With 250 luscious recipes, along with eight pages of color photographs, "The Splendid Grain" dramatizes how you can incorporate extraordinarily healthful grains into your life without changing your lifestyle. Grains can transform taste and texture in unsurpassed ways like these: <UL><LI>Nutty, sweet oats form the delicious crust of fried chicken <LI>Piquant quinoa heightens and absorbs the savory juices of gingered lamb <LI>Hearty buckwheat becomes a sweet, delicate, Parisian-inspired crepe <LI>Thai black sticky rice flavored with coconut makes unforgettable exotic banana dumplings.</UL> The natural and native history of each grain is also explored along with its health benefits.

"'The Splendid Grain' is a much-needed encyclopedia of innovative grain recipes and lore — practical, useful, andstimulating." (-- Dean Fearing, chef, The Mansion of Turtle Creek, Dallas )

"Rebecca Wood's "The Splendid Grain" will inspire all cooks to explore the wide world of grains — it is an absolutelysplendid book." (-- Charlie Palmer, chef/owner, Aureole; chef/co-owner, The Lenox Room and Alva, New York)

Now more than ever Americans are looking for delicious ways to integrate extraordinarily healthful whole grains into their lives without having to change their lifestyles. The Splendid Grain shows you how whole grains can replace or be added to recipes to not only kick up the nutritional value of every meal but to add essential flavor and flair. A revolution is quietly taking place in restaurants and in our kitchens, where we are cooking with more unusual grains like quinoa, millet, and wheat berries in addition to the more familiar rice, buckwheat, and corn. The Splendid Grain provides irresistible recipes for these grains and also introduces the next frontiers in grain cooking: tef and sorghum from North Africa, Job's tears from Asia, and mesquite and amaranth from America. Wood's expertise on the natural and native history of grains, their medicinal and nutritional properties, and her exhaustive knowledge of selection, storage, and cooking methods make The Splendid Grain not only a remarkable cookbook but an essential resource.

Rebecca Wood, teacher, lecturer, student of Oriental medicine, author of five cookbooks, including "The Whole Foods Encyclopedia," and educational consultant to the natural food industry, runs the Naturally Grand Cooking School. She lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. http://www.rwood.com