Books about Preserves from Amazon.com

Her recipes include the standards, such as strawberry jam, and the obscure, such as Garlic and Onion Jam. Amendt also does the public service of explaining the real difference between jams and jellies. Special caution about food safety holds a prominent place in Blue Ribbon Preserves and Amendt teaches us how to chose optimal foods for canning as well as how to safely store preserves to avoid potentially lethal food contamination. Be prepared for a bit of a chemistry lesson, which can be a long and sometimes didactic read, but it's well worth it for the critical food-safety information.

So complete is the book that Amendt, herself a recipient of countless state-fair awards for her preserves, includes pointers on how to succeed at such competitions (in a very thorough chapter which includes insights into how judges pick their winners). Blue Ribbon Preserves covers everything that goes into a ball jar and more, and in the process earns not only a tight seal of quality but its own blue ribbon. --Teresa Simanton.
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The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:

I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.

Using the vivid, poignant and personal stories of the members of a website support group she founded (www.depressionfallout.com), Anne Sheffield, the author of two highly acclaimed books on depression, provides an honest record of what happens to a love relationship once depression enters the picture, and offers solid advice on what the non–depressed partner can do to improve his or her own life and the relationship.

Of the millions of people who suffer from a depressive illness, few suffer in solitude. They draw the people they love – spouses, parents, children, lovers, friends – into their illness. In her first book, How You Can Survive When They're Depressed, Anne Sheffield coined the phrase 'depression fallout' to describe the emotional toll on the depressive's family and close friends who are unaware of their own stressful reactions and needs. She outlined the five stages of depression fallout (confusion, self–doubt, demoralisation, anger, and the need to escape) and explained that these reactions are a natural result of living with a depressed person.

For both the serious collector and the sometimes sentimentalist, Saving Stuff explains -- in plain language -- how you can use the techniques of museum professionals to keep your prized possessions in mint condition.

You do not need deep pockets or oodles of time: using Don Williams's simple instructions, you can preserve anything quickly and inexpensively. In Saving Stuff, he demystifies preservation and presents easy, foolproof methods anyone can use to save nearly everything, including:

• Photographs -- in print and digital form
• Stuff only a parent could love -- from baby teeth to old blankets and first artworks
• Furniture -- whether it's painted, varnished, or upholstered
• Family heirlooms -- from silver to rugs to wedding dresses
• Sports and political memorabilia -- trading cards, posters, equipment, buttons, stickers
• Attic leftovers -- scrapbooks, military uniforms, medals
• Musical instruments
• Fine art -- oil paintings, etchings, lithographs
• Printed matter -- comic books, magazines, old letters
• And much, much more

With step-by-step instructions, detailed illustrations, tips for making the things you use every day last, and stories about how the Smithsonian takes care of our national treasures, Saving Stuff is the only book you need to take care of the stuff you love..
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