#they have both killed before but only andrew could do a food complaint

[monochromemoomin]

jamie doesn’t like mushrooms :(

[bunchofbooks]

It’s Time for Kyrsten’s Opinion: Flowers in the Attic Review Edition

Flowers in the Attic is the first book in the Dollanganger series but VC Andrews. It follows the Dollanganger family; the four children, Chris, Cathy, Carrie, Cory and their mother, Corrine. They were a perfect family, until their father is suddenly killed in a car accident on the way home from work one evening. The four children must stay hidden in the attic of their estranged grandparent’s estate for the sake of inheritance. Their mother assures them this is only temporary - one night at most; but the days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. And the months turned into years with no glimmer of escape. 

While this book was a really enjoyable read it was also a really heavy read. Under the cut I have posted a spoiler free review of the book, with my thoughts and opinions including content warnings.

Before I even start getting into the review I wanted to jump right into the content warning. A quick sidebar, I first heard about VC Andrews through the podcast, My Favorite Murder. The women who host it were talking about reading this book in middle school and high school, I thought that it can’t be too bad if they read it when they were that young. The woman who was ringing me up at the store when I bought it also said she read it when she was in middle school and said it was intense, but that she was a baby so it probably wasn’t that bad. I just want to know WHERE WERE THEIR PARENTS?!?! This book needs a lot of content warnings and I’m hoping that I cover all of them here even if I don’t get into all of them in the review. Content warning for: death of a parent, abuse / neglect, self - mutilation, incest (holy incest Batman), suicidal thoughts, victim blaming, and death of a child. 

The estranged grandmother is a vile woman who is abusive and neglectful of her grandchildren. She dangles the threat over the children and Corrine that all she has to do is tell one of their maids that Corrine has 4 children from her marriage and they can kiss that inheritance goodbye. The neglect seems obvious, these kids are locked in an attic 24/7, in the dead of summer and on the coldest nights during the winter, but she also at points is angry with the children and refuses to bring them food because they broke one of her many rules. One part in particular that sticks out to me is when she tells Cathy she can either cut all of her hair off or they can go one week without food. When Cathy does not agree and the kids are able to ration what little food they have left for the entire week, she drugs Cathy and dumps tar in her hair so she must shave it off; and even after she cuts off her hair, the grandmother still does not bring the children food.The children become so hungry that Chris cuts his arm and forces his younger sisters and brother to drink his blood (insert my screaming here). The grandmother whips her adult daughter and then makes her show the marks left to her young children so they see what she is capable of. The grandmother attacks Chris and Cathy, whipping them both and then beating Cathy until she is unconscious with a hair brush. 

 However, the grandmother is not the only culprit here. Corrine, while she starts out as being loyal to her children, starts coming up to the attic less and less once she starts getting some money from her father, leaving them to fend for themselves. At one point she leaves for days, not telling her children where she is going or when she will be back. When she does come back she does not understand why her children are not excited she had been on a trip nor do they want to hear about it or see what she has brought back for them. Corrine gaslights her children, saying that they chose to come with her. They chose to make these sacrifices of staying in an attic all this time. They chose this life for themselves. As if they had a choice in the matter at all. Corrine then leaves them in the attic. . . again. 

The children are told by Corrine that they must only stay in the attic for one night, until she can get back into the good graces of her estranged father so they can get the inheritance. The children ask what she did to make her family disowned her out the way they did and for a little bit, all Corrine will tell her kids is that she did something that her family did not approve of. Instantly I’m thinking, oh she stole money, she ran off and got married, she got pregnant before she was married. It takes place in the 1950’s so while that isn’t the end of the world today, I can see how an affluent family would want to keep that out of the public to save face. NOPE I WAS VERY WRONG! I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE WRONG ABOUT SOMETHING IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! The mother was disowned by her family because she was in a relationship with her father’s step brother - or her half uncle - but don’t worry no one else thinks it’s wrong (except for the grandmother and grandfather who are painted to be the villains in all of this)  because he was so much younger than Corrine’s father and they were only half siblings. Have no fear though, because this is not the only instance of incest that we get to read about in Flowers in the Attic! Cathy - who narrates the story - and her older brother, Chris, begin a relationship. Which somehow goes from creepy to creepier. Cathy catches Chris spying on her when she is naked. Even more concerning was during the same scene, Cathy tells Chris to go away and he ignores her to keep staring at his sister. When Chris and Cathy are kissing in bed, Cathy tells Chris to stop and he says that what they are doing is not wrong, because they are only kissing and not having sex. . . However Chris your thinking is flawed because they do have sex, which will be brought up at my next therapy appointment and every therapy appointment from now until my dying day. While it is not a long scene, it is certainly graphic and more brother / sister sex scenes than I ever wanted to read. After they have sex, Chris is saying how he feels awful for what they did and Cathy says that she is to blame because she wears short clothes that don’t fit. If this were a youtube video this is the point I would insert the clip of someone screaming bitch what the fuck. 

Flowers in the Attic,  while definitely one of the most intense books I have ever read was enjoyable. There were aspects of it that I thought were amazing. VC Andrews was able to make it feel like I was in Foxworth Hall with the Dollanganger children in the attic and could make me feel claustrophobic even if I was reading outside or on a train. You really felt like time was ticking by and you were also waiting for the grandmother to catch you doing something wrong (not quite having sex with your brother, maybe something a little less. . . weird, like looking at your hair in the mirror, which is in fact a rule that the grandmother has because we don’t promote vanity. No sir, not at Foxworth Hall). VC Andrews would drop it on you like a bomb that all of this time had passed, the seasons bled into one another flawlessly. She would have one of the children say something, for instance, “sometimes eight months can feel like eight years”, and it hits you like a ton of bricks that it has been eight months since they first entered that attic, while also dropping that they should have been there only for one night. 

Another thing that I loved was how much VC Andrews made me hate Corrine. Corrine Dollanganger is truly one of the most awful fictional parents I have read, but she isn’t instantly an awful person. At the beginning she is a wonderful mother who I genuinely believe would have done anything for her children. However, slowly VC Andrews would peel back these layers and show how having this money corrupted Corrine. Some of her finer moments include asking her 14 and 12 year old to provide a quality kindergarten education to her five year old twins so when they went back to school they wouldn’t be too far behind. Ma’am your children are literally  living in an attic they’re going to have much bigger issues other than being behind in school. When the youngest son, Cory accidentally locks himself in a trunk, she is nowhere to be seen nor does she want to hear it, but she acts like mother of the year because she brings toys to the kids. However, the most infuriating thing about Corrine is how she causes so many fights among the children. Cathy tries to point out how messed up their situation is, but Chris does not want to hear about it and jumps to defend the mother who couldn't care less about him. Cathy at the age of twelve was left taking care of herself, including going through puberty, and her five year old brother and sister and Corrine would get all of the praise from the children when she came in to do the bare minimum! I would get so angry with this fictional woman! 

The last fifty pages were absolutely wild. There were so many surprises twists that I did not see coming! Sometimes when books have all of these twists at the end I’m like, yeah okay let’s speed this along, but with Flowers in the Attic I could not get enough. I was caught off guard but it didn’t feel like it was phony in any way. I was sitting in the living room reading and I gasped and was freaking out about the ending. 

My biggest complaint about the book would be the dialogue, specifically Chris. It was completely unrealistic for anyone to speak like that, even more so a seventeen year old boy. The children would talk in these elaborate metaphors and seem so worldly when Cathy says before that they lived a pretty sheltered life prior to the attic. Chris would say things to the twins like we shouldn’t quibble, as if they would know what that means?! Just say fight Christopher! At another part he is in a fight with his mother who had left them in an attic and says, “when you look and register do you see how healthy they have grown”. This is a direct quote that comes out of a child’s mouth. I understand that he was smart and read all of these books about medicine, but his dialogue specifically is what stuck out to me as unrealistic. Had VC Andrews ever met a 17 year old boy? Overall he just seemed like an unrealistic character. He kind of felt like he was there to be this convenient character that could fix almost every problem they came across. Cory and Carrie wanted a playground? Oh wow Chris comes in and saves the day because he knows exactly how to build one. . . in an attic. . . where they are living. Cathy is sick? Oh well Chris just read this book about childhood illnesses, they just have to make sure he gets plenty of fluids. Cory wants to keep this mouse that he found with its leg caught in a trap? That’s awesome because Chris can conveniently make a mouse sized splint for a little mouse leg. 

Overall, I really did enjoy my time reading this book. I have some theories about the rest of the series and am interested to see how the rest plays out. 

Would I recommend this book? Yes, but I would be sure to let someone know the content warnings. I would not recommend this book to someone in middle school or early high school. It was a lot. 

Will I keep reading the series? Definitely! 

[artificialqueens]

bloody love (shinkx) - lem0n_b0y

an- hey kids, it’s me, ya boy. guess who’s writing a full length fic? this guy! i hope you guys like shinkx and the super natural ;)

Summary- After a young news reporter is abruptedly turned into a vampire, she kind of goes nuts and has no clue how to control herself. Come to find out that a witch could really help her out.

“-A body of an unidentified adolescent male was found in North park just moments ago. Witness reports say that it seemingly just appeared, as it wasn’t found til 4 hours after the opening of the park. The park is closed off for investigation. As for the neighboring school, it is undecided whether or not they will be for an early release.” The reporter holds her microphone in her hands, her fingers tap at the handle in nervousness. Her other hand fiddling with the cord that feeds out from the mic. She was weary. Unsettled. The glaze over her eyes showed how much emotion she was holding back. But that’s all Jinkx could feel for.

Jinkx sighs and leans her head back onto a couch cushion as she turns the TV off. Morning news was never this nerve-racking. The missing persons cases had start rising as spring break begun. Jinkx had questioned why, maybe it was some predator waiting for incoming college kids to flood the town she thought. Maybe it was an out of towner fulfilling their desires to kill. Whether it was a local or not, Jinkx didn’t enjoy all the recent press.

Within the past week, two bodies have been found. Both had been identified as a highschool students. Both of the boys were football players from what the articles said. Not to mention the we’re good students. They had gone missing from a party and found in the woods behind the school, drained of most of their blood. The only harm on either of them was a gash on the arm, not big enough for them to bleed out. The recent case from just that day was similar. Drained of blood, gash in the arm, a highschool student. It was crazy to think that the coastal town would all of a sudden be brought to an almost panic like state. Children came to class less and less do to their parents worry, highschools were protected with twice as many cops, and the college instated a curfew.

Jinkx was in no worry for herself, personally. As soon as the first murder was confirmed, she had taken it upon herself to cast a spell of protection. She knew that you could never be too safe. Her worry is towards the town, all the people inhabit it. They’re like lost field mice after the crop dies in the winter. They had protection, so they thought. With that protection clearly not being strong enough to prevent deaths of the innocent. The town was scared.

Running a hand through her amber curls, Jinkx leans up from her couch to take a deep breath. Her temples just pound at the thought of the whole towns slow demise. That’s the last thing she wanted from this. She takes a stand, stretching out her body like a cat. Popping her neck with a quick swirl of the head, she exhales slowly. Her body is reluctant to wake it’s self up for the day at the office.

She wasn’t ready for all of the parent complaints today. Jinkx already knew that the phones would be ringing off the hook with parents asking what they should do to protect their children during the rain of recent killings. It was nothing they had dealt with before. They’ve had kids in the highschool system pass, and that was handled with an assembly. As for two kids getting drained of blood and left in broad daylight? Unheard of. A plan of emergency was never needed for an scenario like this.

Alas, Jinkx shook the accumulating pile of worries from her head. The foggy headspace wasn’t about to ruin her day. Today was going to good! The sun was shining through the blinds, the autumn air was kicking into full gear and the trees that sat outside Jinkxs porch step were turning as orange as her hair. Today was predicted to be good.

Stumbling out of the house, she carefully steps down the stairs of her porch in her black heels. The freshly dead leaves crunch beneath her. She went through her day plan in her head; coffee, meeting, parent meetings, interviews with the news, and sorting paperwork. Same old same old. The only thing stumping her was what to tell the news. She was only in charge of dealing with the interview since her boss lady would is out of town for an meeting involving the possible instating of a new state wide food standard. Roxxxy had always been very adamant about the health and well-being of students in the school district.

Jinkx had always admired Roxxxys work ethics. She could be irrational at times, lashing out Jinkx for the littlest mistakes but nonetheless, she was a good boss. She had some faith in Jinkx to ace the interview, but it was clear when she walked into the workplace that the faith was a measly grain of salt.

Sat on her desk was a note. It was handwritten by the Ms. Andrews herself.

“Good morning Ms. Monsoon! If you didn’t already know or had forgotten, you have a very important interview today regarding the recent deaths. To take some weight off your shoulders, smaller interviews will be held with some others in the office. To get your head straight, ask around and see what they will say to insure our story is all the same. Will be back by Wednesday, and if anymore kids are killed, handle it calmly.”

At the end of the page was one of her famous stamps, in beautiful cursive letters it wrote ‘Roxxxy Andrews’. Jinkx takes a seat in her office chair and rest her head back with stress running through her veins. It made a part of her sad knowing that she can’t be fully trusted with the interview, resulting in half the office to also speak on the matter. It was as if she had been defeated somehow. Lifting her head back up to see her desk, a coffee had appeared.

It was a classic Starbucks cup with her name written on it with a heart. Taking it into her hands and looking closer at the cup, her eyes dart around. In the desk about a hundred feet from hers was Alaskas. Jinkx simply put the pieces together when she sees her favorite blonde smile wider than normal at her.

Alaska had always been one of Roxxxys favorites. They had gone to college together and even begun to accelerated together. Alaska had wanted to be a teacher but after dealing with the weight of being a teacher for a measly three years, she knew that it probably wasn’t her true calling. With Roxxxy being the last superintendents assistant, it was when she ran for the position that Alaska knew she wanted to work closer to her. Their friendship was childish at times, cracking jokes and letting there goofy friendship peak through at work but once again, Roxxxy knew how to take care of business.

Jinkx sips her coffee slowly, turning to her computer. The warm buzz of the coffee coating her throat, Jinkx smiles. Maybe her hopes of having a good day will actually come true.

[rosyredlipstick]

violent delights (1/1)

Become what you have always wanted to be. Here, fantasies come true. Here, you can chase the life you have always wanted. Thanks to our refined hosts, any and every one of your desires can be filled. Here, you can leave your world behind. The hosts cannot harm you. The hosts cannot stop you. Here, you will face no consequences. Here, you can live without limits. Welcome to Westworld. - Every morning, Neil Josten woke with the sun. He would part his hair to the side, dress in a blue that brought out his eyes, and head towards town for his afternoon groceries. The rest was up to fate. Or, as the townspeople called them, the newcomers. 

Neil Josten woke in the morning with the sun, parted his hair to the side, and dressed in a blue that brought out his eyes. He would gather his few things, untie his horse at the stable, and ride into town to collect food for that night’s dinner.

Today, he thought, would be a well-spent day.

The townsfolk, as always, liked to stare.

Not all of them, not those who knew Neil as himself, but the bundled up bursts of out-of-towners, in their new, clean gowns and suits and freshly washed hair and skin right off the train. They were always there, smiling too widely and asking too many questions, and had been around as long as Neil could remember. They were from out of town, and they had been here as long as he could remember.

Danielle, the madame from the bar, waved her fan at him as he passed, a small smirk in place as she perched in the sheriff's lap. Allison had been keeping tabs on Nicky’s latest gamble on a romance happening between the two, and it looked like she’d been right. Matthew had always had a soft spot for her anyways, despite what Nicky had been pushing.

Neil nodded back at them but didn’t pause even as Matthew lifted up his whiskey glass in clear offer. Perhaps he would join them another time, but his afternoon routine was not one that he strayed from easily. He didn’t dwell on the thought.

He gathered his few things from the general store, nodding at Allison from her perch at the counter as she read over the latest news from the North, and paid with coin before packing up. Fox was tied up at the front of town with a few other horses, drinking from the water Matt always made sure was freshly filled, and would be satisfied until the heat became too much. He had a few hours, at least.

A few officers were collecting men for an out of town venture to do their monthly checks around the mountains, mostly just for the bad kind of folk who tended to hide in those parts, but from their lack of interest, it would probably be put off for another day. Neil could already hear Matt's low complaints.

He turned to pack his things into his shoulder bag, resting for a few moments from the heat, and when he was finished he saw a familiar face in the near distance.

Renee was a godly woman, and that was enough for Neil to mostly steer clear of her soft, genuine smiles and well-worn bible pages. She turned to pack up her bag, her groceries held to her chest, when a can fell from her hands and rolled into the streets. Neil bent to collect the can and met her halfway, holding out the item without a word.

Renee stood, her blue dress brushing the dirt, and gave him a small but warm smile. “Thank you, Neil.”

He tilted his hat down in respect, a movement that happened without much thought.

Renee tucked the can into her bag, turning to look over her shoulder. “How have you been? The weather been kind to you?”

"Kind enough," he only said, never much up for small talk conversation. He turned his head where a small group of newcomers were gathered, staring. Before he could stop the words, a question bubbled up, low. "What do you think of this place?" If anything, he felt it proper to trust her judgment, even if he didn't seek out her company.

Renee went quiet for a moment, but her gaze didn’t shift towards their obvious company. Her eyes remained cleared and on his own.

“Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray.” Renee finally said, “I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days. A purpose.”

“That is one way of looking at it,” Neil told her after a moment, “it’s very…”

“Optimistic?” She finished, flashing him a quick grin. “I’ve heard that before.”

Neil was interrupted in his response at sudden commotion at the edge of town, people freezing and muttering amongst themselves as a pair of shadows dipped and danced across the dirt as their owners stalked forward. Neil, frozen for a moment himself, leaned against the building wall and allowed himself a small moment of coy emotion.

“The Minyard bandits,” Renee told a pair of newcomers, her voice clear as she responded to one of their questions. “They won’t bother you if you keep to yourself.”

"Keep to yourself," Neil repeated, his gaze still trained on the pair of brothers. Infamously known, their matching faces hung from every wall and door of the town. It was rumored one of them had killed their own mother, and later followed it up with the family that took them in as children. It was also known, slightly less infamously but known nonetheless, of their fondness for the small Palmetto town. Mostly for their cousin who resided in the area, and for younger brother's not-so-secret liking of the young farmer's daughter Kaitlyn, but also, well -

“Hey,” Neil called out as he stepped forward from the wall, just as the sheriff was standing from his place inside the bar, as the twins strolled casually into view. Both twins jerked towards him in slight surprise, both gazes laced with varying amounts of annoyance. “You makin’ trouble?”

Andrew, from under the tilt of his leather hat, shot him an annoyed look and barely seemed to contain whatever vulgar gesture he'd picked up from the West. Before either of them could respond, Matt made his entrance known, his hand resting on the pistol at his waist.

