory pastries follow, segueing into chapters on vegetables, meat and poultry, grains, fish and seafood, and finally desserts. To help you build a typical Turkish meal, there’s a chapter on suggested menus.

The book is packed with attractive photographs, but it’s not a coffee-table book. It’s meant to be taken into the kitchen and cooked out of. Some recipes are quick and easy, like the mezze of sauteed carrots mixed with garlicky yogurt. Others are more elaborate, like the luscious kaytaz boregi, savory pastry squares topped with seasoned ground beef. The most time-consuming is oruk, bulgar balls filled with walnuts and ground meat. A dish for festivals.

It’s not a book for beginning cooks, but no recipe is really difficult to manage. For example, baklava might seem intimidating to make, but with filo pastry from the supermarket, a careful cook can easily produce a trayful of that exotic sweet from this book.

The instructions given are clear and easy to understand, with tips and explanations interspersed throughout to ensure the reader success. The only thing I found bothersome is the index, which is extensive and well-organized, but gives the names of some dishes only in Turkish, which assumes that readers remember their unfamiliar names. For example, what is sini oruğu? I’m mystified.

Altogether, Özlem’s Turkish Table makes a nice addition to the cookbook shelf. I’ve already promised to lend my copy to a friend married to a Turkish man – she wants to surprise him with dishes he doesn’t expect his Western wife to know. I’m confident that they’ll find a good few keepers in this book.

Özlem’s Turkish Table, 2018.
304 pages with an introduction by Ghillie Başan
ISBN 978-1-912031-94-8

Publisher: GB Publishing
Available from the author’s website (www.ozlemsturkishtable.com); GB Publishing (www.gbpublishing.co.uk/ozemsturkishtable), or via Kindle.

The post Ozlem’s Turkish Table cookbook for everyday and festivals: Our Review appeared first on Green Prophet.

Aldo Leopold was an American author who believed that our well-being, or the well-being of all people was tied to the environment. He created today’s idea of community to enlarge it to sentient and non-sentient beings other than us people, to include water, soil, animals and all plants.

His most famous book is A Sand County Almanac.

His most well-known idea from the book on land ethics is such: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

The first issue of the book included published essays that Leopold had been submitting to popular hunting and conservation magazines, along with more philosophical essays.

To get youngsters writing, and in the spirit of Leopold, entries are now being accepted for the Aldo Leopold Writing Contest featuring several $500 awards and open to students in grades 6 to 12 throughout the State of New Mexico.

In the essay students should tell a story about a local leader and in it reflect on Leopold’s ethics to the land. Local can be interpreted to be the entire southwest United States. And students can buy the book online or find it in bookstores for inspiration. The contest is open to kids in public, private and homeschool systems. But a teacher must sponsor the submission.

Younger students can submit shorter essays, and on them the writer’s name must not be identified so they can be judged anonymously. Of course while it is easy to buy cheap essays online, no forms of plagiarism will be expected. Buying essays is okay for use on commercial interest business websites, but not in creative submissions in this case.

Go to this site for more information on the essay contest.

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I’ve chosen one for each of the six Muslim-majority nations whose citizens are currently banned from entering the America.

Crack one open and learn some “alternative facts” about the Middle East. A published book will always be mightier than a presidential tweet.

1. The Book of Khalid by Lebanese-American Ameen Rihani is a reprint of the first Arab-American novel which dealt with religious conflict and the immigrant experience. This is the story of two Lebanese men who set off for adventure in 20th Century New York, only to return to Lebanon, their minds now saturated with Western political ideals.

The story later inspired Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and includes illustrations by Gibran.

2. Hiding in Plain Sight by Somali author Nuruddin Farah – called “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years” by The New York Review of Books – is a riveting saga about freedom and family, about liberty and obligation. Follow Bella, a photographer living in Rome, as she returns to Nairobi to care for the children of her murdered brother. Kirkus Reviews called it a “body of work worthy of a Nobel Prize.”

