How would you like to cook delicious, deeply nourishing dishes from a gorgeous large format cookbook that is so much fun to read that you can really enjoy it even when you're not cooking?  Cooking with the Muse, a winner of over a dozen culinary and literary awards, offers 150 nutritious international recipes for everyone -- whether you're gluten free, a vegetarian, paleo, an omnivore, an occasional cook, an avid cook, or any kind of food lover. It also features a plenitude of imaginative poetry about food and ingredients, along with enlightening literary and historical essays, playful and informative culinary and historical notes, and 200 beautiful full-color photographs. Here's a feast of words and images, with easy-to-follow steps for preparing amazing individual dishes and truly satisfying whole meals. **Highlights fresh, local ingredients and encourages the use of seasonal produce, wild seafood, traditional fats, and healthy meat from pasture-raised animals. (And almost all of the dishes are or can be made gluten free.) **Revels in flavors that are complex and global, ranging from Middle Eastern and Turkish to American Southwestern, from Vietnamese and Japanese to Italian and Indian. **Offers a delectable feast for the locavore or omnivore, novice cook or experienced chef -- a food lover's literary anthology and a book lover's cookbook. **Includes an anthology covering 3000 years, along with the equivalent of a complete book of original poems and poetic prose by authors Massimilla and Kornfeld, and a complete book of the authors' original essays explaining key culinary poems and traditions. Omnivores, Vegetarians, Gluten-Free, and Paleo eaters will all be excited by the dishes offered here! The broad range of recipes includes Blackberry Parfait; Hominy, Tomatillo, and Pepper Stew Baked in a Pumpkin; Cranberry-Glazed Roast Turkey (or Tempeh); Shepherd's Pie with Colcannon Topping; Ruby Red Cabbage Kraut; Goan Green Coconut Fish Curry; Fudgy Nibby Brownies; Warm-Hearted Pea Cakes with Sesame Crust and Garlic Piquillo Pepper Sauce; Sping Onion Tart; I-Sold-My-Birthright Lentil Soup; Seared Tuna with Purple Potatoes and Cherry Tomato Sauce; Peach-Indigo Blueberry Crisp; and Chocolate "Cherry-Ripe" Espresso Mousse Parfait. The book includes a vast array of classic and contemporary poems, each perfectly paired, like a fine wine, with each dish. In addition to an abundance of poetry and poetic prose by Massimilla and Kornfeld, pieces included here represent such authors as: Homer, Lu Tong, Rumi, Chaucer, Basho, Keats, Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Claude McKay, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Galway Kinnell, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Tom Robbins, Lucille Clifton, Wendell Berry, Michael Ondaatje, Billy Collins, Jorie Graham, Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, and a great many others.   "Prepared dish photos" by Michael Grimaldi; illustrations by Francis Estrada; and "market/ingredient photos" by Massimilla and Kornfeld.  Both a literary and a culinary achievement, Cooking with the Muse is a feast for the heart and the senses, a delectable journey that nourishes the body, mind, and spirit. Cooking with the Muse has received very enthusiastic reviews in over 70 national and local publications and won well over a dozen awards, including the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, the Living Now Book Award, the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award, the New England Book Festival Award, the USA News Best Book Award, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, and many others, including prizes and citations not only in the Cookbook category, but also in the Nonfiction, Anthology, Poetry, Coffee Table Book, Holiday, Green Book, and Photography categories. It was also selected as a "top pick" by publications ranging from Bella Magazine to Epicurus . "Get good ingredients, a French chef might say, and try not to screw them up. The heart of this big, beautiful book beats with that philosophy, but also this: respect the food, and please, slow down, and don't forget to read some poetry along the way." -- Josh Cook, Foreword Review Spring 2016 --Advance Praise "If I ever had the chance to take off a year and spend it in the country with my family, the one cookbook I'd pack is Cooking with the Muse . Preparing recipes from this book will persuade you to slow down and appreciate the powerful connection between food, poetry, and nature. Come to think of it, wherever you are -- enjoying the fantasy vacation of your dreams or anchored to hearth and home -- Cooking With the Muse will provide you with a tasty new seasonal recipe, and poem, every night." --Sara Moulton Chef, Cookbook Author, Television Personality "This vertiginous, seductive, learned book surprises the palate on every page. Its ranging, awakening recipes and awakening, ranging poems would be more than