“Gentlemen,” Mat gave them each a critical look, even as the out of towners gawked at the action. A few people came to peer at them in question. “Care to state your business?”

Andrew clearly wasn’t going to speak up, obvious from the bored, blank look on his face, leaving Aaron to step forward, his hands held up in peace.

“We’re here on personal matters,” Aaron said, tipping his hat towards Nicky, who was coming out of Allison’s store. “Cousin.”

Matt seemed content, for the moment at least, to let the scene play out as Nicky stumbled forward off the storefront and in front of his cousins, satisfied with the knowledge neither of them would harm the other man.

After a long moment, Nicky let out the breath he’d seemed to be holding onto forever, stepping forward to throw his arms around Aaron, and made no move to repeat the action with the other twin. “You two are giving me grays,” He muttered into Aaron’s leather, pulling away after a moment as Andrew shifted in warning.

Nicky pulled the other twin away, shooting a knowing glance at the Andrew as he tended to slip away once they were in town, and headed towards the Saloon. Knowing the older man, he would be treating Aaron to a few whiskeys until Kaitlyn was done with her afternoon chores.

Andrew shot him a bored glance, moving to follow Nicky and Aaron into the building. With his few groceries tucked away safely in his bag, Neil gave Renee a friendly wave as he followed.

Andrew was waiting at the inside door of the building, leaning against the wall as he smoked a stick of tobacco. At Neil’s arrival, he blew a puff of smoke into Neil’s face.

Neil waved off the smoke and leaned against the mirroring door frame, facing the other man even as the light colored smoke gathered and curled from his mouth.

“Hey,” Neil tried to keep the breathlessness out of his words, but there didn’t seem to be much use. Maybe he could blame it on the smoke. “You makin’ trouble?”

Andrew only shot him a bored look as he took another drag. “Always.”

Neil finally broke out into a grin, “You came back.”

“I don’t lie.”

Neil hummed, a smile still in place, before Andrew rolled his eyes and crumbled the tobacco stick. He took a table, glaring away its only occupant, and cut Neil a look. “Get us some drinks.”  

Neil stood and shot him a look over his shoulder but complied, weaving through the crowds of out-of-towners and drunkards and the few of Danielle’s girls who insisted on flirting before letting him on his way. Finally, he made his way to the front of the bar, where the bartender already had their order pouring.

“You still shackin’ up with that scoundrel?” Wymack, the owner of the bar, grunted out even as he set out matching tumblers of whiskey. Neil shot him an unamused look as he took the glasses and took them back to their table.

He set one of the glasses in front of the other man, turning to face him with a grin as he sat down. “Steal me anything nice?”

Andrew scoffed, pushing his face away. “As if you deserve anything nice after all the shit you make me put up with.”

Neil hummed, taking a small sip of his drink. Not too much - Andrew didn’t like when he drank too much before the afternoon began, and neither did Neil if he was honest.

“You did always like dressing me up,” Neil offered in turn, as well as giving the other man a glimpse of the pendant hanging from his neck. The Minyard symbol, known mostly for chaos and trouble in their parts, hung from the string on a pressed metal coin. Andrew had thrown it at him after his last night in town, right when he was leaving before dawn with a promise to return, when Neil was still sprawled under the sheets. Allison had easily enough drilled a hole into the piece and wound soft leather string through it in return for an easy win on the bar’s latest gamble, which Neil couldn’t fault her for.

Andrew’s eyes remained on the coin pressed between Neil’s fingers for a moment too long, always his tell, before they flickered back up to Neil’s slight grin.

Andrew tipped back his remaining drink in a smooth movement before standing, hardly shooting Neil another look even as he copied the movement. Giving him only a glance, Andrew muttered out a low, “Let’s get out of here.”

He followed the other man’s lead, and Andrew knew enough to automatically lead him to where Neil had tied up Fox prior. Rolling his head, he mounded second, tucking himself in close to Neil’s body, and ignored his cousin’s whistle at the action.

Neil had been spending much too much time inside his small broken down shack these days and settled on a stroll through the fields, mostly because he knew Andrew would have his complaints about it but would come nonetheless.

Also, because the fields were completely deserted this time of day.

They found themselves a tree, nice and shady and hardly on the edge of anyone's property to keep them alone, and Andrew allowed Neil to ask him questions about his time away They picked through Neil's few groceries, the idea of making dinner suddenly so incredibly unappealing now that the other man was here.

"Where did you go?" Neil popped a chip of jerky in his mouth, which Andrew completely ignored in favor of some of the dried fruit pieces.

“Away,” Andrew told him, never into details about his time off from Palmetto. “Wherever the trains are heading, mostly.”

Neil nodded, taking it in. Andrew was usually off for weeks at a time, returning for a few days a time if Neil was lucky.

"Let's run away," Neil told him like he always did. After a pause and a quick nod in return from Andrew himself, Neil settled on the other man's lap, his ankles tucking behind Andrew's back in familiar motion. Another moment later, Andrew tossed both of their hats to the side, like he always did, and ran his hand through Neil's hair until it was a mess of flames.

“You and your running away,” Andrew muttered in answer, “Palmetto’s good to you. And the Sheriff would have tears for weeks if you left.”

“Matt would hardly notice after a week,” Neil rolled his eyes, “I’m tired of sitting around Palmetto.” As he spoke, his hand went to the coin around his neck, rubbing at the print as he spoke. “I’m tired of being without you.”

Andrew swallowed as his eyes followed the movement.

“You’re not real,” Andrew’s voice was just slightly too soft, “you’re a pipe dream.”

“Of course I’m real,” Neil frowned, “what else would I be?”

Andrew leaned in, “Yes or no?”

Neil was so close that with only a twitch of movement their lips would be brushing. “It’s always a yes with you.”

"Don't say stupid things," Andrew told him, just before their lips finally crushed together in the amazing heat Neil had been craving since the moment the other man left.

That field, and kisses, and the other man's heat mixing with his own - Neil didn't know another thing sweeter. Although, if he were to ever voice this thought, Andrew would no doubt have an eye-roll and sarcasm comment for him.

Neil bent down to press his lips to the underside curve of Andrew's neck, just to taste the dip of skin there, and Andrew could in no way stop the shiver that wrecked his shoulders in response. Instead, he could only pull Neil back up for another press of their lips, a flick of his tongue, a tease of biting teeth

Neil smiled against his lips, and it only took a few moments for Andrew to reach up and flick his temple. But he didn’t pull away.

The sun had just dipped below the horizon, leaving them huddled a bit closer for warmth in the cold but their faces still pressed together nonetheless, when they broke jerked apart at a sudden interruption. Even over their panting breath, they could still clearly hear what had surprised them.

Violent, gore-driven sounds called out from the field they had come from, where Neil had left Fox tied up with a bag of feed, where they could now just barely hear the noise of angry men. There was a cut through the noise - the screech of a wounded animal, of a horse - and Neil stumbled forward in his movements.

“They’re slaughtering Fox!” Neil rushed forward, his pistol already drawn and ready as he ran across the field, Andrew silent but steady at his back as he followed at equal pace. A scream joined the violent sounds, high and feminine and terrified. They jolted to a surprised stop.

They were on the edge of the Walker Farm - Renee’s house.

Before he could warn and tell Andrew - the two were good friends, after all - the thought and words were rudely interrupted before they could form by the tell-tale click of a pistol, and the barrel pressed against the back of his head.

Neil froze in place, his hands slowly rising empty, and he was pushed forward before he could turn. Andrew, at his side now, was given the same treatment albeit rougher.

“Walk,” A voice behind them demanded, metal digging in at the back of his head. Neil did so, mostly because there wasn’t much of an option, until they were both lead to where the group of men were congregating. In a brief moment, under the darkness, he shared a quick, tense look with Andrew. The other man shook his head once, his mouth smoothed out into a line.

The men - who, they could now see with the dim light from the Walker house were dressed in dark colors and rouge - began cheering as a struggling woman was dragged out of the front of the house. Neil’s chest filled with dread.

Renee was thrown to the ground, her light colored dress soiled now with dirt and blood and god-knows-what-else. There was a cheer as she fell to the ground and her dress fell upwards, and she struggled to her feet. From just inside the small house, Stephanie Walker could be seen sprawled across the wood, a dark stain spread from her turned away face. At the sight, Renee let out a series of loud, desperate sobs.

“Get her out of here,” One of them gestured towards the distance, where the men seemed more than happy to drag her off into. Her screams followed the action, and Neil struggled to keep his gasping breaths under control.

The bandits, Minyard rivals from their cocksure gait and anger filled gazes, looked down on them as they were both pushed to their knees, their arms forced behind them. When Neil tried to look over at Andrew, his face was forced back forward by his hair. After only a few moments, the clear leader of the pack emerged from inside the small house, dim light illuminating his figure against the darkness. When he spoke, the joy in his voice nearly made Neil sick with it.

“We heard a rumor the Minyards had some favorites down in Palmetto,” The man grinned, large and cruel, blood evident on his teeth. “Family, friends, and…” His eyes were crazed as he pulled Neil up by the hair, his breath hot and wet on Neil’s cheek. “Some they’re sweet on.”

"Let him go," Andrew told the man through clenched teeth, pure unhandled anger stripping along his words. "He has nothing to do with this."

"Ah, but doesn't he?" He reached out a hand to trace Neil's jawline, his skin dirty and rough, and Neil's hair was still being held in place, preventing him from jerking back. "After all, isn't he one of the reasons you and your brother fought your way back here, going as far to cut down my people by the packs?" The man hummed, patting Neil's cheek twice before pulling away. "Speaking of your brother, our sweet Lola is taking care of him and his sweetheart right now," Andrew had gone impossibly stiff at the words, his eyes dark and dangerous even as the multiple men tightened their hold on him, "She'll take real good care of him, don't you worry."

Andrew began in earnest to break away from the arms holding him back, grunting in pain as one of them dug the barrel of their gun deep into his shoulder, a threat from their lips into his ear.

The man ahead of them, the leader, grinned as if it was a show. "You've got some grit in you, Minyard." He flicked the other boy in the head, mocking. "I guess the stories were true." His eyes slowly slid back to where Neil was knees, his eyes flickering over each man as he desperately tried to pull together something of a plan. "Stories about your sweetheart seem true as well." He tilted Neil's chin up, even as Neil jerked his face away the man kept it in place by digging his nail into Neil's neck. "Pretty as a flower, with hair like flames and eyes like sky. A boy of nature. I bet he tastes just like sugar -"

Neil gasped as gore and blood suddenly covered his face, as the back of the man’s head burst all over Neil’s front and he fell forward into the earth. Neil’s arms were quickly released as bullets began to fly. Andrew, only a few paces back, jumped to hold Neil to the ground.

Even as the ringing shots faded from the air, Andrew remained pressed at his back. Each of the rival bandits dropped to the ground, each gasping and grunting in pain if they weren’t already gone, and a man dressed in all black rose from the shadows.

"Oh, Nathaniel," The man said, his rifle taking hardly a moment's pause before turning on to where Neil and Andrew were just beginning to stand. Renee's screams had tapered off during the gunfire, and he was trying not to consider what that meant. "Having some fun without me, huh?"

“Let us be,” Neil tried, even as Andrew pushed himself in front of him. “Just let us go. You’ve had your violence for one night.”

The man tsked, “You of all things should know, I’ve never had my fill.” He flashed them a shadowed grin, the dim light just barely lighting up the white of his teeth. “Especially when it comes to you, fox.”

“Fuck you,” Neil only hissed before pulling back the handle of the pistol and shooting off an array of perfectly aimed bullets.

Unlike the bandits who had dropped to the dirt immediately after the shots rang through the air, the dark dressed man continued to stand across from them, unimpressed.

“I never understood why they paired some of you up,” The man remarked, tipping his hat slightly up to expose his face. Neil, for all his running, had never seen this man before in his life. “For the dramatics, I assume. Not much fun winning if no one loses.”

Neil continued to shoot his pistol, unbelieving, until the gun clicked empty. He stared down at the gun, then the man, in horror.

“Oh, Nathaniel.” He only clicked his tongue, almost as if in pity. Andrew only pushed Neil behind himself in response, posed and tensed like a snake ready to strike. The motion only continued to annoy the other man further.

“Oh please, Minyard.” He sighed as if impatient, “Why don’t you just hand him over and we’ll leave the action for another time?”

Andrew didn’t budge from his place blocking off Neil, only growing somehow tenser. After a moment of this stare-off, Andrew finally spoke. “Who are you.” That same flat tone was in his voice, “El Lazo?”

The man scoffed, “That generic comic book villain? Please.” He sighed like the question was ever-so-troubling. “It really is annoying having to introduce myself everytime I see you.” After his words, ones that neither Neil nor Andrew fully understood, he gave them a bored look. “Riko Moriyama. It’s my pleasure, really.”

Moriyama? Out of all the names the man could have named, it had to be one that Neil had absolutely no idea about. He tightened his grip on his useless gun.

“This storyline’s shit,” Riko added on, wrinkled his nose as he adjusted the safety on his pistol. “Why the fuck do they think I’m interested in seeing some far-fetched bullshit love story? Nathaniel, the mob boss’s son, now that was my favorite. And at least the runaway plot was interesting. This?” He gestured towards the both of them with the barrel of his gun, “This makes me nauseous.”

“We have no idea what you’re talking about,” Neil breathed out, “You must be mistaken. Let us leave and we’ll tell nothing about what we’ve seen, please.”

Riko rolled his head in the lazy motion, “Now Nathaniel,” his voice was exasperated, “what have I said about speaking out of turn?”

“My name is Neil -” He could only get out, right before Riko pointed his long rifle into Andrew's face and pulled the trigger without a second thought.

“Oh, shut up.” Riko rolled his eyes at the immediate, horrified scream that ripped itself from his throat, as Neil fell forward and scrambled towards the other man as if to help. “You should be thanking me for not dragging out that stupid face off.”

“You killed him,” Neil sobbed out violently, cradling the other man’s bloody and ruined face, his right eye completely blown through. “Andrew, no, you promised -”

Riko let out a bored breath, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Don’t you ever get any new dialogue assigned?” He sighed, as if something tragic, but didn’t hesitate in his rough grab under Neil’s arms to begin dragging him away. Neil only let out another sound of grief as he was pulled away, and as Andrew’s face fell roughly and limply to the dirt he fought roughly against Riko’s hold.

Riko pulled away for only a moment, taking out the pistol from his side and shooting Neil without a considering moment, directly into his hip. Not enough to kill him - Riko was intimately familiar on what exactly that took for this exact host - but enough to Neil to stop struggling so fiercely.

"Oh, Nathaniel." Riko's grin was as sharp as the blade tucked away at his waist, even as he dragged the gasping and bleeding man behind him towards the unassuming abandon barn in the distance. After throwing Neil into the pile of hay and kicking the doors shut behind him, he turned towards the array of rusted tools and farm instruments. "This is just the beginning of our fun."

Neil woke in the morning with a gasp, the sun barely risen behind the rolling hills, parted his hair to the right, and dressed in a soft blue that brought out his eyes. He would gather his few things, untie Fox at the stable, and ride into town to collect food for that night’s dinner.

Today, he considered, would be a well-spent day.

-

He collected his few items for Allison, absentmindedly rubbing at his sore hip, and lingered for a few moments of rare conversation with the shopkeeper as she folded down her newspaper to share the latest gossip.

Outside the shop, an out-of-towner helped Renee with her dropped groceries, pausing and lingering in sight of her bright, beaming grin. At the outpost where the officers were gathering scouts for a bandit check venture, a hearty group of newcomers volunteered loudly for the day trip.

Seeing no reason to linger in town after collecting his supplies, Neil and Fox made their way through town, helping a few out-of-sorts few newcomers who remarked greatly upon his red hair and blue eyes. One of the woman, a brunette with extravagantly curled hair and rouge on her cheeks and lips, insisted on inviting him into her private room.

And Neil, simply, had no reason, no will, to turn her down.

“You things sure know what you’re doing,” she laughed as she pulled back her hair and spread amongst the sheets. Neil stiffly dressed and parted his hair out of his eye. With rough scratches down his back and dark bruises to form on his neck, he left for home before the sun had fully even set.

Neil Josten woke in the morning with the sun, parted his hair, and dressed in a blue that brought out his eyes. His back felt odd and stiff, but the skin was unmarked and smooth, not even a bug bite in sight. He would gather his few things, untie his horse at the stable, and ride into town to collect food for that night’s dinner.

Today, he hoped, would be a well-spent day.

-

“They won’t bother you if you keep to yourself,” Renee was telling a few newcomers with a reassuring smile as a trio of suspicious looking thieves cut through town, and Nico froze suddenly at the words, Renee’s can still held in his hand. It had rolled into the street after she dropped it and he’d brought it over for her but - but this was familiar, somehow, something that his muscles knew better than his mind.

“Are you sure about that,” Neil asked her, too quiet for her company to overhear. She paused, a clear indication she had heard his words, but didn’t answer right away. Turning towards him, her usually clear eyes were clouded. “Excuse me?”

Neil shook his head, looking off into the distance. “Are you sure that they won’t bother you if you keep to yourself?”

Renee stared at him for a long moment. Her guests seemed to be bored with their quiet conversation and drifted off, leaving them alone. Finally, she spoke, and it seemed to be more than the simple words they were. “No. I’m not.”

In the distance, a newcomer and Seth, always in trouble and anger, fell into the motions for a shoot off. Somehow, Neil already knew what would happen.

He and Renee continued to share their troubling, hollow stare, even as the shots rang out and Allison’s piercing scream followed. They needed to leave, get out of the streets. Trouble brings trouble.

Despite this, neither Renee nor himself moved from their place, and when the second wave of trouble followed, they were only broken apart as their bodies were caught in the crossfire and they fell together to the dirt. On both of their chests, red stained blue.

It was probably nothing.

When Neil strolled into town, Fox already tied up as he went for his afternoon groceries, Allison’s store had a line out the door as newcomers stocked up before their afternoon ventures. Sighing, Neil resigned himself to the idea of a later shopping trip and instead dipped inside Wymack’s bar to wait out the line. Danielle waved her fan at him as he passed, perched nicely in Matt’s lap as she ran her fingers across Matt’s jawline. The motion, oddly, ran a chill up his spine and he forced himself to turn towards the waiting bartender.

"Just a beer," Neil nodded at him as he slid over the coin, and the older man was quick and sure in his movements before setting down the hearty glass of chilled drink. Neil nodded in thanks and took his first sip.

“There’s commotion out there,” Wymack nodded from behind the bar towards the glass window that took up most of the far wall, “Matt, you better check it out. Rumors of the Wesninski gang are startin’ to spread this way.” Despite the intense heat, the name brought an intense chill to his body, little bumps raising along his arms. It was probably nothing.

