Serving up summer's glories

REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT

Heavens preserve us! And all the beautiful fruits and vegetables that reach their peak in this bountiful season. Home gardens, farmers' markets, you-pick orchards and roadside stands are bursting with ready, ripe produce, making this a great time to store up some of summer's glories. Premier preserver Linda J. Amendt, one of the top prize-winning, down-home cooks in the country, shows you how to do just that in Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to Award-Winning Jams, Jellies, Sauces, Pickles and More. With Linda's canning canniness, anyone willing to spend a little time and effort will be rewarded with the healthy, satisfying benefits of farm fresh flavor all winter long. She explains the basics of successful home canning clearly and concisely; everything from selecting ingredients to storing the finished product, along with reassuring advice on safety precautions, equipment and processing. There's even a detailed "Troubleshooting Guide," in case of a crisis. You may run out of jam, but you'll never be in a jam with these 200 luscious recipes for jellies, jams, conserves, marmalades, curds and butters. Think what you could do with a just-picked peck of perfect peaches -- Peach Jam, Peach Jelly, Peach Butter, Brandy Peach Conserve, Peach Pie Filling. And you can be just as creative with apples, blueberries, pears and more. Deserving veggies get their preserving due too, from pencil-thin asparagus to Zucchini Pickles, with Chile Pepper Sauce and Dilled Green Beans in between. With Linda at your side, you'll be doing the can-can with the best.


Vegging out

Nowadays, with international imports readily available at increasingly savvy supermarkets, you can find a wide selection of vegetables all year long; the average American supermarket now carries nearly 400 different kinds of vegetables and fruits over a 12-month period. But in high summer, a cook's fancy turns to the home grown and the fresh-picked‹nothing beats an ear of corn that's just been taken off the stalk or a vine-ripened tomato right out of the garden. So this is the ideal time to browse through Jack Bishop's Vegetables Every Day: The Definitive Guide to Buying and Cooking Today's Produce, an A to Z tribute to the root, the shoot, the sprout, the leaf, the bean and the tuber. Bishop, a food writer and author of Pasta e Verdura, covers both the ordinary and the exotic. You'll find asparagus and eggplant, spinach and sweet potatoes, as well as broccoli rabe and boniato, chayote and Jerusalem artichokes. As he moves through the vegetable kingdom, he takes you on a tour of the buying and cooking process. Each of the 64 entries is packed with the detailed info you need -- availability, selection, storage, basic prep, best cooking method and veggie-specific recipes. The recipes, more than 350 in all, like Sauteed Beets with Butter and Orange Juice, Garlicky Chard or Braised Red Radishes show you how to make each vegetable sing its own unique song. You know that vegetables are good for you, now you'll know how good they can taste.


Back-to-school bonanza

You don't need an advanced degree to know what students want. Aside from acing the course, making the team and a few unmentionables, they want good, cheap, easy-to-make food and lots of it. And the ever-growing number of vegetarian students want the same thing, but without fur, feathers or fins. Dede Hall's The Starving Students' Vegetarian Cookbook, the non-carnivorous successor to her best-selling The Starving Student Cookbook, deftly doles out easy, clear, understandable instructions that make the grade. In fact, there are drawings on every page that will have even the most culinary-challenged turning out fool-proof fare. Dede begins at the beginning with breakfast, brunch and a few quick-fix breads, segues to salads, soups, sandwiches and simple veggies, moves on to "EZ" main dishes, many with a Mexican accent or the aroma of Italy, and finishes up with desserts, shakes and smoothies. This is the perfect slim, trim treasure to slip into college-bound backpacks or put in the hands of anyone starting out on their own.


Sybil Pratt has been cooking up this column for more than five years.

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