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Each cookbook in Quail Ridge Press' acclaimed "Best of the Best State Cookbook Series" contains favorite recipes submitted from the most popular cookbooks published in the state. The cookbooks are contributed by junior leagues, community organizations, popular restaurants, noted chefs, and just plain good cooks. From best-selling favorites to small community treasures, each contributing cookbook is featured in a catalog section that provides a description and ordering information -- a bonanza for anyone who collects cookbooks. Beautiful photographs, interesting facts, original illustrations and delicious recipes capture the special flavor of each state.
UPDATED AND EXPANDED FOR 2025-2026! Iowa...a state filled with exciting adventures, heartwarming culture, and unforgettable experiences! Embark on a year-long journey through the diverse landscape and rich culture of the Hawkeye State with "Iowa's Best: 365 Unique Adventures - The Essential Guide to Unforgettable Experiences in the Hawkeye State (2025-2026 Edition)". From the rolling farmland to vibrant cityscapes, Iowa has a unique adventure waiting for you every day of the year. This meticulously curated guide invites you to explore Iowa like never before. Immerse yourself in essential experiences, delve into cultural treasures, find fun for the whole family, discover urban hotspots, bask in natural beauty, relish culinary delights, and indulge in a variety of activities that make Iowa truly special. Organized into distinct categories such as "Nature and Wildlife Adventures," "Outdoor Adventures," "Seasonal Adventures," "Culinary Adventures," and "Adventures at Quirky Roadside Attractions," this guide ensures that you have a trove of activities to choose from based on your interest. Also included are invaluable chapters on "Travel Basics," "Accommodation Suggestions," "Transportation," "Local Cuisine," and "Additional Resources," providing practical information to help you plan your journey more effectively. Each activity is presented with a detailed description, necessary information, insider tips, and reasons why it will make your Iowa trip memorable. No two adventures are the same - you're assured a unique experience each day, whether it's exploring a historic landmark, taking part in a local festival, or relaxing in a nature retreat. "Iowa's Best: 365 Unique Adventures" is not just a travel guide, it's your companion in discovering the hidden gems and local favorites that encapsulate Iowa's charm and spirit. Join us on this journey through the heartland of America and create your own unforgettable experiences in Iowa. So whether you're an outdoor enthusiast, a history buff, a foodie, or a family on vacation, make the most of your Iowa adventure with this essential guide. Explore, experience, and enjoy Iowa in 365 unique ways!
In 1949, Iowa farm wife Evelyn Birkby began to write a weekly column entitled “Up a Country Lane” for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel, now called the Valley News. Sixty-three years, one Royal typewriter, and five computers later, she is still creating a weekly record of the lives and interests of her family, friends, and neighbors. Her perceptive, closely observed columns provide a multigenerational biography of rural and small-town life in the Midwest over decades of change. Now she has sifted through thousands of columns to give us her favorites, guaranteed to delight her many longtime and newfound fans. Evelyn begins with her very first column, whose focus on the Christmas box prepared by a companionable group of farm wives, the constant hard work of farming, and an encounter with an elderly stranger over a yard of red gingham sets the tone for future columns. Optimistic even in the wake of sorrow, generous-spirited but not smug, humorous but not folksy, wise but not preachy, Evelyn welcomes the adventures and connections that each new day brings, and she masterfully shares them with her readers. Tales of separating cream on the back porch at Cottonwood Farm, raising a teddy bear of a puppy in addition to a menagerie of other animals, surviving an endless procession of Cub and Boy Scouts, appreciating a little boy’s need to take his toy tractor to church, blowing out eggs to make an Easter egg tree, shopping for bargains on the day before Christmas, camping in a converted Model T “house car,” and adjusting to the fact of one’s tenth decade of existence all merge to form a world composed of kindness and wisdom with just enough humor to keep it grounded. Recipes for such fare as Evelyn’s signature Hay Hand Rolls prove that the young woman who was daunted by her editor’s advice to “put in a recipe every week” became a talented cook. Each of the more than eighty columns in this warmhearted collection celebrates not a bygone era tinged with sentimentality but a continuing tradition of neighborliness, Midwest-nice and Midwest-sensible.