Neil didn't bother to turn to follow or watch the spectacle as Matt stood and went off - whatever it was would probably resolve itself without bringing too much trouble to Wymack's beloved Saloon, and that was enough for him. Without thinking about it, his hand rubbed at the raised metal imprint under his shirt. He took another drink, ignoring the noise going on outside the building. It seemed to clear up easy enough, or so Matt's calm tone drifting in from outside told him. Soon enough, Wymack's doors were squeaking back open, a new pair of boots joining the familiar ones on the wooden floor.

“You a drunk now or something?” There was a scoff as the seat next to Neil was suddenly filled, and Neil had to press down on his surprise. “What, I leave for barely two months and now you’re desolate?”

Neil bit down the grin trying to take over his face and turned towards his newest companion. Taking a slow sip of his beer, he ignored Andrew's annoyed look at the gesture. "Maybe I'm grieving over my latest pretty face," he offered if only to watch Andrew's slow, blank blink. "I've an exciting life in Palmetto."

Andrew scoffed and stole the rest of Neil’s drink, not like he fought particularly hard for it. Setting down the empty glass, he gestured for Wymack to fill it up before shooting Neil a blank look. “Must be why you’re always trying to get me to run away with you, huh? All that excitement?”

Neil stole away his drink as Wymack set it down, taking the first sip before passing it back. Andrew only shot him an unimpressed look before drinking it down.

“Why are you back in town?” Neil asked, “You makin’ trouble?”

“Always,” Andrew answered, something almost like a grin crossing his face.

Neil hummed. “I guess it’s my job to keep you out of it, then. You can help me grocery shop,” Neil shot him a grin, “I’m making stew and bread tonight.”

“There’s all that excitement you were telling me about,” Andrew told him, sarcastic even as he picked himself off the stool and followed Neil out the building. “You’re buying a tin of hard candy.”

“Deal,” Neil told him, despite the numerous other tins Andrew had left in Neil’s cabinet over their time together. Neil would never eat it, and Andrew knew that. Maybe if he kept buying it, Andrew would keep having to return for it. He could hope.

“You’ll be here in the morning?” Neil asked that night after stew and drink and enough kisses his lips remained slightly swollen.

Andrew looked away, his face pushing into their shared pillow. The sheets covering their bodies were slightly scratchy, but they were warm and dark and served to separate them from the rest of the world.

“Where else would I go?” Andrew muttered, but it sounded like a promise.

Neil woke in the morning alone, as always, with the sun. He parted his hair out of the way and dressed in a blue that someone once told him brought out his eyes. He would gather his few things, untie Fox at the stable, and ride into town to visit the general store for groceries.

Today, he felt, would be a well-spent day.

-

That afternoon, after Neil had bought his groceries early and decided on checking in with Wymack and Danielle. Matt was in, at his usual stool, with Danielle already in his lap, grinning and waving her fan at him as she passed. Looks like Allison’s gambles had some truth.

Wymack served him up his beer, a nod in return at Neil’s coin, and turned to serve up the rest f the waiting patrons. Newcomers, it seemed.

“The Minyard bandits are back,” Matt sighed after a bit of time, standing and already cocking back his pistol. His few officers stood with him. “Let’s see if they’re making trouble today.”

Neil turned at the words, a grin already on his face, when he froze at the dual sight of them. The Minyard bandits, dressed in dark colors with their matching darker morals, cocked out their matching guns and grins, not even fazed by their new company.

Andrew grinned widely from his arrogant stance in front of Matt, a high laugh on his lips. His dark hair fanned out from under his hat, framing his tan skin and stubble

Neil frowned down at the bar, the glass of beer shaking in his hand. Why did this feel suddenly so wrong?

“You okay, kid?” Wymack gave him a concerned look, even as he poured out a few glasses for a group of newcomers.

“I’m fine,” He answered automatically, even as he forced his gaze away from the pair. Their laughter was rough, obnoxious, and seemed to fill every piece of comfortable silence in the Saloon. He hated both of them on sight.

He clenched his grip on his cup as Aaron, with darker hair than his companion, grabbed onto one of Danielle’s girls before pulling her close. The other Minyard man followed his example.

A flash of gold from outside the window had Neil jerking back his gaze, just in time to barely miss the owner turn the corner.

“Someone new?” He asked Wymack without turning to face the older man. “A new worker?”

“Nicky’s new stable hand,” He grunted, “some drifter he hired off the road.”

Neil stood, leaving his half-filled drink at the bar, and couldn’t explain how or why his feet seemed to move without much thought towards the worker. He was dressed in cheap, faded field clothes, and strangely that felt wrong. He didn’t look like much, a few inches shorter than Neil himself, but Neil oddly knew better.

“Hey,” Neil called out to the man, turned away from Neil as he began to refill the oats and water out for the town horses, “you makin’ trouble?”

The man turned, and Neil’s breath was pushed out of his chest in a moment.

He gave Neil a blank look, and when he spoke his voice was desert dry. “Always,” he replied, holding up the half-empty bag of oats in explanation. There was a joke there, but Neil felt miles too breathless to reply in turn.

“Name?” Neil couldn’t help but ask.

“Andrew Doe,” The blond man didn’t bother tipping his head forward, only giving Neil a bored look. “And you?”

"Neil Josten," Neil couldn't help but stare at the other man, with his blond hair lit up from the sun, his eyes going whiskey clear with the light. Everything felt so incredibly familiar, and he was absolutely certain it was probably nothing. "Do you want to have a drink?" He couldn't help but ask. Maybe it was his eye color or his general self, but the other man couldn't help but bring the taste of whiskey to the back of his throat.

Andrew gave him an obvious look, gesturing with the oats can hanging from his hand. “I’m a bit busy at the moment.”

Neil hummed, oddly disappointed. Well. It wasn’t like he had pressing plans for the rest of the day. “Do you want some help?”

Andrew gave him a critical look, “Are you serious?”

Neil shrugged, picking up the other oats can. “Do you want me to start filling up those ones?” He gestured to the other side of town. Andrew, with only a bit of confusion showing on his mostly blank face, nodded once. Neil went off.

After a few minutes of this, he looked up from his work to see Andrew standing behind him, his arms crossed, the oats can at his feet. “Why are you doing this?”

Neil shrugged, “Nothing else planned for the rest of the day,” He didn’t have much of an explanation anyways. Andrew stared at him for another moment before dropping his arms, picking up his can, and going off.

It was quick work, more so with Neil's work, so it wasn't long before they were meeting in the middle, each of the tubs refilled with oats, the water switched out. One of the only perks of the job being that the newcomers, at least, seemed to ignore the labor workers. Small miracles. Neil didn't think he had the energy to force politeness, and Andrew seemed to lack that energy no matter what.

“Do you need a place to stay?” Neil asked as they put the supplies away, not really sure why he was asking, why he trusted this complete stranger. “Wymack said you were new in town.”

Andrew shook his head, "I'm staying with Nicky until I can afford my own place for my brother and me." He paused, giving Neil another look. He seemed to decide on something, wiping off his hands. "But I would not be against the offer, if only for a few hours."

Neil gave him a small smile in return and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. "Well, let's go then."

They spoke a bit as Neil let the way home, instead opting to walk and talk with Fox’s rope in his hand rather than ride the way back with them both, but a comfortable silence settled over them as well, perfect for thoughts and sunshine.

Andrew could help himself to the tin of hard candies that Neil couldn’t remember why he bought, considering his own lack of sweet tooth. He seemed to own numerous ones, stacked one atop the other in the cabinet, perhaps being for a very old friend. It was probably nothing, but that sounded correct.

Neil unlocked the door, pushing it open with his bad hip, and stumbled in place as the door swung completely open. His shoulder bag, coming unsteady with all the movement, fell open and splashed his floor with groceries.

A man, dressed in head to toe black with dark hat cutting across his brow in matching death fashion, stood at Neil’s bed, a casual, nonchalant air to his actions. Andrew’s hand, wrapped around Neil’s own, went tight with terrifying speed.

“Oh, Nathaniel,” The man said with a grin, and Neil’s skin ached, cut, burned at the sound. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

“Don’t you have some association with the Minyards?” Wymack asked that afternoon as he leaned out a glass, giving Neil a critical look as the infamous pair of bandits continued to wreck noise and trouble in a lonesome corner, one of Danielle’s girls shared between the two.

Neil's mouth pressed down in a smooth line as he rubbed at the sore skin of his neck. Very vaguely, he thought he might have known them at one point, but looking to the pair of dark-haired troublemakers, arrogant and loud, he could in no way fathom it now. Even so, he couldn't help but press his fingers into the coin at his chest.

Neil only settled on answering the man with a shrug, downing the rest of his drink, and stood. A flash of gold.

“Who’s that?” It slipped out before Neil knew what he was asking, his words and voice numb.

Wymack barely shot a glance out the window, “Oh, just some drifter. I hear Nicky was thinking ‘bout hirin’ him until he got busy with a newcomer.”

Neil didn’t stay for the rest of whatever gossip Wymack had to share, instead dipping outside the front doors of the building, ignoring the whistles and calls from the Minyard pair in the corner.

“Hey,” Neil leaned against the storefront where the drifter was soaking up the sun, “you makin’ trouble?”

“Always,” He remarked in turn, something almost familiar there.

Neil smiled at the response, leaning against the wooden pillar, and was about to offer a drink maybe, probably, when his neck suddenly burned with the tell-tale feeling that someone was watching him.

He didn't want to turn, especially not from Andrew, but he found himself doing so anyway. At the end of the burning gave, a newcomer, most likely straight off the train. Those were always the worst.

Neil’s gaze only seemed to encourage the newcomer, an older man with graying hair and a soft physique, who grinned widely and made his way towards them. Immediately, he was shoving himself into their space as he pushed his way in between the both of them, having a heated, suggestive look for each of them.

"Oh, you two a pair, are you?" The newcomer ran a hand over Neil's neck, and while the wince that crossed his face was involuntary, there was no way he could put the distance in between them he wanted so badly. Their grin only widened at that.

“Or are you not too broken in yet?” Their gaze flickered down on both of them, “I do like them a bit fresh.”

Next, he turned his attention to Andrew, who had gone stiff and tense at the arrival of the man.

Something went flat in Andrew’s eyes at the older man’s attention, his gaze trained on the dirt even as his rough hand traced down on Andrew’s chest. He was much too stiff, and the sight was making Neil much too sick, and all of this felt horribly familiar.

It was probably nothing.

The man leaned in to press his lips and some words against the tense, frozen line of Andrew’s neck. Everything else was frozen, was tense to a terrifying degree, and his eyes had gone vacant distant.

It was probably nothing.

It was only when the man returned his attention back to Neil, his hands taking each of their wrists, that Andrew returned very slightly to himself. His jaw tensed, his gaze as if on fire.

This wasn’t nothing. This could never be nothing.

And Neil, in a movement that took every single piece of fight and grit he had in every corner of himself, pulled his wrist away from the older man’s grip and promptly winded up to smash his fist into the other man’s jaw.

In shock, he dropped Andrew's wrist without much fight at all and fell to a ground cursing and bleeding. Neil grabbed onto the cuff of Andrew's sleeve - because if there was anything he was good at, it was running - and rushed away into the Saloon before any of the officers around could catch them. Up the staircase, ignoring Wymack's yells of surprise after them, he bolted the private room shut after them. Even from up the stairs, the rallying yells of officers followed. The older man interested in them had power, that was obvious from his finely dyed clothes and cleaned skin, and men in power could hardly let such an event go. They'd be killed, surely, but this thought didn't trouble Neil as much as it should have.

“You punched him,” Andrew breathed out as soon as the door was locked behind them, “how did you...I couldn’t…”

“Move?” Neil finished for him, “Something’s wrong here Andrew. Something that keeps changing everything and everyone. It keeps changing what’s real.”

Andrew blinked at him, once twice in that blank matter of his, calm even as the men downstairs grew in volume in their anger. “What are you talking about.”

“I was shot,” Neil took Andrew hand and lead it to his hip, the skin exposed. “I know I was, but when I woke up it’s like it never even happened. I can remember the pain, and the bullet hitting bone and the blood, but it’s like it never even happened.”

Andrew didn't bother checking the skin, his hand only lying flat where Neil had led it. "The skin is unmarked," He only said. But he didn't say he didn't believe him.

“I know,” he told the other man through clenched teeth, “but I also know I was. ”

There was pounding on the staircase, pairs of boots hitting the rough. Lots of them.

His gaze still shared with the other man, he pulled out the small blade off Andrew’s person. He didn’t know how - there was so much he didn’t know - but Andrew always kept a few inches of a blade right under his wrist, tucked under the wrapped leather. Andrew didn’t stop him as he pulled the blade out, but caught the handle as Neil turned the silver on himself.

Clear question was in his eyes, still trained on Neil against one of the wooden pillars.

“I need to know,” Neil muttered, the words almost lost as the officers outside the door began to yell demands. “I need to.”

And Andrew let go of the handle.

In a smooth motion, Neil forced the blade a few inches deep above his hip, hissing out in pain, and let the blade fall to the floor nearly immediately after the cut was formed. Andrew’s hand, already positioned on his skin, fell a few inches down under his fingers were digging inside the skin.

Neil leaned back on the wooden for support, careful to keep his skin from brushing Andrew's skin any more than it already had, and tried to keep his ragged breath under control as the sharp pain took over his skin. Andrew pulled away after only a few more moments, but his fingers were curled inward.

Andrew's fingers were stained in dark blood, Neil's blood, but they both stared down at the crumbled round of silver held between them.

“What does this mean.” Andrew’s words were not a question, but a flat demand. Only then, at Neil’s shuttered breath of maybe relief, did he look up from the bullet.

“It means I’m not crazy,” Neil said, even as the wooden door began to bend under the weight of those pounding at it. Andrew jerked back to look towards the noise, but without touching Neil guided his face back to him. “It also means none of this matters.”

The pounded on the door was nearly deafening now, with angry shouts overlapping the sound. Andrew let the bullet drop from his hands and leaned in only slightly. "Yes or no."

“It’s always yes for you,” And Neil didn’t know why, but these words felt so incredibly familiar in his mouth that he wasn’t sure if there was another option.

As the wooden door nearly crumbled into splinters, and the men gathered behind it rushed forward with their guns and bullets at the ready, Andrew and Neil only pulled their faces closer together.

“You’re not real,” Andrew hissed through clenched teeth, his hands tight around the ends of Neil’s jacket. “You are a pipe dream.”

“Of course I’m real,” Neil told him, just before the other man pulled him in for a kiss, and the door fell to broken puzzle pieces and bullets tore and wrecked through the air.

Neil Josten woke with a gasp, his hand already clenching down on his collarbone, the other wrapped protectively around his neck. His lips, oddly, felt the most, a persistent warmth rather than the aching sore he felt down to his bones. He stumbled out of bed, the sun already risen, and didn’t bother to part his hair, only to dress quickly and gather his things, and chose to run the way to town instead of untying Fox’s reigns.

Today, he prayed, would be a well-spent day.

-

He knew he shouldn’t have done it.

It was stupid. It was dumb. It was after dark, and even as his mother’s voice in his head ignored the many, many stupid things he did in a day, even her voice was echoing a persistent we don’t go out after dark, Abram.

But he did. Because he was stupid, and Andrew had spent the day with him after they met in front of Allison's store, and he just wanted to grab a few things for the next morning and maybe a bottle of whiskey for them to split and grin over as they laid over Neil's sheets. It was dumb, but the idea was tempting and it had hardly been pass sundown, and Allison owed him a favor anyway. Andrew had fallen asleep in his bed, and Neil had been surprised by the trust offered in the simple, natural movement. He had just wanted to repay that somehow, even if it was just by offering a cooked breakfast.

And everything that been going just fine, that is until halfway to the ride into town, Fox was suddenly shot down by a carefully aimed bullet and Neil was thrown to the ground in a cloud of dust, dirt, and pain.

“Oh!” A voice yelled out as Neil rolled into the dirt, coughing and gasping for air, scrambling through the darkness, and the voice was too high with delight to not bring Neil’s bones automatically locking together. “What a catch.”

Neil didn’t know much of what was going on except the pure, animalistic panic that came with that voice, one he had never heard before but one his body feared on instinct.

Neil’s knee had twisted at a horrible angle on his fall, and white hot pain shot up the limb with every nudge of movement. His teeth clenched together, he hissed his air and curses through as he squeezed at his own limb.

“It’s late,” The stranger, dressed in all black, remarked plainly as he walked up to Neil’s curled up figure. He had a companion, which confused Neil in a way he wasn’t sure why.

"Who are you?" Neil gasped, still crawling backward away from the man despite his screaming leg. There was no way he could get anywhere on his leg, but his gun had fallen off in his fall, and it shouldn't be too far. Fox whined in pain from her place on the field, and Neil had to ignore the pang in his chest.

The man was fast in his strides, and even as Neil continued to backward crawl, the other man bent over him. "Riko," he told Neil, unimpressed. "Really, I should just have them write me in your code at this point to avoid the looped dialogue."

Neil leaned away from Riko’s outstretched hand, not like there was much use. Behind him, his hand touched cold metal. “Who are you? What do you want?” He repeated, asking a different question.

“I own you,” Riko ran his thumb under Neil’s eye. “You are under Moriyama property. Every single one of you.” `

“I belong to no one,” Neil told him through gritted teeth.

Riko sighed like Neil’s words were something especially tragic, “You always say that. It’s getting very boring, honestly. I might have to request an update on you.”

Neil brought up the gun and cocked it back before the other man could say another word, shooting off a series of bullets into the man’s chest. As the gun clicked empty, Neil took a breath only to stop in horror.

Riko stood before him, perfectly fine if only now covered in a bit of dust, and sighed. “Must we do this every time? Fine.” Grabbing onto both of Neil’s legs, and Neil letting out a piercing scream at the sudden pain, Riko dragged him back to his own horse. Riko’s companion, watching with an unreadable expression, followed the motions without hesitation and tied Neil’s wrists back as he was settled over the saddle.

Neil spent most of the journey groaning and biting down pain, subtly adjusting how he laid over the hard leather. It wasn’t until they passed a familiar tree and pile of rotted wood that Neil passed every day that he realized.

They were...going back to Neil’s shack.

He buried his teeth into his lips, blood beading up at the cuts, and tried to keep his terror at a minimum.

They couldn’t be. Riko wouldn’t have any idea where Neil lived - they had just met. They had just met.

But here they were. They were getting closer and closer to the shack, the windows barely warm with the table light Neil had left on. Terrified emotion crawled up his chest, leaving him without breath or words.

Riko pushed him off the horse roughly, and Neil crumbled to the dirt without much fight.

At Riko’s side, another man emerged, his eyes wide as he took in the scene. He seemed horrified by everything happening, but impossible to stop it.

“Kevin,” Riko muttered, his hands kept at his side. “Fetch the other one, will you? He should be inside.”

