Perfect Gifts for the Holidays

This is the perfect gift for wine lovers and foodies.
The most comprehensive guide to matching food and drink ever compiled, by the James Beard Award-winning author team of Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, with practical advice from more than seventy of America's leading pairing experts

In a great meal, what you drink is just as important as what you eat. This ground-breaking food and beverage pairing reference allows food lovers to learn to think like a sommelier, and to transform every meal - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - from ordinary to extraordinary.

Exceptional in its depth and scope - with over fifteen hundred entries - What to Drink with What You Eat is based on the collective wisdom of experts at dozens of America's best restaurants, including Alinea, Babbo, Bern's, Blue Hill, Chanterelle, Daniel, Emeril's, French Laundry, Frontera Grill, Inn at Little Washington, Jean Georges, Masa's, The Modern, Per Se, Rubicon, Tru, and Valentino.

You'll find authoritative recommendations for stocking your cellar and kitchen with must-have beverages, from wines to waters. You'll also learn what to drink with everything from French toast to Chinese food, and what to eat with everything from Pinot Noir to green tea, to create mouthwatering matches. Follow the authors' three simple "Rules to Remember" when making a match - or just dive into the wide-ranging listings in chapters 5 and 6.

This "incisive, hip writing team" (Publishers Weekly) distills history, geography, science, expert technique, and original insight to create a remarkably user-friendly and engaging reference. Lavishly illustrated with gorgeous four-color photographs, What to Drink with What You Eat is an instant classic essential to every connoisseur's bookshelf.

Books Make Great Gifts!

Here are three books that are sure to please some of the folks on your holiday list this year.





Liz Smith's Dishing is the perfect choice for food and gossip lovers.


This juicy extravaganza of a book is at once a star-studded memoir, a mouthwatering reminiscence about great food and great meals, and a very special kind of cookbook by Liz Smith, bestselling author and surely America's most beloved gossip columnist (indeed, perhaps the only gossip columnist ever to be universally beloved). Here, great dish and great dishes are artfully blended with anecdotes and spiced with Liz's inimitable sense of humor, instinct for a great story, and joie de vivre to produce a life-loving, sometimes bawdy, and always utterly captivating read.

Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited




Arthur Schwartz knows how Jewish food warms the heart and delights the soul, whether it's talking about it, shopping for it, cooking it, or, above all, eating it. Jewish Home Cooking presents authentic yet contemporary versions of traditional Ashkenazi foods-rugulach, matzoh brei, challah, brisket, and even challenging classics like kreplach (dumplings) and gefilte fish-that are approachable to make and revelatory to eat. Chapters on appetizers, soups, dairy (meatless) and meat entrees, Passover meals, breads, and desserts are filled with lore about individual dishes and the people who nurtured them in America. Light-filled food and location photographs of delis, butcher shops, and specialty grocery stores paint a vibrant picture of America's touchstone Jewish food culture.




For all those special kids on your list, this is the book we all know and love by Marlo Thomas and her friends—brought to new life with brand new illustrations to captivate and inspire a new generation of readers on a journey of the heart. Whether you are opening Free to Be . . . You and Me for the first time or the one hundredth time you will be engaged and transformed by this newly beautifully illustrated compilation of inspirational stories, songs, and poems. The sentiments of thirty-five years ago are as relevant today as when this book was published. Celebrating individuality and challenging stereotypes empowers both children and adults with the freedom to be who they want to be and to have compassion and empathy for others who may be different. Working closely with Marlo and co-creator Carole Hart, Peter H. Reynolds, the New York Times Best Selling Children’s Book Author/Illustrator, conjured his whimsical drawings throughout the book bringing a new sense of unity and warmth to the pages. You will find yourself marveling at the illustrations, nodding in agreement with the stories and poems, and singing the words to all the classic songs! It is wonderful that the thoughts, ideas, and emotions the creators envisioned so many years ago can still have a magical effect on children today.

Books to Consider: Don't Mind If I Do and Embracing Your Big Fat Ass

Don't Mind If I Do

George Hamilton

Publishers Synoposis

Don't let that tanned, handsome, charming surface fool you. Beneath the bronzed façade is a mischievous mind with a wicked wit. George Hamilton doesn't miss a thing. With a front row seat for classic Hollywood's biggest secrets and scandals, George has the intelligence, heart, and unflappable spirit to tell his story, and the story of Tinseltown's heyday, with great good humor and delicious candor -- as only he can. From Where the Boys Are to Dancing with the Stars; from Mary Pickford to Elizabeth Taylor; from smalltown Arkansas to the capitals of Europe -- it's all here, and George has lived to tell and to laugh about it.

As the child of a Dartmouth-educated bandleader father and a glamorous Southern debutante mother whose marriage crumbled early on, George had a childhood filled with misadventures and challenges that his mother always seemed able to turn from tragedy to comedy. Her idea of changing the family's fortunes involved a trip cross-country with three sons and a poodle in a Lincoln Continental, making stops along the way to search for husband/father number three. And she was quick to recognize that George's potential success lay in Hollywood.
George starved nobly for his art in the late 1950s, but was soon starring in major motion pictures directed by the likes of Vincente Minnelli and Louis Malle. He has forgotten more about Hollywood than most movie experts will ever know and shares intimate and hugely entertaining stories of his friendships with Cary Grant; Brigitte Bardot; Robert Mitchum; Merle Oberon; Mae West; SammyDavis, Jr.; and Judy Garland -- not to mention Lyndon B. Johnson and Elvis's Colonel Tom Parker as well as the King himself -- among others. The world is Hamilton's oyster, and this ultimate insider is ready to share it with us. So fasten your seat belt. We'll tell you when it's safe to move about the cabin again.

Note from The Three Tomatoes:

We’ve never been big fans of George Hamilton, but as we watched him promote his memoir, we were intrigued to read it. And we must say, it was a delightful fun read, and we are definitely fans now! His quirky family and descriptions of jet set sixties/seventies lifestyle are definitely worth the read.

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Embracing Your Big Fat Ass - An Owners Manual

Laura Banks and Janette Barber, bestselling authors of Breaking the Rules

Life is short -- too short to spend most of it worrying about what you look like from behind. That fact hasn't stopped women everywhere from obsessing over their weight -- specifically, that portion of it resting on their asses. In this gleefully frank new book, Janette Barber and Laura Banks lampoon society's obsession with the gluteus maximus while offering solidarity, support, and inspiring advice to fellow B-FABs (Big Fat Ass Babes). Embracing Your Big Fat Ass encourages readers to accept and love every inch of themselves -- including the lumpier parts.