The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland

The Botanical Kitchen by Elly McCausland ISBN-13: 9781472969453 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury Absolute Released: April 28th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Elly McCausland guides readers through cooking with botanicals, looking at their culinary history and diverse uses over the years. Weaving through this compelling text will be 90 delicious recipes including relishes and bakes, salads and soups, noodle bowls and breads and everything in between, offering unique and insightful flavour pairings. With chapters including fruits (tropical, Mediterranean and orchard), leaves, flowers, seeds and berries, this beautiful book places botanical ingredients at the fore and showcases exactly how plants can transform your food.


My Review:
The Botanical Kitchen is a cookbook using bought ingredients, some of them potentially hard to find. For some reason, I thought the focus was going to be more on the leaves and flowers (like how to prepare and use them) than on recipes that happen to throw in some herbs, spices, seeds, fruit, or flowers. She did spend a couple of paragraphs on each of the focus botanicals explaining how to know when a fruit is ripe, where to find some of the more exotic ingredients, some cooking tips, and some history of the fruit or herb or a personal recollection about using it. I'm an American, so I will point out that her recipes use milliliters and grams and her oven temperatures are in Celsius. She also referred to some ingredients in a way that will be unfamiliar to Americans (like linseed instead of flaxseed or rapeseed oil instead of canola oil).

Her recipes note how many it serves or makes, and many recipes included a full-color picture of the finished dish. She included some recipes for salads and such or meat dishes (fish, duck, pork, chicken, beef, etc.), but there were also a lot of recipes for tarts, crumbles, cakes, cookies, and ice cream. She used a lot of dairy.

The "botanicals" she focused on were apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, quinces, figs, apricots, dates, oranges, lemons, bergamot, mango, pineapple, papaya, banana, grapefruit, persimmon, lychees, pomelo, gooseberry, strawberry, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, black currants, red currants, blackcurrant leaves, tea leaves, banana leaves, lemon and lime leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, and other herbs, saffron, rose petals, chamomile flowers, lavender flowers, vanilla beans, elder flowers, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, cardamon, and nutmeg.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson ISBN-13: 9781782749790 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Amber Books Released: April 14, 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
With a total of 150 expert survival tips, Survival Tips gives you the basic skills to keep going in any situation. Tips range from using an ice axe and sheltering from the wind, to finding fresh water and building a protective shelter. Survival Tips explains how to stay safe in every environment, from the sub-zero landscape of the Arctic to the scorching suns of the tropics. Topics covered include: edible plants and animals, finding water, celestial navigation, surviving at sea, constructing shelters, hunting and trapping techniques, making fire, and more. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations.


My Review:
Survival Tips provides a series of brief tips about how to stay safe in a variety of landscapes (desert, snow, jungle, etc.) and how to deal with different emergency situations. This book is not comprehensive, not really survival training, and wasn't necessarily about unexpected emergency situations. For example, it started off with advice about what to carry in your survival kit when going hiking. The water survival tips assumed that you had been on a yacht equipped with a survival raft, so you can grab canned goods, a can opener, and water before getting into the raft. The author did have an illustration showing how to lash a raft together from wood, but a YouTube video showing these techniques in action would be more helpful and comprehensive.

The tips were generally only a few sentences long. He'd tell you how to find water, what animals and plants are edible, and what animals and plants are dangerous. However, you already have to know how to identify these plants and animals for this information to be useful. He also gave commonsense advice and advice that you probably would be given by instructors if you were going hiking in a snowy, mountainous area or visiting a desert area. He also gave some information about first aid, but much of this ended with evacuating the person to a hospital as fast as possible. Even if you had this book on hand in a survival situation, I didn't feel like the information was complete enough to help you survive. Since I learned how to do first aid, use maps, make fires, etc., in Girl Scouts and from my parents, I didn't really find much of this information useful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Heart, Breath, Mind by Leah Lagos

Heart, Breath, Mind by Leah Lagos ISBN-13: 9781328604408 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Released: May 5th 2020

Source: ARC review copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Leah Lagos, PsyD, BCB is an internationally known expert in biofeedback and sport and performance psychology. In this book, she shares with readers for the first time the same program that she uses with top athletes, CEOs, business leaders—anyone who wants and needs to perform at their best. What makes her scientifically proven 10-week program unlike any other is that she recognizes the link between heart rhythms and stress to create specific, clinically tested exercises and breathing techniques that allow you to control your body’s physical response to stress. She pairs this training with cognitive-behavioral exercises to offer a two-tiered process for strengthening health and performance, enabling readers to respond more flexibly to stressful situations, let go of negative thoughts and emotions, and ultimately be more focused and confident under pressure.


