Voted best small town restaurant for five years in a row by Southern Living magazine, The Blue Willow Inn Cookbook offers delicious Southern recipes, vintage pictures from the early days of Social Circle, Georgia and fascinating anecdotes about the restaurant. Billie and Louis Van Dyke say that no one is allowed to leave hungry, and certainly no one should after feasting on a variety of Southern dishes and famous drinks such as lemonade and tea, also known as the "Champagne of the South". Housed in a gloriously restored southern mansion, The Blue Willow Inn is home to Southern hospitality and charm at its best. In The Blue Willow Inn Cookbook, Billie and Louis share delicious recipes such as: Fresh Greens and Peas Southern Fried Chicken Sweet Potato Pie Cast-Iron Corn Bread Fried Green Tomatoes Southern Style Sweet Tea The greatest restaurants in America are its wonderful independent regional restaurants, and there are no greater experts on America's regional restaurants than Michael and Jane Stern. The brief stories connect the recipes to The Blue Willow Inn in a charming way and the recipes will make your mouth water. The Blue Willow Inn Cookbook is the perfect guide for creating traditional, Southern style dishes for family and friends.

Kentucky native and national tastemaker Duncan Hines (1880--1959) published his first cookbook, Adventures in Good Cooking, in 1939 at the age of 59. This best-selling collection featured recipes from select restaurants across the country as well as crowd-pleasing family favorites, and it helped to raise the standard for home cooking in America. Following the success of this debut, Hines penned The Dessert Book in 1955. Filled with decadent treats, from homemade ice cream royale to fried apple pie to praline fudge frosting, this book inspired the recipes for the earliest boxed cake mixes and baked goods that carried the Duncan Hines name.

Featuring a new introduction by Hines biographer Louis Hatchett, this classic cookbook serves up a satisfying slice of twentieth-century Americana, direct from the kitchen of one of the nation's most trusted names in food. Now a new generation of cooks can enjoy and share these delectable dishes with family and friends.

"The Secret Life of Dogs" meets "A Good Walk Spoiled" in this behind-the-scenes look at the subculture of the professional dog-show circuit. "A year on the dog-show circuit with a breeder and show of bullmastiffs has all the melodrama of a soap opera."--"San Francisco Chronicle." of photos.

Five years ago Jane Stern was a walking encyclopedia of panic attacks, depression, and hypochondria. Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both died before she was thirty, Stern was terrified of illness and death, and despite the fact that her acclaimed career as a food and travel writer required her to spend a great deal of time on airplanes, she suffered from a persistent fear of flying and severe claustrophobia. But a strange thing happened one day on a plane that was grounded at the Minneapolis airport for six horrible, foodless, airless hours. A young man on a trip with his classmates suddenly became dizzy and pale because he hadn't eaten in many hours, and there was no food left on the plane. Without thinking about it, Jane gave him the candy bar that she had in her purse. A short time later the color had returned to his cheeks, the boy was laughing again with his friends, and Jane realized that this one small act of kindness--helping another person who was suffering--had provided her with comfort and a sense of well-being.
It was shortly thereafter that this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical technician, eventually coming to be known as Ambulance Girl. Stern tells her story with great humor and poignancy, creating a wonderful portrait of a middle-aged, Woody Allen-ish woman who was "deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people," but who went out into the world to save other people's lives as a way of saving her own. Her story begins with the boot camp of EMT training: 140 hours at the hands of a dour ex-marine who took delight in presenting a veritable parade of amputations, hideous deformities, and gross disasters. Jane--overweight and badly out of shape--had to surmount physical challenges like carrying a 250-pound man seated in a chair down a dark flight of stairs. After class she did rounds in the emergency room of a local hospital, where she attended to a schizophrenic kickboxer who had tried to kill his mother that morning and a stockbroker who was taken off the commuter train to Manhattan with delirium tremens so bad it killed him.
Each call Stern describes is a vignette of human nature, often with a life in the balance. From an AIDS hospice to town drunks, yuppie wife beaters to psychopaths, Jane comes to see the true nature and underlying mysteries of a town she had called home for twenty years. Throughout the book we follow her as she gets her sea legs and finally bonds with the burly, handsome firefighters who become her colleagues. At the end, she is named the first woman officer of the department--a triumph we joyously share with her.
Ambulance Girl is an inspiring story by a woman who found, somewhat late in life, that "in helping others I learned to help myself." It is a book to be treasured and shared.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Part memoir, part guidebook, part cookbook, and all parts hilarious, Two for the Road shares the lessons the Sterns have learned during thirty years of sampling regional fare on America's back roads. If you want a great restaurant, forget the Yellow Pages, ask the local cop--and avoid anything that calls itself "world famous." Sure bets are places with a giant plastic pig on the roof or pictures of Jesus on the walls. As the Sterns search for the Holy Grail of barbecue, they relate achingly funny adventures and misadventures, and what emerges is a big picture of America, revealing exotic eating customs that flourish right under our noses.