Inspired by 'Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls' and 'Rad Women A to Z,' Iowa State education professor Katy Swalwell worked with over 25 Iowa women artists and RAYGUN to create an illustrated children's book that celebrates the incredible accomplishments through short biographies of a diverse set of women throughout Iowa's history. The book is available at raygunsite.com.
In language that is scientifically sound but accessible to the layperson, Kathleen Woida explains how Iowa's soils formed and have changed over centuries and millennia. Its soils are what make Iowa a premier agricultural state, both in terms of acres planted and bushels harvested. But in the last hundred years, large-scale intensive agriculture and urban development have severely degraded most of our soils. However, as Woida documents, some innovative Iowans are beginning to repair and regenerate their soils by treating them as the living ecosystem and vast carbon store that they are.
Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembers the month of June 1957 in his hometown, the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the “resplendently sequined” Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her. But mostly what Will summons up in his intimate remembrance are those few catastrophic days in early June when he was “three months shy of twelve,” more than a decade after his parents have married and returned to the Vaughns’ home place, where Lewis farms his family’s land. For it is during those days that Leanne’s affair with a local man named Bobby Markum becomes known—first to Lewis and then, in a fiercely dramatic public confrontation, to young Will, to his beloved Grandmother Vaughn, and by nightfall to all the citizens of the town. The knowledge of such scandal, in so small a place, sets off a series of highly charged reactions, vivid consequences that surely determine the fates of every member of this unforgettable family. A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.
I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp. So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering. Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared. Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon. Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”
"A reminder that even the smallest newspapers can hold the most powerful among us accountable."—The New York Times Book Review Watch the documentary Storm Lake on PBS. Iowa plays an outsize role in national politics. Iowa introduced Barack Obama and voted bigly for Donald Trump. But is it a bellwether for America, a harbinger of its future? Art Cullen’s answer is complicated and honest. In truth, Iowa is losing ground. The Trump trade wars are hammering farmers and manufacturers. Health insurance premiums and drug prices are soaring. That’s what Iowans are dealing with, and the problems they face are the problems of the heartland. In this candid and timely book, Art Cullen—the Storm Lake Times newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize for taking on big corporate agri-industry and its poisoning of local rivers—describes how the heartland has changed dramatically over his career. In a story where politics, agri­culture, the environment, and immigration all converge, Cullen offers an unsentimental ode to rural America and to the resilient people of a vibrant community of fifteen thousand in Northwest Iowa, as much sur­vivors as their town.
Good Night Iowa includes walleye fishing, Iowa Great Lakes, the State Capitol Building, Iowa State Fair, Adventureland, Blank Park Zoo, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa City, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium, and Effigy Mounds National Monument. This adorable board book allows children to explore all the famous sights, attractions, and landmarks to state of Iowa has to offer. No stalk of corn has been left unturned! This book is part of the bestselling Good Night Our World series, which includes hundreds of titles exploring iconic locations and exciting, child-friendly themes. Many of North America’s most beloved regions are artfully celebrated in these board books designed to soothe children before bedtime while instilling an early appreciation for North America's natural and cultural wonders. Each book stars a multicultural group of people visiting the featured area’s attractions as rhythmic language guides children through the passage of both a single day and the four seasons while saluting the iconic aspects of each place.
Wander prairies blazing with color. Climb up ridges and discover stunning vistas. Dip into quiet valleys and peaceful canyons. Glide through a golden forest, stroll a city street, stand beneath a waterfall or in a cave. In this book, Lynn Walters guides you to some of Iowa's most scenic and diverse trails. No matter if you are in the mood for a casual jaunt or an adventuresome trek,