My Review:
Heart, Breath, Mind talks about combining HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing along with visualization techniques to train your body to switch from a state of stress to relaxed much more quickly. I've previously heard some information on HRV and was told that a breath pattern of 5.5 seconds inhale and 5.5 seconds exhale creates resonance breathing, but she stated that "the standard rate that works for most individuals is to inhale for four seconds and exhale for six seconds with no pause in between.... The magic ratio here is 40:60 – you spend 40% of each breath inhaling and 60% exhaling." She never explained why this was a magic ratio; you just have to take it on faith. However, breathing in that ratio does not feel comfortable to me but the 5.5 seconds inhale and 5.5 seconds exhale does. This special breathing is the basis of her method, so I wish she spent more time explaining why this is the "magic" ratio.

Anyway, she started the book by describing the benefits of resonance breathing and how she discovered the benefit of combining it with visualization techniques. You do not need to have an HRV biofeedback device to do her technique, but she does talk about several devices if you want to get one. Each day for 10 weeks, she has you breathe for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening following a breath pacing app set to her resonance breathing ratio. The first week is learning to breathe at that ratio, and the second week is learning belly breathing. Weeks 3 through 10 each introduce a new visualization technique that you can use to switch between a stressed state back into a relaxed state. The goal is to find one or more techniques that you find easy to use that will help you deal with stressful situations.

The author was not always clear when describing a technique. For example, she said to identify how your heart feels. I thought she meant physically only to later realize she meant what emotion are you feeling. However, the visualization techniques seem reasonable and doable. She wasn't clear about if these visualization techniques would work with a different ratio of resonance breathing. I'd be more inclined to commit to her system if I found the four seconds in and six seconds out breathing to be comfortable and calming, but she describes many people that she's worked with where this breathing technique has been very successful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces by Amarilys Henderson

Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces by Amarilys Henderson ISBN-13: 9781631598654 Paperback: 144 pages Publisher: Quarry Books Released: February 18, 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
In Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces, artist and popular Skillshare instructor Amarilys Henderson shares her practical and creative techniques for drawing and painting faces with style and personality. Gather supplies, including watercolor, graphite pencils, ink, and markers. Use photos to simplify the face’s key elements, learn about facial proportions and factors and variables for placing facial features. Learn about the five basic facial shapes and how to modify the chin line, ears, and hairline, and how to draw and paint mouths, eyes, and noses and make alterations to show pose and personality. Navigate the process from start to finish, learn to adjust line quality to suggest different genders and ethnicities, and change up artistic styling to put a unique spin on your creations. Try out some project ideas: party invitations, repeat patterns, comic books, and more!


My Review:
Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces is an art instruction book about creating somewhat stylized faces with marker, pencil, and watercolor. For each part of the face, the author showed how to make a very simple version and then how to add detail with just another mark to create more and more detailed variations. She talked about the proportions of a face and how to create the basic facial shapes, ears, eyes, noses, mouths, and hair. She then showed how to put these elements together to create a unique face along with adding accessories. She talked some about how to create different skin tones, though she's not highly realistic with skin or hair color. She also suggested ways to use these expressive faces in urban sketching, personalized cards, etc. Overall, I'd recommend this book to teens and adults who want to learn how to draw and watercolor paint somewhat stylized but expressive faces.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt: Read an excerpt using Google Preview.

Healing through Nutrition by Eliza Savage

Healing through Nutrition by Eliza Savage ISBN-13: 9781641528139 Paperback: 212 pages Publisher: Rockridge Press Released: March 24th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Natural medicine isn’t just herbs and oils―what you eat every day has the power to support your health and well-being. Healing through Nutrition is your essential guide to 50 plant-based foods packed with vital nutrients like antioxidants and dietary fibers. With this nutrition reference at your fingertips, it’s easy to integrate more plants into your diet―and invite their healing properties into your life. With details for a wide variety of superfoods―vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, herbs and spices, even coffee and tea―you’ll find resources for many common health problems.

Get acquainted with each food’s restorative powers, the medical conditions it may benefit, and how you can use it in your everyday life. 94 nourishing recipes how you to integrate each nutrition source into your life with one or two accompanying recipes, like Apple Cinnamon Ginger Oats, Chickpea-Stuffed Acorn Squash, Grapefruit Avocado Salad, and more.


My Review:
Healing through Nutrition profiled 50 different plants that are known to have healing effects through their nutritional content. The author started by briefly talking about how plants have been used historically all over the world for their healing properties and about how whole food and organic are better choices. She then profiled 15 vegetables, 10 fruits, 10 whole grains, legumes, and nuts, 10 herbs and spices, and 5 coffee, tea, and tisanes. For each plant, she talked about how it had been used traditionally, what compounds are most notable in the plant (like beta-carotene or lutein), what those compounds do, what health conditions the plant is useful for, and what I presume is a suggested serving size. (Her word choice was occasionally confusing.)

She included 1 to 2 recipes for each plant (usually two recipes). She included how many people the recipe serves, prep time, cook time, about the recipe, ingredients and instructions, suggested variations, storage tips, and per serving information (calories, saturated fat, total fat, protein, total carbohydrates, fiber, sodium). There were only a few pictures included of the recipes. These simple recipes usually used only a few ingredients and they were common and easy to find. I'd recommend this book to those new to the idea of plant-based healing.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.