Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

by Shauna Niequist
Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

by Shauna Niequist

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Overview

Join New York Times bestselling author Shauna Niequist as she offers an enchanting mix of funny and vulnerable storytelling in this collection of recipes and essays about the surprising and sacred things that happen when people gather around the table.

Bread & Wine is a literary feast about the moments and meals that bring us together. With beautiful and evocative writing, Shauna celebrates the sweet and savory moments that happen when family and friends sit down together. She invites us to see how God teaches and feeds us even as we nourish the people around us, and she explores the ways that hunger, loneliness, and restlessness lead us back to the table again.

Part cookbook and part spiritual memoir, Bread & Wine sheds light on:

  • How sharing food together mirrors the way we share our hearts with each other—and with God
  • What it means to follow a God who reveals His presence in breaking bread and passing a cup
  • What happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another’s faces, and listen to one another’s stories

A satisfying read for heart and body, you’ll want to keep Bread & Wine close at hand all year round. Recreate the meals that come to life in each essay with recipes for any occasion, from Goat Cheese Biscuits and Bacon-Wrapped Dates to Mango Chicken Curry and Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Toffee.

For anyone who has found themselves swapping stories over plates of pasta, sharing takeout on the couch, laughing over a burnt recipe, and lingering a little longer for one more bite, this book is for you.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780310598879
Publisher: Zondervan
Publication date: 04/09/2013
Sold by: HarperCollins Publishing
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 350,079
File size: 712 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Shauna Niequist is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books, including I Guess I Haven’t Learned that Yet and Present Over Perfect. Shauna and her husband, Aaron, and their sons, Henry and William, live in New York City. Shauna is an avid reader and traveler, and a passionate gatherer of people, especially around the table.

Read an Excerpt

bread & wine

A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes


By Shauna Niequist

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2013Shauna Niequist
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-32817-9


Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

my mom's blueberry crisp


My mom's dad is Irish, a storyteller and twinkling-eyed joker, and her mom is German, a rose gardener and meticulous baker. They met in the third grade in Vicksburg, Michigan. My grandpa's family moved away at the end of that school year, but my grandparents reconnected at the end of high school, and my grandpa insists he remembered her beautiful face all those years. They were married just before my grandpa joined the navy, and my mom, their first child, was born at Pearl Harbor.

Neither one of them grew up in religious homes, but when they married, they decided that religion was important and that they wanted to join a church. They visited all sorts of churches before settling at Lake Center Bible Church. Over the years they were members at other Bible churches for a few seasons, but these days they're active members and volunteers at Lake Center once again, almost sixty years later.

My dad's family is 100 percent Dutch, and they built a large produce company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They owned farms all over the world, and a warehouse, and their trucks delivered produce to stores, restaurants, and hotels all over the country. My dad and his siblings all worked at the warehouse or in the fields or driving trucks. When each child turned five years old, they began spending Saturdays at the warehouse with little wagons, moving produce around, filling orders.

They were faithful members of a Christian Reformed church in Kalamazoo, a church that was strict and orderly, that emphasized observance of the Sabbath and thriftiness and looked down on frivolity and high emotion.

They were meat-and-potatoes people, men who worked long days on the farm and ate accordingly. Some days the farm lunch was a loaf of white bread and a pound of bologna per person. They'd fry the bologna in a frying pan with butter and make a tall stack of sandwiches for each of them.

And then six brothers—my grandfather and my dad's five uncles—all died of heart attacks before they were fifty-five. When I was born, my parents knew something had to change, that my dad had inherited those same dangerous genetics, and that nutrition was a way to stand up to what seemed terrifying and inevitable.

My mom was enamored, like all new moms are, with how perfect and pure her new baby was. She only wanted to feed me things that were healthy and whole. Because of that, and because of my dad's scary family health history, my mother became a health food person way before it was fashionable.

When other kids were eating Froot Loops in whole milk and Twinkies and Little Debbie snack cakes, my mom fed my younger brother and me whole grains, tofu, and skim milk. We ate almost no processed foods and very little red meat, and we never had "junk food"—soda, chips, store-bought cookies—in our home. While our friends were having hamburgers and sloppy joes on soft white buns, we were eating tuna over whole grain pasta and lentil burgers and muesli.

This was a time and place—the suburbs of Chicago in the early 1980s—when yogurt was weird and hummus was downright horrifying. In my school lunch, I had whole grain bread, all-fruit preserves, and the kind of peanut butter that had been ground from peanuts at the health food store, a place that smelled like vitamins and mulch. I also had a massive bag of carrots and sometimes an apricot fruit leather, which is just as luscious as it sounds. Why would anyone ever want to eat something whose greatest selling point is its textural similarity to leather?

These were the days when trading at lunch was a major feature of social politics, and I was deeply embarrassed about my lunch. I longed for white bread, American cheese, Cheetos, Hawaiian Punch. This was before Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and farmers markets with live music and cute, scruffy organic farmers peddling kale. This was when health food stores, tofu, and lentils were all vaguely suspect, and not at all upscale and respectable. Now half my friends get CSA boxes and many of our playdates involve the farmers market. Our friends and family are an assortment of gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, vegan. Whole grains and quinoa are ubiquitous. Back then, though, this kind of stuff made you weird.

