Judith Jones

The Book of Bread demonstrates that breadmaking is within your ken and your competence whatever the dimensions of your kitchen, the demands of your work schedule, the preferences of your palate, or your experience-or lack of it- as a baker.

Presents more than forty recipes for baking all kinds and shapes of bread from French bread to peanut butter muffins to pizza.

Reveals how our love affair with chocolate begain. In Mesoamerica, Southern Mexico and Central America, people living in the tropical rain forests discovered the edible properties of Theobroma Cacao, referred to as the "food of the gods." Visit boutique chocolate houses and learn the secret behind great chocolate making: roasting, cracking, winnowing, grinding, aging, tempering and packaging. Discover the stories behind the creation of famous chocolate brands. At the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, horticulturalist Lara Jewitt discusses the components of the cacao tree. In St. Lucia, Zoe Palmer visits the Fond Doux Cocoa Plantation to learn how to produce cocoa beans for export. Historian Sara Jayne-Stans explains how, in the sixteenth century, the Spanish introduced the bitter chocolate drink of the Aztec nobility to Europe. Historian and broadcaster Dr. Matthew green conducts seventeenth and eighteenth-century Chocolate House tours in the heart of St. James Square, London.

"Doesn't man's best friend deserve a little more than cardboard-dry kibble day in and day out? Judith Jones thinks so, and in this ... new cookbook she offers up more than fifty home-cooked recipes, both time efficient and finance friendly--among them salmon cakes, wild mushroom risotto, and shepherd's pie--that she's loved and shared with her own canines"--