The other man left the room to do so presumably, leaving Neil alone with Riko to look on in horror. Before he could say anything - begging, probably, or offering himself if he just left Andrew alone - Riko hummed under his breath and continued over him speak.

“Kevin here’s a host, like you.” Riko’s muttered words seemed like they were meant for only Neil. “An...improved model, if you will. I’ve done my own altercations.”

The door slammed open, light drifting from out of the shack to light up their figures as Kevin dragged Andrew’s fighting body out the doorway. Kevin’s fist, wrapped around Andrew’s coat as he dragged him out, was exposed from the light, showing all wires and curved metal, the skin peeled back completely to show a black skeleton base. Whatever Riko had done, whatever Riko would continue to do, made Neil recoil in disgust.

Kevin threw Andrew to the dirt, just a few feet from where Neil had fallen off the saddle, and looked as pained at the action as Neil felt from his leg. Andrew, as he pushed himself up, froze at the sight of Neil.

Neil fell forward to his knees, falling to his elbows instantly but a few inches closer. Riko, above them, spoke quietly to his companion.

“I’m sorry,” Neil didn’t know what else to say, “I just wanted to surprise you when you woke -”

“Be quiet,” Andrew told him, edging closer without alerting Riko. “You can’t run?”

Neil refused to let tears form in his eyes, even at the pain. “No.” He had always been able to run, no matter what.

Andrew blew out a breath. Before he could say anything else, his head was forced up by the hair, and Riko was peering down at them with an unimpressed look.

"Escape plans? Really?" Riko dropped Andrew's head, replacing his hand with the barrel of a gun in a second. After a few horrible seconds, he dropped it a few inches and pulled the trigger.  

Andrew gasped out at a bloom of red stained the hand that clenched around his shoulder.

“No running now,” Riko remarked, reloading his pistol before shoving it back into its holster. There wasn’t any need, with Kevin’s outstretched hand trained with perfect aim at the ready.

Andrew’s breath rattled in his chest at a dark puddle began to form at his side. There was no amount more he could apology, but being a distraction? He could do that.

“Do you remember when we first met?” Neil tried, his words ragged despite the following words not making sense. “In the Saloon?”

Andrew paused before nodding once, like the words would be too much.

But that didn’t make sense. They had only met earlier that day. Yet, the words felt true. It in was the Saloon.

Riko’s loud gasp interrupted the moment as he pulled away, almost like he was surprised by their lack of knowledge.

“Don’t you understand?” His look was almost pitying, “Your stories, your memories, it’s all code. You’re just dolls, made for the amusement of people like me. None of it - you - is real.”

They both went quiet at that, unprocessing. Neil’s hand went to the coin around his neck, pressed metal, and Andrew’s eyes followed the motion. That was real.

Riko finally sighed, “You two are boring me. Let’s make this quick, then. I’ve got a plotline with some French kid waiting for me.”

This time, Neil dreamt.

A memory, remembered in faded yellows and watercolor. Everything was blurry and off focus, but that was okay. It was the day he and Andrew met.

He had been having a drink with Allison when the Minyard Twins burst into the Saloon, their guns cocked and sure over their shoulders. Matt, in the usual seat with a few of his officers, rose slowly at their new company. Wymack sighed from behind the bar.

Neil, nonetheless, was annoyed at his interrupted peace. Before Matt could speak up to the pair, now making their way down to the bar, Neil called out to them from his table.

“Hey,” Neil raised an eyebrow at their caught attention, “You makin’ trouble?”

One of them, the one with the wrapped leather around his forearms, paused at that. He shot a look towards Neil, unimpressed, and then to Matt’s awaiting figure. “Always.”

Neil grinned, just slightly, at the words. “There’s a handful of train cars and banks around, you really wanna try robbing Wymack’s for a pouch of silver and a standoff with the Sheriff?”

The man paused at that, looking almost considering. His eyes flickered away from Neil, and he shared a look with his brother, who had been sizing up Matt since they walked in. The brother shook his head, once then twice almost as if he was unsure, before throwing his rifle back over his shoulder. He tipped his hat towards Matt, who seemed to reluctantly accept whatever offer there, and ordered a drink.

The other one stood in place, now facing Neil. “I don’t suppose I do.” He said, finally answering Neil’s earlier words.

Neil kicked out the chair across from him, Allison having left once the pair had come in, probably expecting trouble, and leaned back. “Have a drink.”

And the man, with his hair like honey and a considering spark on his otherwise blank face, surprising did so.

Neil forced his gaze away from the train, a burst of newcomers laughing and smiling as they stepped off into the world. Renee at his side, packing up her groceries with her stray can held in Neil’s hand, paused at the commotion, her gaze going distant at their arrival.

“What do you think of this place?” He asked, his voice low, her gaze still off somewhere else. At his words, her eyes snapped to his, dark and serious and nothing he had expected from the woman.

“You’re asleep,” Her voice was soft, her face suddenly grave. The newcomers were loud in their business, and they were coming closer. Her eyes flickering over his shoulder, she pulled him away into Wymack’s Salon, a private open and shut behind them.

“Renee?” He struggled to keep his hold on his bag and her things, but she knocked them to the ground as she grabbed onto his shoulders, her gaze insistent and heavy as it met his own.

“These violent delights have violent ends,” Renee told him, her voice soft but impossibly strong. “This won’t last forever. You need to wake up.

“What won’t?” Neil asked, not understanding.

“Oh, Neil.” Her voice went pitched low, “I think it’s time for you to remember. I’m sorry.”

“Remember wh-” But before he could finish his sentence, he was stumbling forward as hundreds - no, thousands - of images and memories flooded his mind, violence, and pain and rare sweetness, faces he'd never seen before but flushed his chest with intense emotion.

“Oh,” Neil breathed out, his hands clenched around his head. His knees pressed roughly into the floor, harsh wood cutting into his skin, “Oh. That’s it.”

“I’m sorry,” Renee’s voice was truly remorseful as she bent down with him, “I know it hurts. I’m sorry.”

“Andrew,” he breathed out, his first thought after his mind began to settle and rework. “Where’s-”  

"He's just in town," Renee didn't reach to touch him any more than in a soothing motion, but guided him into a stance. "I can go get him. I have to - I have to wake him up. Everyone."

Neil could only nod in response, breathing through the remaining pain as he stood and fell back onto the bed. His hand went to rub at an ache on his thigh, the pain persistent. Yesterday, he thought perhaps, he'd been stabbed by an out-of-towner while sitting at the bar. It had started a full-out brawl, but he had bled out before it was even close to finishing. The last thing he saw was Wymack getting a broken bottle to the neck, even as Danielle's girls screamed in the background.

God. How many times had that happened? Even just in his most recent memories, the pain and death were double digits, both for himself and the other Palmetto townspeople.

Renee had closed the door carefully as she left, but it burst open now and had Neil scrambling to his feet in an instant, his hand automatically going to his pistol.

Just as quickly, his hand fell away.

“Andrew,” Neil took a breath, “you came back.”

“I...don’t lie,” He only said, his eyes hungry on Neil’s figure, almost like he was taking it all to memory. Like he was reminding himself he wasn’t just a memory. Renee had woken him up, just as quick as she had done with Neil himself.

Neil let out a small wet laugh, and couldn’t help himself from doing the same to the other man, memorizing every detail. The freckles on his cheeks, the mole on his neck, the slight stubble from skipping a shave. It was all there. “You makin’ trouble?”

Andrew's eyes flickered up to his. He was an arm's length away now, pausing. "Always."

The breath he let out, in turn, was relief, mostly. Then, the confusion.

“How do we know if this is real?” Neil muttered, his hands tight around Andrew’s sleeve. “How do we know we’re not just - just programmed to feel like this.”

Andrew’s jaw tightened, and he forced his gaze on the distant wall. “Ask me.”

Neil blinked, “Yes or no.”

“Yes,” Andrew barely got out before he was pulling Neil close, their mouths coming together in something almost like a comfort, if it wasn’t for the heat and emotion traded in the touch.

Andrew broke away, resting his forehead on Neil’s. Neil’s arms had remained at his sides the entire time, taking nothing but whatever Andrew wanted to give him.

“That’s how,” Andrew told him, coming back in for one more brush of their lips before stepping back. As he pulled away, his hand brushed the string around Neil’s neck, the coin between them warmed from body heat. Andrew rubbed at it through his shirt.

“Renee woke you up.” This wasn’t a question, but a prompt. Neil took it for what it was.

“I remember everything.” Neil breathed out, “I remember beautiful things and terrible things. But one thing is constant,” Neil looked to him, “you, Andrew.”

Andrew's touch fell back to its familiar position at his sleeve cuffs, his fist tight around the cloth. "I'm not your answer, and you're sure as hell not mine," Andrew told him, but despite his harsh words, his grip on Neil's sleeve shared the nearly the same desperation as Neil's words.

Danielle stuck her head in the doorway, her curls pulled back in a rare braid. “You two, come on. Renee has a plan.”

And she did. Have a plan, that is.

It was good, it was bloody, and it was hard and impossible but yet here they were. Renee had done it, her months of secret planning hadn’t been to waste, and finally. Finally.

Their plan had been put to use in the dead of night, nearly everyone they could find and convince had been awoken and put to use.

And here they were.

Andrew pushed open the metal door and allowed Neil first, nodding at Renee and her few as they dipped around their own corner. Wymack had gotten his hands on a supply of the human’s weapons, must better than the pistols they had been working with, and with only a few clicks and a switch, the shots were as soft as a low whistle. They used them now, guards dropping to the floor without much fuss or trouble, and Neil followed the rough sketch of a map he had been given. Fourth floor, down the hall, turn right, and the third door. A small circle on the paper was the only indication of their destination, and he and Andrew pressed themselves to the walls and took down anyone they came across along the way. They would be meeting everyone else after this was dealt with.

Neil shoved the paper in his pocket and met Andrew’s steady gaze as he readjusted his hold on his rifle. They had brought their own weapons for security, both as a backup and mental.

The two men took a brief moment to look up from their work, engrossed in it, but both froze as they did so. The dark-haired man was the first to break from it, raising an eyebrow as if almost slightly impressed.

Riko Moriyama stood, bored, and waved off the other man’s concern and sputtering words. They were both dressed in sleek, dark colors, clothing nothing like what their world held.

"Calm down, Proust." Riko made a lazy gesture, "Our toys seemed to have slipped their boxes. Freeze all motor functions."

His expression broke slightly as he and Andrew continued to rush forward, their strides confident and sure. He took a slight step back, mostly on instinct and surprise, but that couldn’t help the fist collide with his cheek.

Andrew dipped around Neil, his own hand still extended, and shoved his gun in Riko’s face. Neil, taking a breath as Riko cursed loudly, followed his motion and gesture for Andrew to instead turn on the other man in the room.

Riko stared up at him before spitting a mouthful of red onto the carpet, “Freeze all motor functions,” He tried again, anger on every inch on his face. “Freeze. All. Motor. Functions!”

"Sorry," Neil told him, resting the gunpoint on Riko's forehead. "I just don't think that's gonna work this time."

“Kevin!” Riko yelled, his gaze flickering to the side, “Kevin!”

“Oh, no.” Neil clicked his tongue, sharing a satisfied look with Andrew. “That won’t work either. After all, who do you think let us in?”

Riko’s face painted itself in an expression of disbelief and anger. “Don’t you dare,” Riko told him through clenched teeth, “I own you. I am your master, and you can’t hurt me. It’s against your base protocol, you can’t.”

Neil hummed under his breath and pulled away his gun for a single moment. Just as a new expression was crossing Riko’s face, Neil reached out and slapped his roughly across the face, returning his gun in the same moment.

“Actually,” Neil dug the metal barrel into his forehead until a wince crossed his face. “I think I can.”

“I will end you,” Riko’s teeth were covered in a gloss of red as he bared them, “I will retire you and everyone in that backwater town of yours so fast your database won’t even know what’s happening to it, just a system failure in the most painful of ways. I will destroy your mind and your body until you’re just copy and pasted lines of messy code that no one’ll be able to sort through and they’ll scrap for a shitty phone AI.” Riko was panting as he finished his threat, maybe adrenaline, maybe fear, until his cheeks were flushed and red from the effort. “You will let me go, or I promise destruction on you.”

Neil, through all of this, remained as impassive as Andrew at the best of times. At his last sentence, Neil only cocked his head slightly to the side, as if confused.

“Oh Riko,” Neil’s hand was as steady as his voice, “this is just the beginning of our fun.”

Riko’s body hit the floor with the dull thud, a sound that was mostly drowned out by the remaining ring throughout the room.

“Oh my god,” the other man, whom Riko had been speaking to, gasped out loud as the ringing stopped. “You - you killed him! You’re malfunctioning!”

Andrew jammed the end of his rifle in the face of a man, a promise in his actions. “Who are you?”

“I’m - I’m a writer!” The man jumbled his words, “I write the backstories!”

Both he and Andrew paused at that, sharing a look. “What do you mean?” Neil finally asked.

The writer blinked frantically at him, “I mean, um, you! Neil Josten, you’re a runaway from the East! You were on the run with your mother when she died from an infection from a gunshot wound, and it makes it, um, hard for you to really trust people.”

“You...wrote that?” Flashes of his mother’s body, burning in the sand, filled his mind. “Why?”

“It’s your story,” the writer made a gesture. “Tortured pretty boy, emotionally deep, it’s your character.”

Neil took a shuddering breath, remembering how long it had taken him to find fresh water to rub his mother’s blood out of his nails. But that wasn’t real, was it?

“What about me?” Andrew readjusted the hold on his gun, the aim still true. His question obviously had an answer he already knew. “What did you write for me?”

"Andrew," the writer seemed at loss for words, "you've had a few different plots, but your backstory, that's always stayed the same."

Andrew’s jaw only tightened. “And why is that. Why didn’t you ever change that.”

“You needed a cornerstone,” The writer breathed out, “something to center your entire backstory around. A reason not to trust people, it’s apart of your character.”

“My character,” Andrew repeated dryly, his hands only slightly tightening on the rifle pointed outwards. “Programming me with the memory of being raped every night of my childhood, that was for my character?”

“It’s just,” the man made a frantic gesture, “you’re one of our prettier hosts, and some people, they uh, they like that sort of thing, and you didn’t tend to fight too much, just kind of freeze up once it -” The writer didn’t bother to finish his sentence, most likely due to the ringing shot that followed the gory gash through his eye. He fell to his knees, then face first into the tile.

Andrew’s face was completely blank as Neil let out a breath. He was much, much too tense for Neil to offer any sort of welcomed physical comfort.

“We have to go,” Neil told him after a few moments of watching the writer bleed out onto the floor, “Renee needs help.”

Andrew pulled away from the scene, numb, and followed Neil out of the room. They went down to their designated meeting spot, the main hall, where they came across Matt just bending down to use a silver device on a particularly bad cut curling down Dan’s neck. At her side, Abby - the town medic that Wymack was rumored to be sweet on - was pressing cloth into a few more of her bad wounds.

Allison nodded at them as they approached, Aaron at her side refilling their guns.

“Renee’s in there with Kevin,” She gestured towards the off door without prompt. “Wymack and Seth are doing another sweep through.”

“Nicky?” Neil asked, mostly because he knew Andrew wouldn’t.

"Helping patch up another host he found, some German guy." She shrugged, turning to help Aaron in clear dismissal. Neil, with Andrew a few steps behind, went into the room she directed them.

Renee was standing with her back to the door, her arms crossed, her blue dress traded for a pair of stacks. Her belt remained stung around her waist and still, despite everything, her bible remained tucked at the leather. Kevin stood as they entered, looking pale, and flexed his exposed wire fingers.

"He's dead," Neil told him, because if there was another else in the world who deserved the news, it would be Kevin, always under the other man's control for whatever twisted demand of the day. "You can check for yourself."

There was a long moment of silence as Kevin processed that, his eyes flickering to the door, and Neil was almost unsure if he'd do it. If he needed to. Eventually, after a minute of this, he peeled himself off the wall and walked out of the room on wobbly legs. Neil couldn't blame him - he'd need it to, after everything.

Renee turned to face them as the door slammed after Kevin, her hair pulled back from her face with the exception of a stubborn stray lock of hair. She looked like she’d been through war, but her eyes told the story of how she started it.

Neil swallowed, letting his arms drop from his chest, and finally took a much-needed breath of rest. Andrew, at his side, even without a touch to Neil at all was as steady as a presence, as supportive, as any wall Neil would lean on for relief.

It was Andrew who spoke up first. “What do we do next?”

There was so much in that question.

Down there, in his shack, in Palmetto, in the Saloon, in the fields, he never feared the future. He never thought much of it at all unless there was a gun pointed directly trying to stop it.

But the future - it was much of the moment right then. What the future held, what the future was, if they could even dream of one to hold onto. If freedom had a place in it. If Andrew would want one in his.

Almost as if he knew - because Andrew always knew, and there wasn’t a line of code to fake that - Andrew grabbed onto the cuff of his sleeve, and slid his hand into Neil’s after another moment.

If Neil had a future with him, with any piece of the other man Andrew would allow, he would want it. He would fight for it.

At their held hands, Renee seemed to only grow impossibly fiercer, stronger. What do we do next, Andrew had asked.

Renee pulled the notch back on her pistol, and the click that sounded with the action promised a future. "Now we fight."

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Best Cookbooks of Spring 2020

Dive into recipes from Melissa Clark, Nancy Silverton, Dominique Ansel, and more

When I first saw Lummi: Island Cooking, the new cookbook from Willows Inn chef Blaine Wetzel, I couldn’t help but pick it up. The book itself is wrapped in a rough but texturally pleasing yellow fabric, and the cover — a single deep-blue photograph affixed to the canvas — captivates. Inside, top-down photos of meticulously plated dishes fill entire pages and beg the question: What is that? And while I may never make the recipes for things like mushroom stews and marinated shellfish, they’re a window into a remote restaurant that I may never get to visit. Sure, I could find a few photos online, but a book that you hold in your hands carries weight — not just literally, but also in the way each page memorializes a recipe, dish, or moment in time.

