To keep your bookshelf as sustainable and green as your kitchen, pick up these great guides and cookbooks for a more healthful and green lifestyle. Impress others with your new found wealth of knowledge and masterful cooking skills. 1. From Seed to Skillet: A Guide to Growing, Tending, Harvesting, and Cooking Up Fresh, Healthy Food to Share with People You Love by Jimmy Williams and Susan Heeger - A helpful guide for those who want to eat food so local, it comes from their own backyard. Author Jimmy Williams learned about cultivating a garden rich with produce from the Gullah community in his native South Carolina.
2. L.A.'s Original Farmers Market Cookbook: Meet Me at 3rd and Fairfax by JoAnn Cianciulli - A gorgeously photographed cookbook that combines recipes with real stories from many of the vendors at the amazing L.A. Farmer's Market, as well a history of the market itself, which has been active since 1934.
3. My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness by Gwenyth Paltrow - Don't be distracted by the famous actress' byline and focus instead on the plentiful health-conscious advice she doles out in this cookbook. Filled with great recipes and photographs, this book offers a guide to eating sustainably and organic for busy mothers-and all food-lovers, really-with easy and delicious recipes. In sweet recipes, she advocates many baking alternatives to sugar, like brown rice syrup and agave.
4. The Beekeeper's Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes & Other Home Uses by Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch - A beautiful, yet totally functional almanac to guide the amateur beekeeper within. Includes a history of beekeeping, an all-inclusive beekeeping how-to guide, almost 100 honey-centric recipes and countless alternative uses for honey and beeswax, such as wood polish and beauty products, complete with detailed instructions on how to make them.
5. Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Dr. Oran Hesterman - A great guidebook for anyone who is interested in food justice and wants to effect change in how our food system operates, whether on a personal level or on a broader, nationalized scale. Learn more about this inspirational book here.
What are your favorite books about eating and cooking well?