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Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook

Far fewer than the 80 percent of Americans who own slow cookers use them on a regular basis. This book is an attempt to change that. Instead of the usual recipes for slow-cooked roasts and throw-together soups, it is filled with modern and ethnic-inspired recipes – 350 in all – for such dishes as Mexican black beans with pork, Caribbean jerked chicken, polenta, and veal stew with sun-dried tomatoes and rosemary.

In addition, the authors provide plenty of tips and recipes for basics they say come out better in a slow cooker, such as chicken stock and baked whole winter squash.

The recipes occasionally run to 11/2 pages, but the print is large enough to read in a glance while measuring and stirring.

Author Beth Hensperger has written more than a dozen cookbooks and is a food columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, where Julie Kaufmann is food editor.

A Thousand Splendid Suns/
Kite Runner

Double book exploration

Book Exploration
By Chuck Bowen

In his first novel The Kite Runner, and now A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini writes about the Afghans caught in the middle of a seemingly endless string of wars and battles for power. Both novels paint a grim and moving picture of life in a war-torn country, and of lives lived in the face of hunger, death and a bleak future. Hosseini makes you realize that, even while bombs rain down and people are dying of hunger, people still fall in love, seek friends and, mostly, try to remain human.