The 15 titles here represent only a portion of the cookbooks on offer this spring, but they embody all of the qualities that make cookbooks worthy vehicles for imagination. There are debuts from chefs at the top of their game, and first-time restaurant cookbooks that may inspire you to host a clambake or make your own bubble tea. But there are plenty of cookbook veterans on this list, too, with contributions from Sami Tamimi (the non-Ottolenghi half of the duo behind Ottolenghi); pastry chef Dominique Ansel; and New York Times recipe maven Melissa Clark, whose recipes may dominate Google searches, but gain new dimension when they’re printed on a glossy page. — Monica Burton

The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook: Dishes and Dispatches from the Catskill Mountains

Mike Cioffi, Chris Bradley, Sara B. Franklin Clarkson Potter, out now

In 2011, Mike Ciofi did what many office workers spend their days dreaming about: He bid farewell to city life in favor of renovating and reinvigorating a roadside diner in the woodsy New York hamlet of Phoenicia. Today, Ciofi’s Phoenicia Diner is a hit among locals and tourists, as well as the Instagram glitterati that flocks in droves to sample the restaurant’s elevated diner fare and pose in the green vinyl booths. Though it might be a while before the rest of us achieve our own version of the Phoenicia Diner, it’s at least become easier for us to pretend with The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook, a collection of comfort-food recipes that make up the Ulster County hot spot’s celebrated menu. Try to make the renowned buttermilk pancakes on lazy Sunday morning, or enjoy a cozy night in with the chicken and chive dumplings. For lighter meals, the cookbook also includes a variety of fancy salads and some delicious-sounding vegetable preparations.

We live in uncomfortable times, but we still have comfort food — and our upstate escapist fantasies — to help us cope. So serve up some Phoenicia Diner recipes on enamel camping cookware, then curl up under a Pendleton (or Pendleton knock-off) blanket. It’s almost as good as the real thing. — Madeleine Davies

Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook

Evan Bloom and Rachel Levin Chronicle Books, out now

Chef Evan Bloom of San Francisco’s Wise Sons Deli and former Eater SF restaurant critic Rachel Levin teamed up to write an unconventional book about Jews and Jewish food. From the first chapter, “On Pastrami & Penises,” which jokingly weighs the morals of circumcision, it’s clear they succeeded. There are a trio of pastrami dishes (breakfast tacos, carbonara, a reuben) to celebrate “the cut,” before the authors move on to recipes for other life events, from J Dating in “The Young-Adulting Years” section to Shivah’s Silver Lining in “The Snowbird Years.”

This isn’t the first book to combine Jewish food and Jewish humor (the two are practically inseparable), but it has the added benefit of being actually funny. Eat Something sounds less like a commandment from bubbe and more like a comedian egging on readers to whip up a babka milkshake at 3 a.m. or serve chopped liver to unknowing goyim in-laws.

The authors gladly admit the book won’t satisfy conservative tastes. Wise Sons serves updated takes on deli fare, like pastrami fries, pastrami and eggs, and a roasted mushroom reuben, and “The Kvetching Department” chapter reprints customer complaints about Wise Sons’ sins against real deli. Those readers can find rote recipes for matzo balls and kugel elsewhere. Eat Something is for readers, Jewish or not, who prefer matzoquiles to matzo brei and a bloody moishe (a michelada spiked with horseradish and brine) to a bloody mary. — Nicholas Mancall-Bitel

Dinner in French: My Recipes by Way of France

Melissa Clark Clarkson Potter, out now

Melissa Clark is an important figure in my home eating life. Her cookbook Dinner lives on my kitchen counter, while her pressure-cooker bible Dinner in an Instant has helped me get over my anxiety around using the intimidating Instant Pot I received as a wedding present a few years ago. Her recipes in those books and over at the New York Times are energetic and reliable. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book since she announced it.

While I expected it to be a book of Clark’s favorite, tried-and-true French recipes, Dinner in French actually provides a guide to layering some French je ne sais quoi into the kinds of things you may well already love to eat. Instead of just mashing a microwaved sweet potato like I do a few times a week, Clark’s tempting me to make stretchy sweet potato pommes aligot with fried sage for a change. The translation flows in both directions. To a classic French omelet, Clark adds garlic and tahini and tops it with an herby yogurt sauce; she transforms ratatouille into a sheet-pan chicken dinner.

Dinner in French veers more into lifestyle territory than her reliable workhorse books. Shots of Clark living the good life in France — laughing at beautiful outdoor garden dining tables, shopping at the market, walking barefoot in a gorgeous farmhouse — are peppered throughout. Even if that’s not what I need from a Melissa Clark book, for all the work home cooks like me rely on her to do, she deserves a glam moment. — Hillary Dixler Canavan

The Boba Book: Bubble Tea and Beyond

Andrew Chau and Bin Chen Clarkson Potter, out now

What Blue Bottle did for coffee, Boba Guys did for boba. Since Andrew Chau and Bin Chen opened their first shop in San Francisco in 2013, the brand has grown to include 16 locations across the country. Along the way, the guys behind Boba Guys have redefined what it means to drink the popular Taiwanese tea with modern drinks that go beyond the traditional milk tea plus chewy tapioca balls to include items like strawberry matcha lattes and coffee-laced dirty horchatas.

The Boba Book includes step-by-step instructions for these specialties along with recommended toppings for each tea base. There’s also a separate chapter all about how to make toppings and add-ons from scratch, including grass jelly, mango pudding, and, of course, boba. While it’s likely many boba lovers have never even considered making their favorite drink at home, Chau and Chen’s simple directions prove all it takes is a little bit of dedication.

The Boba Book doesn’t offer a comprehensive history of boba; instead, it provides an impassioned argument for drinking boba now from Chau and Chin, who keep the tone friendly and conversational throughout. Colorful photos of drinks alongside pictures of Boba Guys’ fans, employees, friends, and family make the book feel like the brand’s yearbook. And even if there’s no interest in recreating the drinks at home, The Boba Book gives readers the best advice on getting the most enjoyment out of boba, including tips on how to achieve that perfect Instagram shot. — James Park

Ana Roš: Sun and Rain

Ana Roš Phaidon, March 25

Ana Roš is a chef on the rise. While not quite a household name in America, the Slovenia-based chef of Hiša Franko got the Chef’s Table treatment as well as plenty of attention from the World’s 50 Best List. She’s known for being an iconoclastic and self-taught chef.

As with so many fine dining restaurant books, this volume isn’t really meant to be cooked from at home. Roš seems to have gone into the process knowing that, so she avoids the standard headnote-recipe format. Instead, lyrical prose is frontloaded, taking up most of the book, with recipes for things like “deer black pudding with chestnuts and tangerines” or “duck liver, bergamot and riesling” stacked together with only the shortest of introductions at the end. Gorgeous, sweeping landscape photos of Slovenia coupled with gorgeous food photography, both by Suzan Gabrijan, provide a lush counterpoint to the text.

Rather than a guide to cooking like Roš, this is a testament to one chef’s life. There’s quite a bit of personal narrative, from Roš’s experiences with anorexia as an aspiring dancer to a meditation on killing deer inspired by her father’s hunting. And for fans of Chef’s Table, culinary trophy hunters, and/or lovers of travel photography, it’s worth a look. — HDC

Lummi: Island Cooking

Blaine Wetzel Prestel, April 7

The Willows Inn on Lummi Island is that specific kind of bucket-list restaurant that’s fetishized by fine dining lovers: isolated (the island sits two and a half hours and one ferry ride north of Seattle) and pricey ($225 for the tasting menu, not including the stay at the inn, a near prerequisite for snagging a reservation). I should find it irritating.

But the Willows Inn is also inherently of a place I have great affection for — the Pacific Northwest — and that’s captured beautifully in chef Blaine Wetzel’s Lummi: Island Cooking, a restaurant capsule of a cookbook that doesn’t feature the restaurant’s name in the title. Instead, the book is a survey of the ingredients farmed, foraged, and fished from the Puget Sound, a stunning taxonomy of salmonberries and spotted prawns, wild beach pea tips and razor clams. Several recipes quietly flaunt the inn’s reverence for the local bounty. Each in a quartet of mushroom stews involves just three ingredients: two kinds of mushrooms and butter; a recipe for smoked mussels simply calls for mussels, white wine, and a smoker.

The book, though, is really all about the visuals. Photographer Charity Burggraaf captures each striking dish from above on a flat-color background, and the bright pops of color and organic forms evoke brilliant museum specimens. Lummi: Island Cooking shows off the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest — and how in the hands of Wetzel and his team, they become worthy of this exacting kind of archive. — Erin DeJesus

My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes

Hooni Kim WW Norton, April 7

Hooni Kim’s debut cookbook, My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, is part cookbook, part autobiography. Before he opened Korean-American restaurants Danji and Hanjan in New York City, Kim worked at prestigious fine dining institutions like Daniel and Masa, and as a result, he interprets Korean cuisine with French and Japanese techniques.

Over 13 chapters, Kim breaks down the fundamentals of creating Korean flavors, from where to buy essential pantry items to how to recognize the different stages of kimchi fermentation. The recipes themselves cover a wide range, from classic banchan and soups to technique-driven entrees, such as bacon chorizo kimchi paella with French scrambled eggs, and a recipe for braised short ribs (galbi-jjim) that uses a classic French red wine braise method Kim mastered while working at Daniel.

The focus of the book is less about cooking easy, weeknight dinner recipes, and more about understanding and applying Korean cooking philosophy. Throughout, Kim talks about the importance of jung sung, a Korean word for care, which also translates into cooking with heart and devotion. The chef’s jung sung in making this book is apparent as Kim provides foundational knowledge to make readers aware of Korean culture, beyond just knowing how to cook Korean food. — JP

Everyone Can Bake: Simple Recipes to Master and Mix

Dominique Ansel Simon & Schuster, April 14

I’ll get this out of the way from the get go: Dominique Ansel’s newest cookbook has nothing at all to do with the Cronut. In fact, rather than simply a book of recipes for the things you’ll find at the Dominique Ansel bakeries and dessert shops stationed around the world, it’s a manual for how to make just about any dessert the reader’s heart desires, whatever their skill level. With Everyone Can Bake, Ansel asserts that armed with the “building blocks of baking” he provides, baking is achievable for even the most intimidated novice.

This idea guides the book’s structure. It’s split into three sections of Ansel’s “go-to” recipes: bases (which includes cakes, cookies, brownies, meringue, and other batters and doughs); fillings (pastry cream, ganache, mousse, etc.); and finishings (buttercreams, glazes, and other toppings). A fourth section covers assembly and techniques, such as how to construct a tart or glaze a cake. Charts at the front of the book show how these four sections combine to make complete desserts. For example, almond cake + matcha mousse + white chocolate glaze + how to assemble a mousse cake = matcha passion fruit mousse cake; vanilla sablé tart shell + pastry cream = flan.

Although the book’s primary aim is to simplify baking for newcomers, the notion that creativity can arise from working within the boundaries of fundamental building blocks is a helpful lesson for any home baker. And whether they’re after just those fundamentals or the “showstoppers” that come later, they’re in good hands with Ansel’s Everyone Can Bake. — MB

Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou

Melissa M. Martin Artisan, April 14

At Mosquito Supper Club, a tiny, 24-diners-per-night New Orleans restaurant that’s more like a big dinner party, chef and owner Melissa Martin keeps a shelf of spiral-bound Cajun cookbooks with recipes assembled by women’s church groups. “The cookbooks are timeless poetry and ambassadors for Cajun food,” Martin writes, “a place for women to record a piece of themselves.” Martin’s first cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, belongs alongside them. It’s a well-written personal and regional history of a world literally disappearing before our eyes due to climate change: Every hour, the Gulf of Mexico swallows a football field’s worth of land in Louisiana.

But Mosquito Supper Club isn’t an elegy. It’s a celebration of contemporary New Orleans, a timeless glossary of Cajun cookery, and a careful, practical guide to gathering seasonal ingredients and preparing dishes from duck gumbo to classic pecan pie. Martin’s recipes are occasionally difficult and time-consuming — stuffed crawfish heads are a “group project” — but written with gentle encouragement (“Keep stirring!”) and an expert’s precision. And since Martin’s restaurant is essentially a home kitchen, her recipes are easily adapted to the home cook (though not all of us will have the same access to ingredients, like shrimp from her cousin’s boat in her small hometown of Chauvin, Louisiana). Still, Mosquito Supper Club is a cookbook you’re likely to use, and as a powerful reminder of what we’re losing to climate change, it’s a book we could all use, too. — Caleb Pershan

Trejo’s Tacos: Recipes & Stories From L.A.

Danny Trejo Clarkson Potter, April 21

Anyone not living in Los Angeles will likely still recognize Danny Trejo. Muscular and tattooed, with a mustache dipping down below the corners of his lips and dark hair tied back in a ponytail, he makes an impression in just about every role he’s played in his 300-plus film career, whether it’s as a boxer in Runaway Train, the gadget-loving estranged uncle in Spy Kids, or a machete-wielding vigilante for hire in Machete. But since 2016, Trejo has taken on a role outside of Hollywood: co-owner of a growing fleet of LA taquerias.

Trejo’s Tacos, the 75-year-old’s first cookbook, written with Hugh Garvey, is as much a tribute to his restaurant legacy as it is to Los Angeles, his lifelong home. The actor spent his childhood dreaming of opening a restaurant with his mother in their Echo Park kitchen. Years later, film producer Ash Shah would plant the seeds and vision for Trejo’s future taquerias, opened with a culinary team led by consulting chef Daniel Mattern. The cookbook is a reflection of what the actor calls “LA-Mexican food.” Readers will find all the Trejo’s Tacos greatest hits in the collection, including recipes for pepita pesto, mushroom asada burritos, and fried chicken tacos. The recipes are relatively simple and malleable — designed for home cooks who might want chicken tikka bowls one night and chicken tikka tacos the next. There’s even a recipe for nacho donuts.

Throughout, Trejo interjects with stories from his life in LA, like the time a security guard on the set of Heat recognized him from the time he used to rob customers at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. “I used to rob restaurants,” he writes in his new cookbook. “Today I own eight of them.” — Brenna Houck

Falastin: A Cookbook

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley Ten Speed, April 28

Sami Tamimi and co-author Tara Wigley are probably best known for their proximity to Israeli chef and columnist Yotam Ottolenghi. Tamimi is Ottolenghi’s longtime business partner and co-author of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Wigley has collaborated with Ottolenghi on recipe writing since 2011. With Falastin, the pair are stepping out on their own for the first time as part of a rising chorus of voices celebrating Palestinian cuisine.

Falastin is the culmination of Tamimi’s lifelong “obsession” with Palestinian food. The Palestinian chef pays tribute to his mother and the home in East Jerusalem that he left to live in Tel Aviv and London, returning after 17 years. For Wigley, who grew up in Ireland, the book is about falling in love with the region and, particularly, shatta sauce (she’s sometimes referred to by her friends as “shattara”). However, the book isn’t about tradition. Tamimi and Wigley approach Falastin’s 110 recipes as reinterpretations of old favorites — something they acknowledge is an extremely thorny approach everywhere, and particularly given the highly politicized history of Palestine. Food, after all, isn’t just about ingredients and method; it’s also about who’s making it and telling its story.

To do this, Wigley and Taminmi instead take readers into Palestine, exploring the regional nuances of everything from the distinctive battiri eggplants, suited to being preserved and filled with walnuts and peppers for makdous, or the green chiles, garlic, and dill seeds used to prepare Gazan stuffed sardines. Along the way, they pause to amplify the voices of Palestinians, such as Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestinian Seed Library. Keep plenty of olive oil, lemon, and za’atar on hand. It’s a colorful, thoughtful, and delicious journey. — BH

Bitter Honey: Recipes and Stories from Sardinia

Letitia Clark Hardie Grant, April 28

At first glance, Bitter Honey seems like an outsider’s fantasy of Sardinia. British author Letitia Clark moved to the island with her Sardinian (now ex-) boyfriend, looking to escape Brexit and embrace a slower, more beautiful way of life. The book’s warm photography and indulgent descriptions of olive oil seem the stuff of an Under the Sardinian Sun romp. But then, it suddenly becomes real. In the introduction, she speaks of plastic Tupperware and paper plates and blaring TVs, and in stories throughout the book, she gives a more honest depiction of modern, everyday life in Sardinia.

Clark’s recipes are all about achievable fantasy, with some coming directly from her boyfriend’s family and some that are admitted riffs on Nigella Lawson recipes. But all include the island’s staple flavors and ingredients, like pork in anchovy sauce, fried sage leaves, saffron risotto, and culurgionis (essentially Sardinian ravioli) stuffed with potato, mint, cheese, and garlic. Clark describes Sardinian food as a “wilder” version of Italian cooking, something less refined and more visceral. The book is a great way to expand your regional palate, though you’ll have to source your own bottarga and pane carasau. — Jaya Saxena

The Vegetarian Silver Spoon: Classic & Contemporary Italian Recipes

Phaidon, April 29

The essential, 70-year-old Italian cookbook Il cucchiaio d’argento, known as The Silver Spoon in English, gets a plant-based update in The Vegetarian Silver Spoon, forthcoming from Phaidon. Boasting more than 200 vegetarian and vegan recipes, it’s a welcome addition to the library of Silver Spoon spinoffs in a time when diners are cutting back on meat consumption, whether for health, environmental, or animal welfare reasons. While some patrons of red-sauce Italian-American restaurants may exclusively associate the cuisine with weighty meatballs and rich, meaty sauces, as written in the book’s introduction, “the Italian diet has never centered on meat”; rather, home-style cooking “more often revolves around substantial vegetarian dishes like grains or stews.”

Across eight chapters — which are organized by dish, moving from lighter to heavier flavors — classic recipes like pizza bianca mingle with more regional specialties like Genovese minestrone, as well as less traditional fare like vegetable fried rice, demarcated with an icon of “CT” for “contemporary tastes” (other icons distinguish dairy-free, gluten-free, vegan, “30 minutes or less,” and “5 ingredients or fewer”). In this book, the writing is clear, the photos inviting, and above all, the sheer breadth of tasty-sounding dishes encyclopedic enough that any level of cook can find something to make. For fans of Italian cuisine, it’s impossible to flip through the pages without salivating, vegetarian or not. — Jenny G. Zhang

Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking

Nancy Silverton Knopf, April 30

For home cooks, restaurant cookbooks usually serve as half archive, half inspiration, but Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton writes ambitious recipes a home cook looking to grow (or flex) actually wants to try. The Chi Spacca cookbook, written by Silverton, Ryan DeNicola, and Carolyn Carreño, will fuel fantasies of massive slabs of meat seasoned with fennel pollen on the grill, served with salads of thinly shaved vegetables and a butterscotch budino for dessert.

Chi Spacca is the newest of Silverton’s three California-Italian restaurants clustered together in what locals call the Mozzaplex, and it’s decidedly meat focused (Chi Spacca means “he or she who cleaves” and is another word for butcher in Italian). One of the restaurant’s most famous dishes is a beef pie with a marrow bone sticking out of the middle, like the tentpole of a carnivorous circus. That recipe is in the book. So is one for the restaurant’s distinctive focaccia di Recco, a round, flaky, cheese-filled focaccia, which, according to a step-by-step photo tutorial, involves stretching the dough from the counter all the way down to the floor before folding it over into a copper pan. There’s a recipe for homemade ’nduja, a section of thorough grilling advice, and more precisely composed salads than 10 trips to the farmers market could possibly support.