3. In the Country of Men by Libyan writer Hisham Matar takes us to his homeland circa 1979.  Meet nine-year-old Suleiman whose carefree Tripoli childhood is soon uprooted by politics and adult intrigue. It’s a stunning examination of the private fallout of current events told with keen insight and literary grace.

4. The Tent by Egyptian Miral al-Tahawy is powerful, and disturbing.  Female characters fill the novel, linked by their subjegation to an often absent, patriarch and his brutal mother. Get up close and personal with these Bedouin, peasant women, and feel the weight of their tragic existence.

5. Second Person Singular by Israeli Arab Sayed Kashua is a story of love and betrayal that poses the question: can a tiger ever change its spots? Kashua writes in Hebrew coveying emotional power and a sense of the absurd. Here he tackles people straddling two worlds in a psychological mystery set in a divided society.

6. The Moor’s Account by Moroccan author Laila Lalami is a fictional account of the first black explorer of America, Moroccan slave Mustafa al-Zamori, who sailed from the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 1527 with the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez, 600 men and 100 horses. Their aim was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown. Fate intervened, and the story – told by Mustafa – gives a fascinating narrative for this failed expedition.

The post 6 great reads for Arab American Heritage Month appeared first on Green Prophet.

Imagine that you are a castaway on a dead planet. You only have provisions for a few days and you are absolutely alone. How would you survive? Andy Weir turned this question into his best-selling novel, The Martian. It is a tale of man versus Mars.

The golden age of science fiction

The so-called golden age of science fiction began in the 1930s with stories written by the likes of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. They were published in cheap pulp fiction magazines not known for high literary quality. But these hard sci-fi stories were known for their attention to scientific detail, their leaps of imagination and for being fun to read.

Asimov’s “Marooned off Vesta” (1939) envisioned space castaways stranded in orbit almost within spitting distance of a base on our solar system’s largest asteroid. Author Andy Weir continued this tradition when he transformed an exercise in what if? scientific extrapolation into his debut novel, The Martian.

In an interview with Amazing Stories magazine, Andy says he was inspired by the true stories behind the Apollo missions, especially the ingenuity which allowed the crew of Apollo 13 to safely return home after an explosion depleted their oxygen supply and pushed their spacecraft off its course to what would have been the third manned landing on the moon.

Stranger than fiction

The author’s first difficulty is that, unlike the true stories behind Apollo 13, the Shackleton expedition and the discovery of Hawaii via Polynesian canoes, fiction must be believable. The setting adds to this plausibility challenge. It is fun to imagine Martian seas, canals and crystal cities but numerous spacecraft have confirmed that this is a cold and dead planet. It averages more than 40 million miles away from our world which so generously provides the air, water, nutrients and warmth to support an amazing variety of life.

How could a man survive here?

Remember that time when I was lost on Mars?

Andy begins this novel as a first-person journal by a stranded botanist named Mark Watney. Our assumption that the journal writer survived can take away some of the immediacy of an adventure, but it works here. The character’s struggle in what seems an impossible situation leave us wondering how he’ll live another “sol” (Martian day.)

Like much of the hard sci-fi that came before it, you won’t find complex characters or tremendous emotional depth in The Martian. Mark Watney isn’t the kind of gentle astronaut we’ve come to know from people like Commander Chris Hadfield. He seems to swear just as much at the people who are trying to help him as he does at the planet he suspects is trying to kill him. There are times when he doesn’t seem to have the emotional maturity to be selected for a Mars mission. But his blend of sardonic humor and can-do spirit will be be understood, if not appreciated by the folks at NASA.

How is the ecological science?

As a botanist, Mark Watney is the perfect kind of superhero for a Mars mission. He understands that plants require water, warmth, nutrients, bacteria and pollinators. Bacteria, insects and other forms of life have colonized the geysers, icebergs and farthest shores of our planet. But they would not survive in the harsh Martian environment. Sustainable colonization of Mars will require people who understand the environmental requirements of living things. Like our ancestors more than 10,000 years, we will have to invent agriculture to bring life to this desert.

The film version used Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert as a stand-in for the Martian landscape but there is a significant difference. Wadi Rum has enough air and water to support a variety of life. As far as we know, Mars doesn’t.

