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Digital Delivery Delicacies: Food-A Cultural Culinary History, Online Courses from Universal Class, and more!

15 Jun

If you have been wanting to expand your culinary knowledge and skills, but don’t have time to attend a class in person then checkout these great online lectures and courses available from home for Hoboken Library Card holders.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History and The Everyday Gourmet

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For Hoboken Library and other BCCLS Library Patrons interested in learning about the history of food check out episodes of Food: A Cultural Culinary History, part of The Great Courses lecture series available from Hoopla.  Although best watched in order since each of the 36 lecture builds on one another, they are filmed as 30 minute segments by topics on specific regions/eras so if you are just interested in specific food cultures/time periods you can skip around.  The lecture starts at the Stone Age and then moves through different times in history including Ancient Egypt, Elizabethan England, Edo Era Japan and ending with a look into what the future of food might be.  I found the lectures very interesting in the way they looked at not only food trends, but the way history impacted the food we eat and the way food in turn influenced history.  You can pick up some great tidbits for cocktail party chatter.  The course is taught by Dr. Ken Albala, Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in California, where he teaches food history.  The series is also available on DVD from BCCLS libraries and you can check out several of Albala’s books in print on a variety of food history topics.

Hoopla has other lectures from The Great Courses series including several Everyday Gourmet courses on topics such as Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking, Essential Secrets of Spices in Cooking, and Baking Pastries and Desserts.  I have checked out the first of the Baking Pastries and Dessert lectures and plan to watch more in the future.  It has some useful tips for beginners like how to ensure all the ingredients are mixed.

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Hoopla also features a variety of cookbooks and ebooks on food history.  I enjoyed reading The Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin by Michael Krondl.  My parent’s house was behind Dunkin’ Donuts so the delicious smell of fresh made donuts makes me think of home; it was fun to learn about their history and other notable moments in donut history.  Also featured are a baker’s dozen of donut recipes including ones from around the world such as Venetian Carnival Fritters and Oliebollen Dutch Donuts.  My husband was inspired to make the Nutella filled Bombolonis-Yum!  Remember BCCLS patrons have 20 checkouts for Hoopla per month of books, movies, music and more!

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Get Cooking and Baking with Universal Class
For those looking for a more interactive learning experience check out some of the cooking classes available to Hoboken Patrons from Universal Class including online courses on:

If you don’t have a Hoboken Library Resident Card to access Universal Class from home, you can access the courses from within the library on the library’s computers or from your wi-fi enabled laptop.  The courses each feature an instructor who you can email about assignments with.  The courses are self-paced and you have a six month period to complete them.  This is a great way to expand your repertoire and learn some new skills.  I love baking cakes and cookies, but have always found pies intimidating so I’m hoping to take the pie baking course and be able to have homemade rather than store-bought pumpkin and apple pies for Thanksgiving.  Courses are available 24/7 so they are perfect for a busy working mom like me since I can work on them after my little guy goes to bed.  Besides the classes that will appeal to beginning cooks there are also ones on a variety of other topics such as Excel, Grammar, and Resume Writing.  The courses are easy to navigate.

And if you are looking for an in person class for foodies we have that too; on Monday June 13 back by popular demand I will be co-teaching a class on ice cream making using a machine as wells as an easy recipe using just plastic bags, ice, salt and a few simple ingredients.  This is a fun class for adults, older kids, and teens!

-Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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Great Reads from the Land Down Under: Kim Wilkins, Kerry Greenwood, and Graeme Base

6 Apr

One of my favorite trips I have ever taken was to Australia where I was able to see the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, and Uluru (Ayers Rock).  But for all the wonders down under, the best part of Australia was all the kind and friendly people I encountered.  I’ve just started reading the quirky period comedy The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish, about the misadventures of a young anthropologist by Australian author, Tim Flannery.  My enjoyment of the work got me thinking about Australia and some of my other favorite Australian authors and their works.  I hope you’ll check out some of their books and if you are thinking of taking your own trip there, you can borrow Frommer’s Easyguide to Australia from HPL and start planning your own adventure.

Kim Wilkins

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I first fell in love with Kim Wilkins’s Europa Suite, a set of three books which although each with unique plots and characters are connected by their basis in the folklore of different parts of Northern Europe.  You can borrow from BCCLS libraries the third work of this “trilogy,” The Veil of Gold where creatures from Russian myth and legend transform the lives of three modern individuals.  The Europa Suite would be best categorized as romantic urban fantasy and would appeal to fans of mythpunk like Catherynne M. Valente.

Wilkins’s earlier work such as her first novel The Infernal tend more towards supernatural thriller and horror in the vein of Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite.  Unfortunately many of her early works have not yet been published in the US.  If you like your work more grounded in reality you may want to check out some of her most recent fiction works which are written under the pen name Kimberly Freeman including Evergreen Falls which was inspired by her own grandmother’s life.  What runs through all of her writing is despite often being set in our modern world there is a fascination and some type of connection with different time periods such as the 1920s in Evergreen Falls.  Wilkins also has written a children’s series, The Sunken Kingdom (available from BCCLS libraries).

Kerry Greenwood

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Kerry Greenwood is probably my favorite mystery writer.  Rosary wrote about her Phryne Fisher series in an early blog post and I also mentioned the excellent TV adaptation of that series.  Both the Phryne Fisher book series and the first three seasons of the television series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries are available from the Hoboken Public Library.  But besides Phryne you should also check out Greenwood’s terrific six book Corinna Chapman Mysteries which star a zaftig baker who lives and works in a quirky apartment building with her charming feline companion.  Unlike the Phryne Fisher series, the Corinna Chapman series is set in modern times, but like Phryne there are a lot of delightful characters in Corinna’s life.  You will want to eat this series up! Greenwood’s Delphic Woman trilogy was also recently published in the United States for the first time (they are actually some of her older works written back in the 90s) which are based on the stories of women from Ancient Myths including Cassandra, Medea, and Electra.

Graeme Base

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Graeme Base is one of my favorite picture book authors and illustrators.  My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch will introduce you and the little explorer in your life to the native wildlife of his adopted homeland (he moved from England to Australia as a child).  My top pick of his would be The Eleventh Hour, a mystery book for the younger set about an elephant’s birthday feast that disappears before the assorted animal guests can enjoy it.  The gorgeous bright detailed illustrations, clever rhymes, and fun puzzle of who-dun-it will have your little ones enthralled.  If your kids have fun looking for the hidden images in the book they can also check out other of Base’s works such as The Legend of a Golden Snail, The Last King of Angkor Wat, and Enigma: A Magical Mystery.  Tykes learning their ABC’s will find Animalia to be one of the most beautiful alphabet books to enjoy and they’ll giggle at the tongue twisting alliteration.  BCCLS libraries also have the TV adaptation of Animalia available.  For older children there is Base’s first novel, TruckDogs, about truck/dog hybrids living in an outback like setting.

-Written by Aimee Harris, Head of Reference

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