What’s really wonderful about the book, however, is the way it mixes serious ambition with practical advice and tons of context. Silverton explains the inspiration and authorship of every dish, and in those headnotes reveals the extent to which Chi Spacca, for all its Tuscan butchery pedigree, is a deeply Californian restaurant. Reference points range from Park’s BBQ in Koreatown to trapped-in-amber steakhouse Dal Rae to the traditions of Santa Maria barbecue. And the recipes always consider the cook. My favorite headnote, for a persimmon salad, says, “The recipe for candied pecans makes twice what you need for this salad. My thought is that if you’re going to go to the effort to make them, there should be some for the cook to snack on.�� Entirely correct. — Meghan McCarron

Eventide: Recipes for Clambakes, Oysters, Lobster Rolls, and More From a Modern Maine Seafood Shack

Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, Mike Wiley, and Sam Hiersteiner Ten Speed, June 2

Eventide Oyster Co., named one of the best restaurants in New England by restaurant critic Bill Addison, embodies everything a Maine seafood shack should be — a casual place to sit down to slurp shellfish and eat fried seafood with friends and family. Since opening in Portland, Maine, in 2012, and despite accolades and expansion, it’s managed to retain that convivial feel. Now co-owners Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, and Mike Wiley, along with writer Sam Hiersteiner, have created a breezy cookbook for easy entertaining and coastal-inspired cooking.

With 120 recipes, accompanied by visual how-tos and guides on how to properly prepare seafood and shellfish, Eventide offers enough insight to make any home cook feel comfortable assembling an amazing raw bar or hosting a full New England clambake. The book even gets into less-traditional ways to use seafood as the basis for celebratory meals, with recipes for oysters with kimchi rice, halibut tail bo ssam, and the restaurant’s famed brown butter lobster rolls. And although seafood dominates, the authors of Eventide include alternatives to satisfy anyone, like the restaurant’s burger, a smoked tofu sandwich, potato chips and puffed snacks, plus a blueberry lattice pie for dessert. Whether or not you live by the coast, Eventide is the perfect spring cookbook to help you prepare to turn your kitchen into a New England oyster bar this summer. — Esra Erol

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Dive into recipes from Melissa Clark, Nancy Silverton, Dominique Ansel, and more

When I first saw Lummi: Island Cooking, the new cookbook from Willows Inn chef Blaine Wetzel, I couldn’t help but pick it up. The book itself is wrapped in a rough but texturally pleasing yellow fabric, and the cover — a single deep-blue photograph affixed to the canvas — captivates. Inside, top-down photos of meticulously plated dishes fill entire pages and beg the question: What is that? And while I may never make the recipes for things like mushroom stews and marinated shellfish, they’re a window into a remote restaurant that I may never get to visit. Sure, I could find a few photos online, but a book that you hold in your hands carries weight — not just literally, but also in the way each page memorializes a recipe, dish, or moment in time.

The 15 titles here represent only a portion of the cookbooks on offer this spring, but they embody all of the qualities that make cookbooks worthy vehicles for imagination. There are debuts from chefs at the top of their game, and first-time restaurant cookbooks that may inspire you to host a clambake or make your own bubble tea. But there are plenty of cookbook veterans on this list, too, with contributions from Sami Tamimi (the non-Ottolenghi half of the duo behind Ottolenghi); pastry chef Dominique Ansel; and New York Times recipe maven Melissa Clark, whose recipes may dominate Google searches, but gain new dimension when they’re printed on a glossy page. — Monica Burton

The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook: Dishes and Dispatches from the Catskill Mountains

Mike Cioffi, Chris Bradley, Sara B. Franklin Clarkson Potter, out now

In 2011, Mike Ciofi did what many office workers spend their days dreaming about: He bid farewell to city life in favor of renovating and reinvigorating a roadside diner in the woodsy New York hamlet of Phoenicia. Today, Ciofi’s Phoenicia Diner is a hit among locals and tourists, as well as the Instagram glitterati that flocks in droves to sample the restaurant’s elevated diner fare and pose in the green vinyl booths. Though it might be a while before the rest of us achieve our own version of the Phoenicia Diner, it’s at least become easier for us to pretend with The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook, a collection of comfort-food recipes that make up the Ulster County hot spot’s celebrated menu. Try to make the renowned buttermilk pancakes on lazy Sunday morning, or enjoy a cozy night in with the chicken and chive dumplings. For lighter meals, the cookbook also includes a variety of fancy salads and some delicious-sounding vegetable preparations.

We live in uncomfortable times, but we still have comfort food — and our upstate escapist fantasies — to help us cope. So serve up some Phoenicia Diner recipes on enamel camping cookware, then curl up under a Pendleton (or Pendleton knock-off) blanket. It’s almost as good as the real thing. — Madeleine Davies

Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook

Evan Bloom and Rachel Levin Chronicle Books, out now

Chef Evan Bloom of San Francisco’s Wise Sons Deli and former Eater SF restaurant critic Rachel Levin teamed up to write an unconventional book about Jews and Jewish food. From the first chapter, “On Pastrami & Penises,” which jokingly weighs the morals of circumcision, it’s clear they succeeded. There are a trio of pastrami dishes (breakfast tacos, carbonara, a reuben) to celebrate “the cut,” before the authors move on to recipes for other life events, from J Dating in “The Young-Adulting Years” section to Shivah’s Silver Lining in “The Snowbird Years.”

This isn’t the first book to combine Jewish food and Jewish humor (the two are practically inseparable), but it has the added benefit of being actually funny. Eat Something sounds less like a commandment from bubbe and more like a comedian egging on readers to whip up a babka milkshake at 3 a.m. or serve chopped liver to unknowing goyim in-laws.

The authors gladly admit the book won’t satisfy conservative tastes. Wise Sons serves updated takes on deli fare, like pastrami fries, pastrami and eggs, and a roasted mushroom reuben, and “The Kvetching Department” chapter reprints customer complaints about Wise Sons’ sins against real deli. Those readers can find rote recipes for matzo balls and kugel elsewhere. Eat Something is for readers, Jewish or not, who prefer matzoquiles to matzo brei and a bloody moishe (a michelada spiked with horseradish and brine) to a bloody mary. — Nicholas Mancall-Bitel

Dinner in French: My Recipes by Way of France

Melissa Clark Clarkson Potter, out now

Melissa Clark is an important figure in my home eating life. Her cookbook Dinner lives on my kitchen counter, while her pressure-cooker bible Dinner in an Instant has helped me get over my anxiety around using the intimidating Instant Pot I received as a wedding present a few years ago. Her recipes in those books and over at the New York Times are energetic and reliable. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book since she announced it.

While I expected it to be a book of Clark’s favorite, tried-and-true French recipes, Dinner in French actually provides a guide to layering some French je ne sais quoi into the kinds of things you may well already love to eat. Instead of just mashing a microwaved sweet potato like I do a few times a week, Clark’s tempting me to make stretchy sweet potato pommes aligot with fried sage for a change. The translation flows in both directions. To a classic French omelet, Clark adds garlic and tahini and tops it with an herby yogurt sauce; she transforms ratatouille into a sheet-pan chicken dinner.

Dinner in French veers more into lifestyle territory than her reliable workhorse books. Shots of Clark living the good life in France — laughing at beautiful outdoor garden dining tables, shopping at the market, walking barefoot in a gorgeous farmhouse — are peppered throughout. Even if that’s not what I need from a Melissa Clark book, for all the work home cooks like me rely on her to do, she deserves a glam moment. — Hillary Dixler Canavan

The Boba Book: Bubble Tea and Beyond

Andrew Chau and Bin Chen Clarkson Potter, out now

What Blue Bottle did for coffee, Boba Guys did for boba. Since Andrew Chau and Bin Chen opened their first shop in San Francisco in 2013, the brand has grown to include 16 locations across the country. Along the way, the guys behind Boba Guys have redefined what it means to drink the popular Taiwanese tea with modern drinks that go beyond the traditional milk tea plus chewy tapioca balls to include items like strawberry matcha lattes and coffee-laced dirty horchatas.

The Boba Book includes step-by-step instructions for these specialties along with recommended toppings for each tea base. There’s also a separate chapter all about how to make toppings and add-ons from scratch, including grass jelly, mango pudding, and, of course, boba. While it’s likely many boba lovers have never even considered making their favorite drink at home, Chau and Chen’s simple directions prove all it takes is a little bit of dedication.

The Boba Book doesn’t offer a comprehensive history of boba; instead, it provides an impassioned argument for drinking boba now from Chau and Chin, who keep the tone friendly and conversational throughout. Colorful photos of drinks alongside pictures of Boba Guys’ fans, employees, friends, and family make the book feel like the brand’s yearbook. And even if there’s no interest in recreating the drinks at home, The Boba Book gives readers the best advice on getting the most enjoyment out of boba, including tips on how to achieve that perfect Instagram shot. — James Park

Ana Roš: Sun and Rain

Ana Roš Phaidon, March 25

Ana Roš is a chef on the rise. While not quite a household name in America, the Slovenia-based chef of Hiša Franko got the Chef’s Table treatment as well as plenty of attention from the World’s 50 Best List. She’s known for being an iconoclastic and self-taught chef.

As with so many fine dining restaurant books, this volume isn’t really meant to be cooked from at home. Roš seems to have gone into the process knowing that, so she avoids the standard headnote-recipe format. Instead, lyrical prose is frontloaded, taking up most of the book, with recipes for things like “deer black pudding with chestnuts and tangerines” or “duck liver, bergamot and riesling” stacked together with only the shortest of introductions at the end. Gorgeous, sweeping landscape photos of Slovenia coupled with gorgeous food photography, both by Suzan Gabrijan, provide a lush counterpoint to the text.

Rather than a guide to cooking like Roš, this is a testament to one chef’s life. There’s quite a bit of personal narrative, from Roš’s experiences with anorexia as an aspiring dancer to a meditation on killing deer inspired by her father’s hunting. And for fans of Chef’s Table, culinary trophy hunters, and/or lovers of travel photography, it’s worth a look. — HDC

Lummi: Island Cooking

Blaine Wetzel Prestel, April 7

The Willows Inn on Lummi Island is that specific kind of bucket-list restaurant that’s fetishized by fine dining lovers: isolated (the island sits two and a half hours and one ferry ride north of Seattle) and pricey ($225 for the tasting menu, not including the stay at the inn, a near prerequisite for snagging a reservation). I should find it irritating.

But the Willows Inn is also inherently of a place I have great affection for — the Pacific Northwest — and that’s captured beautifully in chef Blaine Wetzel’s Lummi: Island Cooking, a restaurant capsule of a cookbook that doesn’t feature the restaurant’s name in the title. Instead, the book is a survey of the ingredients farmed, foraged, and fished from the Puget Sound, a stunning taxonomy of salmonberries and spotted prawns, wild beach pea tips and razor clams. Several recipes quietly flaunt the inn’s reverence for the local bounty. Each in a quartet of mushroom stews involves just three ingredients: two kinds of mushrooms and butter; a recipe for smoked mussels simply calls for mussels, white wine, and a smoker.

The book, though, is really all about the visuals. Photographer Charity Burggraaf captures each striking dish from above on a flat-color background, and the bright pops of color and organic forms evoke brilliant museum specimens. Lummi: Island Cooking shows off the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest — and how in the hands of Wetzel and his team, they become worthy of this exacting kind of archive. — Erin DeJesus

My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes

Hooni Kim WW Norton, April 7

Hooni Kim’s debut cookbook, My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, is part cookbook, part autobiography. Before he opened Korean-American restaurants Danji and Hanjan in New York City, Kim worked at prestigious fine dining institutions like Daniel and Masa, and as a result, he interprets Korean cuisine with French and Japanese techniques.

Over 13 chapters, Kim breaks down the fundamentals of creating Korean flavors, from where to buy essential pantry items to how to recognize the different stages of kimchi fermentation. The recipes themselves cover a wide range, from classic banchan and soups to technique-driven entrees, such as bacon chorizo kimchi paella with French scrambled eggs, and a recipe for braised short ribs (galbi-jjim) that uses a classic French red wine braise method Kim mastered while working at Daniel.

The focus of the book is less about cooking easy, weeknight dinner recipes, and more about understanding and applying Korean cooking philosophy. Throughout, Kim talks about the importance of jung sung, a Korean word for care, which also translates into cooking with heart and devotion. The chef’s jung sung in making this book is apparent as Kim provides foundational knowledge to make readers aware of Korean culture, beyond just knowing how to cook Korean food. — JP

Everyone Can Bake: Simple Recipes to Master and Mix

Dominique Ansel Simon & Schuster, April 14

I’ll get this out of the way from the get go: Dominique Ansel’s newest cookbook has nothing at all to do with the Cronut. In fact, rather than simply a book of recipes for the things you’ll find at the Dominique Ansel bakeries and dessert shops stationed around the world, it’s a manual for how to make just about any dessert the reader’s heart desires, whatever their skill level. With Everyone Can Bake, Ansel asserts that armed with the “building blocks of baking” he provides, baking is achievable for even the most intimidated novice.

This idea guides the book’s structure. It’s split into three sections of Ansel’s “go-to” recipes: bases (which includes cakes, cookies, brownies, meringue, and other batters and doughs); fillings (pastry cream, ganache, mousse, etc.); and finishings (buttercreams, glazes, and other toppings). A fourth section covers assembly and techniques, such as how to construct a tart or glaze a cake. Charts at the front of the book show how these four sections combine to make complete desserts. For example, almond cake + matcha mousse + white chocolate glaze + how to assemble a mousse cake = matcha passion fruit mousse cake; vanilla sablé tart shell + pastry cream = flan.

Although the book’s primary aim is to simplify baking for newcomers, the notion that creativity can arise from working within the boundaries of fundamental building blocks is a helpful lesson for any home baker. And whether they’re after just those fundamentals or the “showstoppers” that come later, they’re in good hands with Ansel’s Everyone Can Bake. — MB

Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou

Melissa M. Martin Artisan, April 14

At Mosquito Supper Club, a tiny, 24-diners-per-night New Orleans restaurant that’s more like a big dinner party, chef and owner Melissa Martin keeps a shelf of spiral-bound Cajun cookbooks with recipes assembled by women’s church groups. “The cookbooks are timeless poetry and ambassadors for Cajun food,” Martin writes, “a place for women to record a piece of themselves.” Martin’s first cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, belongs alongside them. It’s a well-written personal and regional history of a world literally disappearing before our eyes due to climate change: Every hour, the Gulf of Mexico swallows a football field’s worth of land in Louisiana.

But Mosquito Supper Club isn’t an elegy. It’s a celebration of contemporary New Orleans, a timeless glossary of Cajun cookery, and a careful, practical guide to gathering seasonal ingredients and preparing dishes from duck gumbo to classic pecan pie. Martin’s recipes are occasionally difficult and time-consuming — stuffed crawfish heads are a “group project” — but written with gentle encouragement (“Keep stirring!”) and an expert’s precision. And since Martin’s restaurant is essentially a home kitchen, her recipes are easily adapted to the home cook (though not all of us will have the same access to ingredients, like shrimp from her cousin’s boat in her small hometown of Chauvin, Louisiana). Still, Mosquito Supper Club is a cookbook you’re likely to use, and as a powerful reminder of what we’re losing to climate change, it’s a book we could all use, too. — Caleb Pershan

Trejo’s Tacos: Recipes & Stories From L.A.

Danny Trejo Clarkson Potter, April 21

Anyone not living in Los Angeles will likely still recognize Danny Trejo. Muscular and tattooed, with a mustache dipping down below the corners of his lips and dark hair tied back in a ponytail, he makes an impression in just about every role he’s played in his 300-plus film career, whether it’s as a boxer in Runaway Train, the gadget-loving estranged uncle in Spy Kids, or a machete-wielding vigilante for hire in Machete. But since 2016, Trejo has taken on a role outside of Hollywood: co-owner of a growing fleet of LA taquerias.

Trejo’s Tacos, the 75-year-old’s first cookbook, written with Hugh Garvey, is as much a tribute to his restaurant legacy as it is to Los Angeles, his lifelong home. The actor spent his childhood dreaming of opening a restaurant with his mother in their Echo Park kitchen. Years later, film producer Ash Shah would plant the seeds and vision for Trejo’s future taquerias, opened with a culinary team led by consulting chef Daniel Mattern. The cookbook is a reflection of what the actor calls “LA-Mexican food.” Readers will find all the Trejo’s Tacos greatest hits in the collection, including recipes for pepita pesto, mushroom asada burritos, and fried chicken tacos. The recipes are relatively simple and malleable — designed for home cooks who might want chicken tikka bowls one night and chicken tikka tacos the next. There’s even a recipe for nacho donuts.

Throughout, Trejo interjects with stories from his life in LA, like the time a security guard on the set of Heat recognized him from the time he used to rob customers at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. “I used to rob restaurants,” he writes in his new cookbook. “Today I own eight of them.” — Brenna Houck

Falastin: A Cookbook

Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley Ten Speed, April 28

Sami Tamimi and co-author Tara Wigley are probably best known for their proximity to Israeli chef and columnist Yotam Ottolenghi. Tamimi is Ottolenghi’s longtime business partner and co-author of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Wigley has collaborated with Ottolenghi on recipe writing since 2011. With Falastin, the pair are stepping out on their own for the first time as part of a rising chorus of voices celebrating Palestinian cuisine.

Falastin is the culmination of Tamimi’s lifelong “obsession” with Palestinian food. The Palestinian chef pays tribute to his mother and the home in East Jerusalem that he left to live in Tel Aviv and London, returning after 17 years. For Wigley, who grew up in Ireland, the book is about falling in love with the region and, particularly, shatta sauce (she’s sometimes referred to by her friends as “shattara”). However, the book isn’t about tradition. Tamimi and Wigley approach Falastin’s 110 recipes as reinterpretations of old favorites — something they acknowledge is an extremely thorny approach everywhere, and particularly given the highly politicized history of Palestine. Food, after all, isn’t just about ingredients and method; it’s also about who’s making it and telling its story.

To do this, Wigley and Taminmi instead take readers into Palestine, exploring the regional nuances of everything from the distinctive battiri eggplants, suited to being preserved and filled with walnuts and peppers for makdous, or the green chiles, garlic, and dill seeds used to prepare Gazan stuffed sardines. Along the way, they pause to amplify the voices of Palestinians, such as Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestinian Seed Library. Keep plenty of olive oil, lemon, and za’atar on hand. It’s a colorful, thoughtful, and delicious journey. — BH

Bitter Honey: Recipes and Stories from Sardinia

Letitia Clark Hardie Grant, April 28

At first glance, Bitter Honey seems like an outsider’s fantasy of Sardinia. British author Letitia Clark moved to the island with her Sardinian (now ex-) boyfriend, looking to escape Brexit and embrace a slower, more beautiful way of life. The book’s warm photography and indulgent descriptions of olive oil seem the stuff of an Under the Sardinian Sun romp. But then, it suddenly becomes real. In the introduction, she speaks of plastic Tupperware and paper plates and blaring TVs, and in stories throughout the book, she gives a more honest depiction of modern, everyday life in Sardinia.