How is the physical science, on Mars?

As an amateur astronomer with a degree in physics, I’m happy to report that the science in this movie is well above average, approaching what we once demanded of this genre. Details around ion drives, microgravity tether dynamics, Houghman transfers, the most calorie-efficient crop per acre and the Martian environment are accurate more often than not. The fact that nerds are complaining about the force of Martian winds and the color of Hydrogen flames gives you some idea of how much suspension of disbelief will be required.

The science in the book is detailed and rest assured there are numerous websites full of nerds, even botany nerds who are busy trying to find holes in the science. But Andy did his homework and the holes are few and far between.

Is it as good as the movie?

It’s better. The movie was good and you should see it, but you’ll find more humor in the book. You’ll also find more scientific and environmental details. What crop can survive on poor sandy soil and would provide a high caloric value per acre? How would you make water if you had only rocket fuel? How many watts will he get out of a square meter of solar panels on Mars? How will he stay warm on a planet where the average temperature is more than fifty degrees below zero celsius?

This book might even replace the “Lost on the moon” exam NASA apparently gave at job interviews:

Your spaceship crashed on the moon. Rank these items to decide what you should bring with you on your journey back to the lunar base:

1) A Magnetic Compass
2) Two .45 calibre pistols
3) 5 gallons of Water
4) 2 air tanks
5) A star map
6) A box of matches
7) Parachute silk

etc…

Water, water everywhere, but…

Evidence of liquid water was discovered on Mars during production but I wouldn’t want to change the story any more than I’d want to see dust and craters where Ray Bradbury imagined canals and crystal cities in Martian Chronicles.

One of Isaac Asimov’s stories required the planet Mercury to have an eternal day side and an eternal night side. When asked what he thought of the discovery that this wasn’t true, he said that he wasn’t about to change his story to suit the whims of NASA. And neither should Andy Weir. Future Martian castaways will be thankful to find water, but it may be so contaminated with salt and perchlorate that they may have to resort to Mark Watney’s solution. Read the book to find out what it is.

The post The Martian movie started as a book – here’s the review appeared first on Green Prophet.

You can’t download the books; instead click and add titles to an “bookbag” function that stores your selections so you can read online at your own pace.

These ten titles that may grab you, publisher briefs offer a synopsis for each:

The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change by Richard Somerville (UCP 1996)
Written by a scientist for non-scientists, this primer humanizes the great environmental issues of our time highlighting the interrelatedness of human activity and global change.  The hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and air pollution are explained in accessible prose. A new preface addresses developments in environmental policy that have occurred since publication.

Pollution in a Promised Land: an Environmental History of Israel  by Alon Tal (UCP 2002)
Virtually undeveloped one hundred years ago, Israel, the promised “land of milk and honey,” is in ecological disarray. Alon Tal provides the first-time-ever history of Israeli environmentalism, interviewing hundreds of experts and activists who have made it their mission to keep the country’s remarkable development sustainable amid a century of political and cultural turmoil.

Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 by Melani McAlister (UCP 2001) In the twentieth century, cultural products (films, news, museum exhibits and novels) profoundly shaped ideas about the relationship between America and the Middle East. In this interdisciplinary work, McAlister  explores the significant intersection of culture and politics that is at the heart of both nationalism and globalization.

Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond by Walter Armbrust (UCP 2000)  Mass media are as ubiquitous in Cairo and Karachi as in Los Angeles and Detroit, and popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East.. From Persian popular music in Beverly Hills to postmodern Turkish novels to the music of an Israeli transsexual singer, these essays illustrate the multiple contexts of modern cultural production and challenge conventional assumptions about the region and its relation to the West.

Colonising Egypt by Timothy Mitchell (UCP 1991)
Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe’s colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel by James Ron (UCP 2003)
James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion. He presents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on his field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, and Turkey, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today’s nationalist wars.

A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity by Daniel Boyarin (UCP 1994)
Are the Epistles of Paul the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic? What led Paul – in his dramatic conversion to Christianity – to such a radical critique of Jewish culture? The book examines the apostle’s famous formulation, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ”, encouraging a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Israeli and Palestinian, and as humans.

