Cooking with the Muse offers 150 nutritious international recipes with a plenitude of imaginative poetry about food and ingredients, along with enlightening literary essays, playful 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 individual dishes and whole meals. *Highlights fresh, local ingredients and encourages the use of seasonal produce, wild seafood, traditional fats, and healthy meat from pasture-raised animals. *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 poetry lover's cookbook. *Presents an anthology covering 3000 years; the equivalent of a complete book of original poems and poetic prose by the authors; and a complete book of 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 with Garlic Piquillo Pepper Sauce; Sping Onion Tart; I-Sold-My-Birthright Lentil Soup; Seared Tuna with Cherry Tomato and Purple Potato Sauce; Peach Indigo Blueberry Crisp; and Espresso "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 poetry and poetic prose by Massimilla and Kornfeld, pieces included here represent such authors as: Homer, Lu Tong, Rumi, Chaucer, Basho, Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Claude McKay, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Galway Kinnell, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Tom Robbins, Wendell Berry, Michael Ondaatje, Billy Collins, Jorie Graham, Jane Hirshfield, and a great many others. "Prepared dish photos" by Michael Grimaldi. 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.