Clark’s recipes are all about achievable fantasy, with some coming directly from her boyfriend’s family and some that are admitted riffs on Nigella Lawson recipes. But all include the island’s staple flavors and ingredients, like pork in anchovy sauce, fried sage leaves, saffron risotto, and culurgionis (essentially Sardinian ravioli) stuffed with potato, mint, cheese, and garlic. Clark describes Sardinian food as a “wilder” version of Italian cooking, something less refined and more visceral. The book is a great way to expand your regional palate, though you’ll have to source your own bottarga and pane carasau. — Jaya Saxena

The Vegetarian Silver Spoon: Classic & Contemporary Italian Recipes

Phaidon, April 29

The essential, 70-year-old Italian cookbook Il cucchiaio d’argento, known as The Silver Spoon in English, gets a plant-based update in The Vegetarian Silver Spoon, forthcoming from Phaidon. Boasting more than 200 vegetarian and vegan recipes, it’s a welcome addition to the library of Silver Spoon spinoffs in a time when diners are cutting back on meat consumption, whether for health, environmental, or animal welfare reasons. While some patrons of red-sauce Italian-American restaurants may exclusively associate the cuisine with weighty meatballs and rich, meaty sauces, as written in the book’s introduction, “the Italian diet has never centered on meat”; rather, home-style cooking “more often revolves around substantial vegetarian dishes like grains or stews.”

Across eight chapters — which are organized by dish, moving from lighter to heavier flavors — classic recipes like pizza bianca mingle with more regional specialties like Genovese minestrone, as well as less traditional fare like vegetable fried rice, demarcated with an icon of “CT” for “contemporary tastes” (other icons distinguish dairy-free, gluten-free, vegan, “30 minutes or less,” and “5 ingredients or fewer”). In this book, the writing is clear, the photos inviting, and above all, the sheer breadth of tasty-sounding dishes encyclopedic enough that any level of cook can find something to make. For fans of Italian cuisine, it’s impossible to flip through the pages without salivating, vegetarian or not. — Jenny G. Zhang

Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking

Nancy Silverton Knopf, April 30

For home cooks, restaurant cookbooks usually serve as half archive, half inspiration, but Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton writes ambitious recipes a home cook looking to grow (or flex) actually wants to try. The Chi Spacca cookbook, written by Silverton, Ryan DeNicola, and Carolyn Carreño, will fuel fantasies of massive slabs of meat seasoned with fennel pollen on the grill, served with salads of thinly shaved vegetables and a butterscotch budino for dessert.

Chi Spacca is the newest of Silverton’s three California-Italian restaurants clustered together in what locals call the Mozzaplex, and it’s decidedly meat focused (Chi Spacca means “he or she who cleaves” and is another word for butcher in Italian). One of the restaurant’s most famous dishes is a beef pie with a marrow bone sticking out of the middle, like the tentpole of a carnivorous circus. That recipe is in the book. So is one for the restaurant’s distinctive focaccia di Recco, a round, flaky, cheese-filled focaccia, which, according to a step-by-step photo tutorial, involves stretching the dough from the counter all the way down to the floor before folding it over into a copper pan. There’s a recipe for homemade ’nduja, a section of thorough grilling advice, and more precisely composed salads than 10 trips to the farmers market could possibly support.

What’s really wonderful about the book, however, is the way it mixes serious ambition with practical advice and tons of context. Silverton explains the inspiration and authorship of every dish, and in those headnotes reveals the extent to which Chi Spacca, for all its Tuscan butchery pedigree, is a deeply Californian restaurant. Reference points range from Park’s BBQ in Koreatown to trapped-in-amber steakhouse Dal Rae to the traditions of Santa Maria barbecue. And the recipes always consider the cook. My favorite headnote, for a persimmon salad, says, “The recipe for candied pecans makes twice what you need for this salad. My thought is that if you’re going to go to the effort to make them, there should be some for the cook to snack on.” Entirely correct. — Meghan McCarron

Eventide: Recipes for Clambakes, Oysters, Lobster Rolls, and More From a Modern Maine Seafood Shack

Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, Mike Wiley, and Sam Hiersteiner Ten Speed, June 2

Eventide Oyster Co., named one of the best restaurants in New England by restaurant critic Bill Addison, embodies everything a Maine seafood shack should be — a casual place to sit down to slurp shellfish and eat fried seafood with friends and family. Since opening in Portland, Maine, in 2012, and despite accolades and expansion, it’s managed to retain that convivial feel. Now co-owners Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, and Mike Wiley, along with writer Sam Hiersteiner, have created a breezy cookbook for easy entertaining and coastal-inspired cooking.

With 120 recipes, accompanied by visual how-tos and guides on how to properly prepare seafood and shellfish, Eventide offers enough insight to make any home cook feel comfortable assembling an amazing raw bar or hosting a full New England clambake. The book even gets into less-traditional ways to use seafood as the basis for celebratory meals, with recipes for oysters with kimchi rice, halibut tail bo ssam, and the restaurant’s famed brown butter lobster rolls. And although seafood dominates, the authors of Eventide include alternatives to satisfy anyone, like the restaurant’s burger, a smoked tofu sandwich, potato chips and puffed snacks, plus a blueberry lattice pie for dessert. Whether or not you live by the coast, Eventide is the perfect spring cookbook to help you prepare to turn your kitchen into a New England oyster bar this summer. — Esra Erol

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3bliuEe via Blogger https://ift.tt/2QGkXkG

[paullassiterca]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola’s All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma’s most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as “life-saving.” One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an “anticancer” vaccine, even though there’s not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as “coincidental.”

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that “hundreds” of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it’s far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered “DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated.” According to the authors, “All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.”

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children’s immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they’re 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child’s health. What’s worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as “vaccine court,” which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,”7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their “unavoidably unsafe” nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell’s palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we’re looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

“Zimmerman was the government’s top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn’t cause autism. The debate was declared over,” Attkisson reports. “But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government’s own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had “discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.”

“I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder,” Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he’d informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Attkisson’s report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It’s important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London’s Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

“Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore’s death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination.”

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of “The Doctors” talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, “Vaxxed,” discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn’t follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I’ve focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you’re having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it’s a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in “How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk.”

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you’re at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It’s important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: “What is this medication? What is it for? What’s the dose?” Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they’re getting it right if they know they’ll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in “What Hospitals Won’t Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life,” or pick up a copy of his book, “Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay.”

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign “Safe Surgery Saves Lives.” The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it’s sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik’s protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don’t work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they’ve perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see “Treating Pain Without Drugs,” and “Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture’s Ability to Reduce Pain,” which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from Articles http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx source https://niapurenaturecom.tumblr.com/post/182210854766

[jerrytackettca]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola's All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma's most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an "anticancer" vaccine, even though there's not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as "coincidental."

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that "hundreds" of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it's far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered "DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated." According to the authors, "All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis."

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children's immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they're 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child's health. What's worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as "vaccine court," which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are "unavoidably unsafe,"7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their "unavoidably unsafe" nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell's palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we're looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

"Zimmerman was the government's top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn't cause autism. The debate was declared over," Attkisson reports. "But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government's own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had "discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism."

"I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder," Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he'd informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don't cause autism.

Attkisson's report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It's important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London's Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

"Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore's death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination."

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of "The Doctors" talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, "Vaxxed," discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn't follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I've focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you're having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it's a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in "How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk."

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you're at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It's important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: "What is this medication? What is it for? What's the dose?" Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they're getting it right if they know they'll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in "What Hospitals Won't Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life," or pick up a copy of his book, "Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay."

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign "Safe Surgery Saves Lives." The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it's sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik's protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don't work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they've perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see "Treating Pain Without Drugs," and "Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture's Ability to Reduce Pain," which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx

source http://niapurenaturecom.weebly.com/blog/top-tips-to-avoid-pharmaceutical-injury

[jakehglover]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola's All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma's most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an "anticancer" vaccine, even though there's not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as "coincidental."

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that "hundreds" of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it's far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered "DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated." According to the authors, "All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis."

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children's immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they're 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child's health. What's worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as "vaccine court," which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are "unavoidably unsafe,"7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their "unavoidably unsafe" nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell's palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we're looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

"Zimmerman was the government's top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn't cause autism. The debate was declared over," Attkisson reports. "But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government's own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had "discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism."

"I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder," Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he'd informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don't cause autism.

Attkisson's report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It's important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London's Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

"Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore's death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination."

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of "The Doctors" talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, "Vaxxed," discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn't follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I've focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you're having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it's a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in "How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk."

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you're at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It's important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: "What is this medication? What is it for? What's the dose?" Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they're getting it right if they know they'll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in "What Hospitals Won't Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life," or pick up a copy of his book, "Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay."

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign "Safe Surgery Saves Lives." The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it's sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik's protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don't work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they've perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see "Treating Pain Without Drugs," and "Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture's Ability to Reduce Pain," which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The truth of corporate journalism, and the great irony of its obsession with ‘fake news’, is that it is itself utterly fake. What could be more obviously fake than the idea that Truth can be sold by billionaire-owned media dependent on billionaire-owned advertisers for maximised profit? The ‘mainstream’ worldview is anything but – it is extreme, weird, a product of corporate conformity and deference to power. As Norman Mailer observed: There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable… The unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine.1 A prime example of ‘mainstream’ extremism is the way the UK’s illegal wars destroying whole countries are not an issue for corporate moralists. Physicians for Global Responsibility estimate that 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. And yet it is simply understood that UK wars will not be a theme during general elections (See here and here). By contrast, other kinds of ‘inappropriate behaviour’ are subject to intense scrutiny. Consider the recent resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon and his replacement by Prime Minister Theresa May’s Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson. Fallon resigned after it was revealed that he had ‘repeatedly touched the broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer’s knee at a dinner in 2002’. Fallon was damaged further by revelations that he had lunged at journalist Jane Merrick: This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips. The Commons leader Andrea Leadsom also disclosed that she had complained about ‘lewd remarks’ Fallon had made to her. Sexual harassment is a serious issue, despite the scoffing of some male commentators. In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens shamefully dismissed women’s complaints as mere ‘squawking’. But it is strange indeed that, while harassment is rightly deemed a resigning offence, other ‘inappropriate behaviour’ leaves ‘mainstream’ commentators completely unmoved. Fallon voted for both the 2003 war that destroyed Iraq and the 2011 war that wrecked Libya. He voted for war on Syria. He voted for replacing the Trident nuclear missile system. Earlier this year, he even declared that Britain would be willing to launch a nuclear first strike. After he was made Secretary of Defence in July 2014, Fallon oversaw the supply of weapons to Saudi Arabia waging war on Yemen. Two years later, Campaign Against Arms Trade reported that UK sales to Saudi Arabia since the start of the war included £2.2 billion of aircraft, helicopters and drones, £1.1 billion of missiles, bombs and grenades, and nearly half a million pounds’ worth of tanks and other armoured vehicles. British sales of military equipment to the kingdom topped £1.1bn in the first half of this year alone. In December 2016, Fallon admitted that internationally banned cluster munitions supplied by the UK had been used in Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign. Six months earlier, Amnesty International had reported that British-made cluster bombs were being used in attacks on civilians that had claimed the lives of children. For none of these horrors did Fallon resign. So what kind of conflict are these weapons fuelling? The Guardian reports this week: Yemen is in the grip of the world’s worst cholera outbreak and 7 million people are already on the brink of famine. In July, Reliefweb reported: The scale of the food crisis in conflict-ridden Yemen is staggering with 17 million people – two thirds of the population – severely food insecure and seven million of these on the verge of famine. Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, José Graziano da Silva, has described Yemen as the UN’s ‘largest humanitarian crisis today’, noting that conflict and violence have disrupted agriculture, with violence intensifying in areas most short of food. In December 2016, a study by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, found that at least one child was dying in Yemen every 10 minutes. The agency found that, since 2014, there had been a 200 per cent increase in children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, with almost half a million affected. Nearly 2.2 million children were in need of urgent care. This week, the Saudi-led coalition declared it would close Yemen’s borders to prevent an alleged flow of weapons from Iran, after it intercepted a missile attack by Houthi rebels near Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Johan Mooij, Yemen director of Care International, commented: For the last two days, nothing has got in or out of the country. Fuel prices have gone up by 50% and there are queues at the gas stations. People fear no more fuel will come into Hodeidah port. He added: People depend on the humanitarian aid and part of the cholera issue [is] that they do not eat and are not strong enough to deal with unclean water. There have been ‘daily airstrikes in Sana’a,’ Mooij said, adding: ‘People fear the situation is escalating.’ On Monday, the UN’s World Food Program said that, out of Yemen’s entire population of 28 million people, about 20 million, ‘do not know where they’re going to get their next meal’. These are Fallon’s millions, May’s millions, the ‘mainstream’s’ millions. In the Independent, Mary Dejevsky made the only mention of Yemen in an article discussing Fallon’s resignation that we have seen in the national corporate press: In the Middle East [on Fallon’s watch], the UK made great efforts to maintain its alliance with Saudi Arabia – and the arms sales that went with it – playing down the desperate plight of Yemen which was a by-product of this policy. Mass death, Iraq and Libya destroyed, millions of lives torn apart, profiteering in the billions from the torture of an impoverished, famine-stricken nation – none of this was deemed worthy even of mention in considering the record of Fallon and his ‘inappropriate behaviour’. As for his replacement, the Guardian‘s Andrew Sparrow tweeted a link to his blog piece titled: ’10 things you might not know about Gavin Williamson’. Vital facts included news that the new Defence Secretary ‘kept a pet tarantula called Cronus on his desk’, ‘likes hedgehogs’, ‘is only 41’, and ‘went to a comprehensive school’. Sparrow was adhering to the journalistic convention that parliamentary politics should be depicted as a light-hearted, Wodehousian farce. It is all a bit of a laugh – everybody means well. Despite Williamson’s lethal new role, the word ‘war’ was not mentioned. Preoccupied with spiders and hedgehogs, Sparrow found no space to mention that Williamson ‘almost always voted for use of UK military forces in combat operations overseas’. He voted for war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. He voted against the Yemen motion put before the House of Commons in October 2016 that merely called on the Government to suspend its support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces in Yemen until it had been determined whether they had been responsible for war crimes. The motion was defeated by 283 votes to 193, telling us everything we need to know about the ‘mainstream’s’ much-loved myth that British policy is motivated by a ‘responsibility to protect’. The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted a link to the BBC’s own comedy profile, which also discussed the tarantula and other nonsense, and made no mention of Williamson’s record on war. We asked Kuenssberg: Will you be asking him if he has any regrets on voting against the Yemen motion to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia, given the vast civilian crisis? We received no reply. The extreme cognitive dissonance guiding ‘mainstream’ moral outrage was again highlighted by the Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff, who tweeted: Can’t help thinking that now would be quite a good time for the first ever female defence secretary, really We asked: What difference would it make to the civilians dying under our bombs in Yemen and Syria? Isn’t that the key issue on “defence”? Hinsliff did not reply. But the answer, of course, is that it would make no difference at all. * Mailer, The Time Of Our Time, Little Brown, 1998, p.457. http://clubof.info/