A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity by Michael E. Meeker (UCP 2002)  Michael Meeker combines anthropological and historical methods to examine the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, providing a new understanding of the complexities and contradictions of modern Turkish experience.

Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo by Farha Ghannam (UCP 2002)  In an effort to restyle Cairo into a global capital meeting the demands of tourists and investors and to achieve President Anwar Sadat’s goal to modernize the housing of the urban poor, the Egyptian government relocated residents from what was deemed valuable real estate in downtown Cairo to public housing on city outskirts. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork among five thousand working-class families, this presents an illuminating analysis of Cairo’s urban engineering and the struggle of the working class community to confront associated alienation and dislocation.

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories by Michael Ghorkin (UCP 1996)
This remarkable collection of oral histories from six Palestinian women affords an unparalleled view into the daily lives of women who have lived, and continue to live, through a turbulent and rapidly changing era. Highly personal events such as courting, marriage, and childbirth are interwoven with memories of upheavals such as the wars of 1948 and 1967. These beautifully written narratives bear witness to the power of Palestinian culture in sustaining the often difficult lives of women and provides brilliant testimony to the experience of living in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The collection is dynamic, with new titles being added over time.  Browse for yourself, drop a few titles in your bookbag.  They even offer a cookbook.  Maybe there is a such thing as a free lunch.

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Or samples from a tenth-century cookbook. Or amusing little line drawings, or a page on an abandoned Jewish delicacy made from cattail reed pollen.

After a scholarly introduction the recipes begin on Chapter One, Bread. It’s studded with proverbs, folk songs, photographs, drawings, and transcriptions of ancient documents relating to food. Can you resist a recipe for a bread called Lover’s Window? Its sweet, sesame-sprinkled bread whose dough is stretched out in the middle to make holes that you can peer through.

And that’s only the first chapter. The second, dealing with dairy products, includes a modern recipe for Geymer, a thick clotted cream, with a folk song comparing a lover’s white cheeks to it. In all, there are 20 chapters that cover vegetables, salads, snacks, sandwiches, side dishes, meat main dishes, stuffed foods (where the emphasis is on kubba), fish, poultry, grains and beans. savory pastries, every kind of sweet, and beverages. One chapter is dedicated to rice alone.

It’s easy to see that the author has tested and cooked every recipe herself. Tips and hints are attached to the recipes, that can only have come from her kitchen experience. The photographs aren’t gorgeous, but more than adequate to express appetizing  foods like baked fish stuffed with za’atar and sumac. From simple peasant food like the combination of rice and lentils known as majadra, to a sumptuous, entire lamb stuffed with almonds, rice, raisins, peas and spices, this cookbook will keep the creative cook busy for at least a year, if one chooses to cook everything in it.

The great thing about all this delicious exotic cooking is that almost always, ingredients are easily found. Most are already in your pantry. Some ingredients may have to be especially shopped for, like tamarind concentrate or sumac, but if you enjoy browsing through Middle East markets, that’s just part of the fun.

At the end of the book are sections on menus (including pages on historical table manners and hygiene), an excellent glossary and recipe index, a bibliography, and separate indexes covering ancient, medieval, and Ottoman foods and ingredients, plus a name and subject index. This book is a treasure. It’s just a matter of parking it somewhere in your kitchen where you can flip it open and go on to cook the next mouthwatering recipe.

A Cookbook and History of the Iraqi Cuisine is the sub-title of this food encyclopedia.

Ms. Nasrallah was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the universities of Baghdad and Mosul. Her English translation of the 10th-century Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchens and Delights From The Garden of Eden have won Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2007. We reviewed her book Dates here on Green Prophet.

Delights From The Garden of Eden: a cookbook and history of the Iraqi cuisine.
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-84553-457-8.
574 pages.

You can order Ms. Nasrallah’s books online here.

Recipes from Nawal Nasrallah:

• Healthy Herbed Zucchini Fritters
• Simit, The Iraqi Bagel
• Iraqi Watermelon Rind Jam

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