Immoveable Feast or Superfoods for Babies and Children

Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

Author: John Baxter

A witty cultural and culinary education, Immoveable Feast is the charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread—and didn't speak a word of French—unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family.

Ernest Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast"—a city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles–based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved to Paris to marry her. As a test of his love, his skeptical in-laws charged him with cooking the next Christmas banquet—for eighteen people in their ancestral country home. Baxter's memoir of his yearlong quest takes readers along his misadventures and delicious triumphs as he visits the farthest corners of France in search of the country's best recipes and ingredients. Irresistible and fascinating, Immoveable Feast is a warmhearted tale of good food, romance, family, and the Christmas spirit, Parisian style.

Publishers Weekly

In this witty essay collection, Baxter (We'll Always Have Paris) chronicles his years of learning to prepare elaborate Christmas dinners for his French in-laws. After leaving his Los Angeles home to follow a woman (who would later become his wife) to Paris, Baxter was charged with the serious task of cooking the holiday meal for his relatives. Calling to mind other expatriate writers such as Diane Johnson and David Sedaris, Baxter gives readers insights into both French culture and his own expanding culinary range. In "Ninety Degrees of Christmas," he muses on Christmases in his native Australia versus France, and details his mother's preparation of her holiday pudding. Never condescending or obsequious toward his adopted home, Baxter shares insights with the wry perspective of an outsider permitted into a secret world and eager to share the rules with other visitors. Achieving a particularly sensitive balance of allowing readers glimpses into the intimacies of family life while retaining a degree of journalistic distance, Baxter is autobiographical but never intrusive. (Oct.)

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Kirkus Reviews

Australian by birth, Parisian by marriage, film critic and biographer Baxter (We'll Always Have Paris, 2005, etc.) makes an amiable, jocular companion in this account of preparing a large Christmas dinner for a house full of French in-laws. The final two-thirds of his frisky text deals with the peripatetic preparation of a specific meal, though in these same chapters, as earlier, the author digresses often and smoothly into reflections on Christmases past, in Australia and elsewhere. Baxter indulges in some occasional, informal cultural anthropology, for example, comparing the Gallic notion of sin with that of the American. "Providing it is conceived with imagination and carried off with flair," he writes, the French regard sin as "evidence of endurance, of survival, of life." He comments on the Gallic passion for the Christmas holiday (everything is closed; everyone is with family) and observes that, contrary to what readers of Julia Child may think, French cooking is essentially simple. Baxter rehearses his own evolution as a cook-in early manhood, he'd cooked for his girlfriends for reasons of economy but discovered its powerful aphrodisiac qualities-and confesses that he'd never much cared for Christmas as a lad (he preferred reading). He chronicles his courtship of his second wife and offers anecdotes about his writing career. But the meat in this pie is Baxter's account of the Christmas when he cooked a piglet with its skin still in place, accompanied by oysters and fresh fruit. He prepared it Cajun-style, which made finding the right wine a challenge. His in-laws, not spice-lovers, had to be told about the French connection between Cajuns and Acadians before they licked theirplatters clean. Scrooges may complain about the ebullient excess celebrated in these rollicking pages, but most readers will greedily consume the succulent narrative.

Book review: Managing Human Resources or Making the Team

Superfoods for Babies and Children

Author: Annabel Karmel

All parents want the best for their children, to give them the perfect start in life, and that includes the food they eat. However, choosing the freshest foods and preparing them in the most beneficial and appealing ways is not always an easy task. In SuperFoods, bestselling author Annabel Karmel shows you how to combine creativity with delicious ingredients in order to provide your child with a healthy foundation. You'll find recipes that not only taste great but also maximize the nutritional power of certain foods to boost your child's health and well-being. And Annabel, a mother of three who has written fourteen bestselling books on healthy food for children, knows better than anyone not only what children should eat but what children will eat. From advice on steaming carrots to detailed weekly menus for every stage of development, Annabel's unwavering expertise will teach parents how to provide the nutrition their children need.

SuperFoods is both a cookbook and a reference manual, helping parents recognize the varied nutritional value in even the simplest foods. Eating by color -- Annabel's advice for choosing produce -- encourages parents to use foods in tempting combinations. With a focus on the basic components of your child's diet -- carbohydrates, proteins, and fats -- Annabel provides easy instructions for crafting balanced meals.

SuperFoods will guide you through your child's first five years -- from first foods for your baby to tasty meals for fussy toddlers, from scrumptious lunch-box ideas for school-children to irresistible family suppers. Food is both nourishment and nutrition, and Annabel Karmel's SuperFoods puts funback in the equation.

In addition to a variety of delicious recipes and invaluable advice, SuperFoods also includes:

• More than 130 recipes suitable for children of all ages -- from the best first foods to tasty family meals.
• Menu charts to help you plan ahead -- most recipes are suitable for freezing.
• Information on how to avoid food allergies and common childhood complaints such as colic, constipation, and eczema. Suggestions for healthy convenience foods to keep in the pantry.
• Tasty recipes that harness the power of SuperFoods to promote growth and energy and boost immunity and brain power.

And much, much more!

Publishers Weekly

British bestseller Karmel (The Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner) has made a name for herself cooking meals for kids that any devoted parent could admire, packing each breakfast, lunch and dinner with healthy, nicely presented, delicious foods. Now she and nutritionist Sacher make baby and child fare even healthier by adding more of the brightly colored, antioxidant-rich, disease-fighting fruits and vegetables they call superfoods to every recipe. Broccoli, tomatoes, blueberries and carrots (among many others) find their way into tempting purees for little ones and into dishes like Tiny Pasta with Gruy re, Spinach and Sweetcorn for older children (the book is divided into sections by age group). Karmel grates vegetables into spaghetti sauce for Baby's Bolognese and apples into Finger-Picking Chicken Balls; she whirls several fruits at a time into smoothies and ice pops; and provides good ideas for age-appropriate snacks. She clearly explains nutritional information in the introduction and in sidebars on every page, and includes menu planners for each stage. Karmel's tone throughout is positive and, in urging kids to try new tastes, adventurous. And though some of the recipes require more than a dozen ingredients, most are worth it. (June 6) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.