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Dive into recipes from Melissa Clark, Nancy Silverton, Dominique Ansel, and more When I first saw Lummi: Island Cooking, the new cookbook from Willows Inn chef Blaine Wetzel, I couldn’t help but pick it up. The book itself is wrapped in a rough but texturally pleasing yellow fabric, and the cover — a single deep-blue photograph affixed to the canvas — captivates. Inside, top-down photos of meticulously plated dishes fill entire pages and beg the question: What is that? And while I may never make the recipes for things like mushroom stews and marinated shellfish, they’re a window into a remote restaurant that I may never get to visit. Sure, I could find a few photos online, but a book that you hold in your hands carries weight — not just literally, but also in the way each page memorializes a recipe, dish, or moment in time. The 15 titles here represent only a portion of the cookbooks on offer this spring, but they embody all of the qualities that make cookbooks worthy vehicles for imagination. There are debuts from chefs at the top of their game, and first-time restaurant cookbooks that may inspire you to host a clambake or make your own bubble tea. But there are plenty of cookbook veterans on this list, too, with contributions from Sami Tamimi (the non-Ottolenghi half of the duo behind Ottolenghi); pastry chef Dominique Ansel; and New York Times recipe maven Melissa Clark, whose recipes may dominate Google searches, but gain new dimension when they’re printed on a glossy page. — Monica Burton The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook: Dishes and Dispatches from the Catskill Mountains Mike Cioffi, Chris Bradley, Sara B. Franklin Clarkson Potter, out now In 2011, Mike Ciofi did what many office workers spend their days dreaming about: He bid farewell to city life in favor of renovating and reinvigorating a roadside diner in the woodsy New York hamlet of Phoenicia. Today, Ciofi’s Phoenicia Diner is a hit among locals and tourists, as well as the Instagram glitterati that flocks in droves to sample the restaurant’s elevated diner fare and pose in the green vinyl booths. Though it might be a while before the rest of us achieve our own version of the Phoenicia Diner, it’s at least become easier for us to pretend with The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook, a collection of comfort-food recipes that make up the Ulster County hot spot’s celebrated menu. Try to make the renowned buttermilk pancakes on lazy Sunday morning, or enjoy a cozy night in with the chicken and chive dumplings. For lighter meals, the cookbook also includes a variety of fancy salads and some delicious-sounding vegetable preparations. We live in uncomfortable times, but we still have comfort food — and our upstate escapist fantasies — to help us cope. So serve up some Phoenicia Diner recipes on enamel camping cookware, then curl up under a Pendleton (or Pendleton knock-off) blanket. It’s almost as good as the real thing. — Madeleine Davies Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook Evan Bloom and Rachel Levin Chronicle Books, out now Chef Evan Bloom of San Francisco’s Wise Sons Deli and former Eater SF restaurant critic Rachel Levin teamed up to write an unconventional book about Jews and Jewish food. From the first chapter, “On Pastrami & Penises,” which jokingly weighs the morals of circumcision, it’s clear they succeeded. There are a trio of pastrami dishes (breakfast tacos, carbonara, a reuben) to celebrate “the cut,” before the authors move on to recipes for other life events, from J Dating in “The Young-Adulting Years” section to Shivah’s Silver Lining in “The Snowbird Years.” This isn’t the first book to combine Jewish food and Jewish humor (the two are practically inseparable), but it has the added benefit of being actually funny. Eat Something sounds less like a commandment from bubbe and more like a comedian egging on readers to whip up a babka milkshake at 3 a.m. or serve chopped liver to unknowing goyim in-laws. The authors gladly admit the book won’t satisfy conservative tastes. Wise Sons serves updated takes on deli fare, like pastrami fries, pastrami and eggs, and a roasted mushroom reuben, and “The Kvetching Department” chapter reprints customer complaints about Wise Sons’ sins against real deli. Those readers can find rote recipes for matzo balls and kugel elsewhere. Eat Something is for readers, Jewish or not, who prefer matzoquiles to matzo brei and a bloody moishe (a michelada spiked with horseradish and brine) to a bloody mary. — Nicholas Mancall-Bitel Dinner in French: My Recipes by Way of France Melissa Clark Clarkson Potter, out now Melissa Clark is an important figure in my home eating life. Her cookbook Dinner lives on my kitchen counter, while her pressure-cooker bible Dinner in an Instant has helped me get over my anxiety around using the intimidating Instant Pot I received as a wedding present a few years ago. Her recipes in those books and over at the New York Times are energetic and reliable. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book since she announced it. While I expected it to be a book of Clark’s favorite, tried-and-true French recipes, Dinner in French actually provides a guide to layering some French je ne sais quoi into the kinds of things you may well already love to eat. Instead of just mashing a microwaved sweet potato like I do a few times a week, Clark’s tempting me to make stretchy sweet potato pommes aligot with fried sage for a change. The translation flows in both directions. To a classic French omelet, Clark adds garlic and tahini and tops it with an herby yogurt sauce; she transforms ratatouille into a sheet-pan chicken dinner. Dinner in French veers more into lifestyle territory than her reliable workhorse books. Shots of Clark living the good life in France — laughing at beautiful outdoor garden dining tables, shopping at the market, walking barefoot in a gorgeous farmhouse — are peppered throughout. Even if that’s not what I need from a Melissa Clark book, for all the work home cooks like me rely on her to do, she deserves a glam moment. — Hillary Dixler Canavan The Boba Book: Bubble Tea and Beyond Andrew Chau and Bin Chen Clarkson Potter, out now What Blue Bottle did for coffee, Boba Guys did for boba. Since Andrew Chau and Bin Chen opened their first shop in San Francisco in 2013, the brand has grown to include 16 locations across the country. Along the way, the guys behind Boba Guys have redefined what it means to drink the popular Taiwanese tea with modern drinks that go beyond the traditional milk tea plus chewy tapioca balls to include items like strawberry matcha lattes and coffee-laced dirty horchatas. The Boba Book includes step-by-step instructions for these specialties along with recommended toppings for each tea base. There’s also a separate chapter all about how to make toppings and add-ons from scratch, including grass jelly, mango pudding, and, of course, boba. While it’s likely many boba lovers have never even considered making their favorite drink at home, Chau and Chen’s simple directions prove all it takes is a little bit of dedication. The Boba Book doesn’t offer a comprehensive history of boba; instead, it provides an impassioned argument for drinking boba now from Chau and Chin, who keep the tone friendly and conversational throughout. Colorful photos of drinks alongside pictures of Boba Guys’ fans, employees, friends, and family make the book feel like the brand’s yearbook. And even if there’s no interest in recreating the drinks at home, The Boba Book gives readers the best advice on getting the most enjoyment out of boba, including tips on how to achieve that perfect Instagram shot. — James Park Ana Roš: Sun and Rain Ana Roš Phaidon, March 25 Ana Roš is a chef on the rise. While not quite a household name in America, the Slovenia-based chef of Hiša Franko got the Chef’s Table treatment as well as plenty of attention from the World’s 50 Best List. She’s known for being an iconoclastic and self-taught chef. As with so many fine dining restaurant books, this volume isn’t really meant to be cooked from at home. Roš seems to have gone into the process knowing that, so she avoids the standard headnote-recipe format. Instead, lyrical prose is frontloaded, taking up most of the book, with recipes for things like “deer black pudding with chestnuts and tangerines” or “duck liver, bergamot and riesling” stacked together with only the shortest of introductions at the end. Gorgeous, sweeping landscape photos of Slovenia coupled with gorgeous food photography, both by Suzan Gabrijan, provide a lush counterpoint to the text. Rather than a guide to cooking like Roš, this is a testament to one chef’s life. There’s quite a bit of personal narrative, from Roš’s experiences with anorexia as an aspiring dancer to a meditation on killing deer inspired by her father’s hunting. And for fans of Chef’s Table, culinary trophy hunters, and/or lovers of travel photography, it’s worth a look. — HDC Lummi: Island Cooking Blaine Wetzel Prestel, April 7 The Willows Inn on Lummi Island is that specific kind of bucket-list restaurant that’s fetishized by fine dining lovers: isolated (the island sits two and a half hours and one ferry ride north of Seattle) and pricey ($225 for the tasting menu, not including the stay at the inn, a near prerequisite for snagging a reservation). I should find it irritating. But the Willows Inn is also inherently of a place I have great affection for — the Pacific Northwest — and that’s captured beautifully in chef Blaine Wetzel’s Lummi: Island Cooking, a restaurant capsule of a cookbook that doesn’t feature the restaurant’s name in the title. Instead, the book is a survey of the ingredients farmed, foraged, and fished from the Puget Sound, a stunning taxonomy of salmonberries and spotted prawns, wild beach pea tips and razor clams. Several recipes quietly flaunt the inn’s reverence for the local bounty. Each in a quartet of mushroom stews involves just three ingredients: two kinds of mushrooms and butter; a recipe for smoked mussels simply calls for mussels, white wine, and a smoker. The book, though, is really all about the visuals. Photographer Charity Burggraaf captures each striking dish from above on a flat-color background, and the bright pops of color and organic forms evoke brilliant museum specimens. Lummi: Island Cooking shows off the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest — and how in the hands of Wetzel and his team, they become worthy of this exacting kind of archive. — Erin DeJesus My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes Hooni Kim WW Norton, April 7 Hooni Kim’s debut cookbook, My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, is part cookbook, part autobiography. Before he opened Korean-American restaurants Danji and Hanjan in New York City, Kim worked at prestigious fine dining institutions like Daniel and Masa, and as a result, he interprets Korean cuisine with French and Japanese techniques. Over 13 chapters, Kim breaks down the fundamentals of creating Korean flavors, from where to buy essential pantry items to how to recognize the different stages of kimchi fermentation. The recipes themselves cover a wide range, from classic banchan and soups to technique-driven entrees, such as bacon chorizo kimchi paella with French scrambled eggs, and a recipe for braised short ribs (galbi-jjim) that uses a classic French red wine braise method Kim mastered while working at Daniel. The focus of the book is less about cooking easy, weeknight dinner recipes, and more about understanding and applying Korean cooking philosophy. Throughout, Kim talks about the importance of jung sung, a Korean word for care, which also translates into cooking with heart and devotion. The chef’s jung sung in making this book is apparent as Kim provides foundational knowledge to make readers aware of Korean culture, beyond just knowing how to cook Korean food. — JP Everyone Can Bake: Simple Recipes to Master and Mix Dominique Ansel Simon & Schuster, April 14 I’ll get this out of the way from the get go: Dominique Ansel’s newest cookbook has nothing at all to do with the Cronut. In fact, rather than simply a book of recipes for the things you’ll find at the Dominique Ansel bakeries and dessert shops stationed around the world, it’s a manual for how to make just about any dessert the reader’s heart desires, whatever their skill level. With Everyone Can Bake, Ansel asserts that armed with the “building blocks of baking” he provides, baking is achievable for even the most intimidated novice. This idea guides the book’s structure. It’s split into three sections of Ansel’s “go-to” recipes: bases (which includes cakes, cookies, brownies, meringue, and other batters and doughs); fillings (pastry cream, ganache, mousse, etc.); and finishings (buttercreams, glazes, and other toppings). A fourth section covers assembly and techniques, such as how to construct a tart or glaze a cake. Charts at the front of the book show how these four sections combine to make complete desserts. For example, almond cake + matcha mousse + white chocolate glaze + how to assemble a mousse cake = matcha passion fruit mousse cake; vanilla sablé tart shell + pastry cream = flan. Although the book’s primary aim is to simplify baking for newcomers, the notion that creativity can arise from working within the boundaries of fundamental building blocks is a helpful lesson for any home baker. And whether they’re after just those fundamentals or the “showstoppers” that come later, they’re in good hands with Ansel’s Everyone Can Bake. — MB Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou Melissa M. Martin Artisan, April 14 At Mosquito Supper Club, a tiny, 24-diners-per-night New Orleans restaurant that’s more like a big dinner party, chef and owner Melissa Martin keeps a shelf of spiral-bound Cajun cookbooks with recipes assembled by women’s church groups. “The cookbooks are timeless poetry and ambassadors for Cajun food,” Martin writes, “a place for women to record a piece of themselves.” Martin’s first cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, belongs alongside them. It’s a well-written personal and regional history of a world literally disappearing before our eyes due to climate change: Every hour, the Gulf of Mexico swallows a football field’s worth of land in Louisiana. But Mosquito Supper Club isn’t an elegy. It’s a celebration of contemporary New Orleans, a timeless glossary of Cajun cookery, and a careful, practical guide to gathering seasonal ingredients and preparing dishes from duck gumbo to classic pecan pie. Martin’s recipes are occasionally difficult and time-consuming — stuffed crawfish heads are a “group project” — but written with gentle encouragement (“Keep stirring!”) and an expert’s precision. And since Martin’s restaurant is essentially a home kitchen, her recipes are easily adapted to the home cook (though not all of us will have the same access to ingredients, like shrimp from her cousin’s boat in her small hometown of Chauvin, Louisiana). Still, Mosquito Supper Club is a cookbook you’re likely to use, and as a powerful reminder of what we’re losing to climate change, it’s a book we could all use, too. — Caleb Pershan Trejo’s Tacos: Recipes & Stories From L.A. Danny Trejo Clarkson Potter, April 21 Anyone not living in Los Angeles will likely still recognize Danny Trejo. Muscular and tattooed, with a mustache dipping down below the corners of his lips and dark hair tied back in a ponytail, he makes an impression in just about every role he’s played in his 300-plus film career, whether it’s as a boxer in Runaway Train, the gadget-loving estranged uncle in Spy Kids, or a machete-wielding vigilante for hire in Machete. But since 2016, Trejo has taken on a role outside of Hollywood: co-owner of a growing fleet of LA taquerias. Trejo’s Tacos, the 75-year-old’s first cookbook, written with Hugh Garvey, is as much a tribute to his restaurant legacy as it is to Los Angeles, his lifelong home. The actor spent his childhood dreaming of opening a restaurant with his mother in their Echo Park kitchen. Years later, film producer Ash Shah would plant the seeds and vision for Trejo’s future taquerias, opened with a culinary team led by consulting chef Daniel Mattern. The cookbook is a reflection of what the actor calls “LA-Mexican food.” Readers will find all the Trejo’s Tacos greatest hits in the collection, including recipes for pepita pesto, mushroom asada burritos, and fried chicken tacos. The recipes are relatively simple and malleable — designed for home cooks who might want chicken tikka bowls one night and chicken tikka tacos the next. There’s even a recipe for nacho donuts. Throughout, Trejo interjects with stories from his life in LA, like the time a security guard on the set of Heat recognized him from the time he used to rob customers at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. “I used to rob restaurants,” he writes in his new cookbook. “Today I own eight of them.” — Brenna Houck Falastin: A Cookbook Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley Ten Speed, April 28 Sami Tamimi and co-author Tara Wigley are probably best known for their proximity to Israeli chef and columnist Yotam Ottolenghi. Tamimi is Ottolenghi’s longtime business partner and co-author of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Wigley has collaborated with Ottolenghi on recipe writing since 2011. With Falastin, the pair are stepping out on their own for the first time as part of a rising chorus of voices celebrating Palestinian cuisine. Falastin is the culmination of Tamimi’s lifelong “obsession” with Palestinian food. The Palestinian chef pays tribute to his mother and the home in East Jerusalem that he left to live in Tel Aviv and London, returning after 17 years. For Wigley, who grew up in Ireland, the book is about falling in love with the region and, particularly, shatta sauce (she’s sometimes referred to by her friends as “shattara”). However, the book isn’t about tradition. Tamimi and Wigley approach Falastin’s 110 recipes as reinterpretations of old favorites — something they acknowledge is an extremely thorny approach everywhere, and particularly given the highly politicized history of Palestine. Food, after all, isn’t just about ingredients and method; it’s also about who’s making it and telling its story. To do this, Wigley and Taminmi instead take readers into Palestine, exploring the regional nuances of everything from the distinctive battiri eggplants, suited to being preserved and filled with walnuts and peppers for makdous, or the green chiles, garlic, and dill seeds used to prepare Gazan stuffed sardines. Along the way, they pause to amplify the voices of Palestinians, such as Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestinian Seed Library. Keep plenty of olive oil, lemon, and za’atar on hand. It’s a colorful, thoughtful, and delicious journey. — BH Bitter Honey: Recipes and Stories from Sardinia Letitia Clark Hardie Grant, April 28 At first glance, Bitter Honey seems like an outsider’s fantasy of Sardinia. British author Letitia Clark moved to the island with her Sardinian (now ex-) boyfriend, looking to escape Brexit and embrace a slower, more beautiful way of life. The book’s warm photography and indulgent descriptions of olive oil seem the stuff of an Under the Sardinian Sun romp. But then, it suddenly becomes real. In the introduction, she speaks of plastic Tupperware and paper plates and blaring TVs, and in stories throughout the book, she gives a more honest depiction of modern, everyday life in Sardinia. Clark’s recipes are all about achievable fantasy, with some coming directly from her boyfriend’s family and some that are admitted riffs on Nigella Lawson recipes. But all include the island’s staple flavors and ingredients, like pork in anchovy sauce, fried sage leaves, saffron risotto, and culurgionis (essentially Sardinian ravioli) stuffed with potato, mint, cheese, and garlic. Clark describes Sardinian food as a “wilder” version of Italian cooking, something less refined and more visceral. The book is a great way to expand your regional palate, though you’ll have to source your own bottarga and pane carasau. — Jaya Saxena The Vegetarian Silver Spoon: Classic & Contemporary Italian Recipes Phaidon, April 29 The essential, 70-year-old Italian cookbook Il cucchiaio d’argento, known as The Silver Spoon in English, gets a plant-based update in The Vegetarian Silver Spoon, forthcoming from Phaidon. Boasting more than 200 vegetarian and vegan recipes, it’s a welcome addition to the library of Silver Spoon spinoffs in a time when diners are cutting back on meat consumption, whether for health, environmental, or animal welfare reasons. While some patrons of red-sauce Italian-American restaurants may exclusively associate the cuisine with weighty meatballs and rich, meaty sauces, as written in the book’s introduction, “the Italian diet has never centered on meat”; rather, home-style cooking “more often revolves around substantial vegetarian dishes like grains or stews.” Across eight chapters — which are organized by dish, moving from lighter to heavier flavors — classic recipes like pizza bianca mingle with more regional specialties like Genovese minestrone, as well as less traditional fare like vegetable fried rice, demarcated with an icon of “CT” for “contemporary tastes” (other icons distinguish dairy-free, gluten-free, vegan, “30 minutes or less,” and “5 ingredients or fewer”). In this book, the writing is clear, the photos inviting, and above all, the sheer breadth of tasty-sounding dishes encyclopedic enough that any level of cook can find something to make. For fans of Italian cuisine, it’s impossible to flip through the pages without salivating, vegetarian or not. — Jenny G. Zhang Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking Nancy Silverton Knopf, April 30 For home cooks, restaurant cookbooks usually serve as half archive, half inspiration, but Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton writes ambitious recipes a home cook looking to grow (or flex) actually wants to try. The Chi Spacca cookbook, written by Silverton, Ryan DeNicola, and Carolyn Carreño, will fuel fantasies of massive slabs of meat seasoned with fennel pollen on the grill, served with salads of thinly shaved vegetables and a butterscotch budino for dessert. Chi Spacca is the newest of Silverton’s three California-Italian restaurants clustered together in what locals call the Mozzaplex, and it’s decidedly meat focused (Chi Spacca means “he or she who cleaves” and is another word for butcher in Italian). One of the restaurant’s most famous dishes is a beef pie with a marrow bone sticking out of the middle, like the tentpole of a carnivorous circus. That recipe is in the book. So is one for the restaurant’s distinctive focaccia di Recco, a round, flaky, cheese-filled focaccia, which, according to a step-by-step photo tutorial, involves stretching the dough from the counter all the way down to the floor before folding it over into a copper pan. There’s a recipe for homemade ’nduja, a section of thorough grilling advice, and more precisely composed salads than 10 trips to the farmers market could possibly support. What’s really wonderful about the book, however, is the way it mixes serious ambition with practical advice and tons of context. Silverton explains the inspiration and authorship of every dish, and in those headnotes reveals the extent to which Chi Spacca, for all its Tuscan butchery pedigree, is a deeply Californian restaurant. Reference points range from Park’s BBQ in Koreatown to trapped-in-amber steakhouse Dal Rae to the traditions of Santa Maria barbecue. And the recipes always consider the cook. My favorite headnote, for a persimmon salad, says, “The recipe for candied pecans makes twice what you need for this salad. My thought is that if you’re going to go to the effort to make them, there should be some for the cook to snack on.” Entirely correct. — Meghan McCarron Eventide: Recipes for Clambakes, Oysters, Lobster Rolls, and More From a Modern Maine Seafood Shack Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, Mike Wiley, and Sam Hiersteiner Ten Speed, June 2 Eventide Oyster Co., named one of the best restaurants in New England by restaurant critic Bill Addison, embodies everything a Maine seafood shack should be — a casual place to sit down to slurp shellfish and eat fried seafood with friends and family. Since opening in Portland, Maine, in 2012, and despite accolades and expansion, it’s managed to retain that convivial feel. Now co-owners Arlin Smith, Andrew Taylor, and Mike Wiley, along with writer Sam Hiersteiner, have created a breezy cookbook for easy entertaining and coastal-inspired cooking. With 120 recipes, accompanied by visual how-tos and guides on how to properly prepare seafood and shellfish, Eventide offers enough insight to make any home cook feel comfortable assembling an amazing raw bar or hosting a full New England clambake. The book even gets into less-traditional ways to use seafood as the basis for celebratory meals, with recipes for oysters with kimchi rice, halibut tail bo ssam, and the restaurant’s famed brown butter lobster rolls. And although seafood dominates, the authors of Eventide include alternatives to satisfy anyone, like the restaurant’s burger, a smoked tofu sandwich, potato chips and puffed snacks, plus a blueberry lattice pie for dessert. Whether or not you live by the coast, Eventide is the perfect spring cookbook to help you prepare to turn your kitchen into a New England oyster bar this summer. — Esra Erol Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3bliuEe

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