Exhibit A: the year my mom handed out mini-toothbrushes on Halloween, feeling that after all that sugar, a good brush would be thoughtful. Seriously? I was already hanging by a thread socially. I was already a pastor's kid, which is uncool on a thousand different levels. I already had a weird, organic, all-brown lunch. Now we're the toothbrush-on-Halloween family? Mom, you're killing me.

Now that I'm an adult, I appreciate how much effort this must have entailed, how expensive it was, how loving it was for her to feed us in that way. But as a child, all I knew was that my lunches were weird and that my cousins didn't want to sleep over at our house unless they could bring their own breakfast because they were absolutely terrified about what might turn up on their plates at our house. My cousin Melody always packed her own cinnamon-raisin bagel because she didn't want to risk Grape-Nuts or whole wheat pancakes for breakfast.

My parents and their friends started a church the year I was born, and part of being a church family means that your weekly calendar runs on a different rhythm than other families'. Sunday mornings were workdays, and often Saturdays too, so the weekend really began for us on Sundays after church.

After we got home from the early service, my mom and my brother and I would wait to hear my dad's heavy footsteps coming down the long, tiled hallway after the last service. He always went straight to his closet to change from his church clothes into his Chicago Bears sweatshirt, and when he walked through the study door, the weekend began. He was tired but happy, loose, easygoing.

Sunday afternoons were family time—private, casual, silly. We got to watch the Bears game while we did our homework in the study instead of doing it at the kitchen table like we usually did. My mom made sushi for lunch, and for dinner, blueberry crisp.

My mom baked her blueberry crisp in a round, blue earthenware baking dish, deep enough for there to be several inches of warm, bursting berries under the sweetness of the crisp topping. The dish had a fitted lid and handles on each side, and she would bring it down to the study with potholders and with the lid on, so that even if we had seconds, it was still warm.

She topped each bowl of crisp with a scoop of Breyers vanilla bean ice cream, flecked with dark specks of vanilla, and the ice cream melted into the crisp layer and the hot berries in thick, creamy rivers. Those Sunday nights were some of the only times we had ice cream at home, a special treat. More than that, it was a treat to taste summertime in the middle of winter, to taste the flavors of the lake back at home in the suburbs.

Since my brother, Todd, and I were little, our family spent every summer in South Haven, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan. South Haven is a beach town an hour from where my parents grew up. My dad's parents had a cottage there, and both my grandfathers had sailboats in the marina. It's the town where my parents had their first date, and the setting for most of our family's richest memories.

South Haven is the blueberry capital of the country, and at the end of the summer every year we'd bring home bags and bags of blueberries to freeze. I remember getting home from the lake just in time for school to start, and while we unpacked and sorted sandy towels to wash, my mom covered the kitchen counters with towels, picked through the berries, washed and sorted them, and p
(Continues...)


Excerpted from bread & wine by Shauna Niequist. Copyright © 2013 by Shauna Niequist. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

author's note....................     9     

on bread and wine: an introduction....................     11     

part one....................          

my mom's blueberry crisp Blueberry Crisp....................     21     

what the table is for Mini Mac & Cheese....................     28     

hungry Nigella's Flourless Chocolate Brownies....................     34     

start where you are Basic Vinaigrette....................     40     

go-to risotto Basic Risotto....................     49     

enough....................     55     

the chopping block Steak au Poivre with Cognac Pan Sauce....................     60     

on tea and pajamas Breakfast Quinoa....................     68     

run Green Well Salad....................     74     

hummingbird Goat Cheese Biscuits....................     83     

part two....................          

delicious everywhere Watermelon Feta Salad....................     93     

jazz and curry Mango Chicken Curry....................     100     

open the door White Chicken Chili....................     105     

baking cookies with batman Breakfast Cookies....................     112     

morning, noon, and night Sweet Potato Fries with Sriracha Dipping Sauce.........     118     

what my mother taught me Real Simple Cassoulet....................     123     

cupcake in the oven....................     128     

feasting and fasting Robin's Super-Healthy Lentil Soup....................     133     

love and enchiladas Annette's Enchiladas....................     139     

meeting mac....................     146     

part three....................          

hail mary....................     153     

magical white bean soup Magical White Bean Soup....................     161     

present over perfect Bacon-Wrapped Dates....................     166     

the bass player's birthday....................     173     

russian dolls....................     178     

on scrambled eggs and doing hard things Goat Cheese Scrambled Eggs..............     184     

happy new year Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee....................     190     

swimming in silence Esquites/Mexican Grilled Corn....................     197     

part four....................          

what money can't buy Gaia Cookies....................     207     

last-minute lunch party Maple Balsamic Pork Tenderloin....................     213     

city love....................     218     

better late than never Brannon's Caesar Salad....................     223     

swimsuit, ready or not Farmers Market Potato Salad....................     229     

the mayor of the river Mar-a-Lago Turkey Burgers....................     234     

pont neuf Simplest Dark Chocolate Mousse....................     241     

take this bread Sullivan Street Bread....................     248     

come to the table....................     256     

appendix....................          

four-week book club/cooking club discussion guide....................     261     

four-week book club/cooking club menus....................     264     

four-week book club/cooking club menus....................          


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