Carolyn Niethammer's Books

Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants includes dozens of modern recipes for edible wild plants found in the Southwest. The book focuses on 23 plants that are easily recognized, easily gathered, and tasty. It is the perfect guide for the desert forager looking for innovative ideas for turning their day's harvest into dinner. If you live in the Southwest and consider yourself a "locavore," this book is for you. Look for new, updated recipes (how about Saguaro-Merlot-Chipotle Glaze for Chicken or Mesquite Banana layer cake?)

Award: New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Cookbooks

American Indian Cooking: Recipes from the Southwest is an enjoyable guide to the rich culinary traditions of the American Indians of the southwest. In the 150 authentic fruit, grain and vegetable recipes, you'll learn how Navajo, Hopi, Yavapai, Apache and Pima Indians turned the bounty of the desert into tasty meals. Also included are the other uses of each plant for rituals, medicine, utensils and cosmetics. Scientifically accurate pen and ink illustrations make it easy to identify the plants in the wild.

Southwest cuisine marries traditional cooking techniques with the iconic flavors of the Southwest fostering an explosion of creativity on the part of both professional and accomplished home cooks. We invited the Southwest's top reaturant and resort chefs to submit their favorite recipes. With an eys to local ingredients and culture they have elaborated on the area's best-loved traditional specialties, giving bold new twists to traditional red and green chile, yellow pumpkin, and blue corn. 

The reuslt is some 135 original recipes from 71 chefs including:

El Tovar Fire-Roasted Corn Salsa from El Tovar Lodge at the Grand Canyon, Arizona

The She Posole from The Shed in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Jalapeno Blue Corn Muffins from Tall Timber Resort in Durango, Colorado

Texas Millionaaire Pie from Daily Pie Cafe in Pie town, New Mexico

Stuffed Chicken Mole from Coyhote Grill, Scottsdale, Arizona

Annie Wauneka was the daughter of the famous Navajo leader, Chee Dodge. On his deathbed he counseled his children to "keep the rope straight," that is, to carry on his work with their people. Annie served on the Navajo Tribal Council for 26 years. She played an important role in conquering tuberculosis on the Reservation by getting the white doctors and the tribal medicine men to talk to each other and collaborate. Annie was colorful, outspoken, feared and beloved.

I'll Go and Do More is the story of Annie Dodge Wauneka (1918-1997), one of the most well-known Navajos of all time, an indefatigable, passionate, and controversial woman who some have called "a one-woman Peace Corps for the Navajo." A daughter of the popular Navajo leader Chee Dodge, Wauneka spent most of her early years herding sheep and raising nine children. After her father's death, she entered politics and was often the only woman on the Navajo Tribal Council during the quarter century she served. When tuberculosis was ravaging the Navajos, she got the white doctors and the medicine men to cooperate to get the infected people into hospitals for treatment.

She conducted a weekly radio show in Navajo and drove thousands of miles across back roads to visit hospitals and remote hogans, then she flew to Washington to buttonhole members of Congress to make sure they understood the issues surrounding Indian health care.

The Native American woman was the guardian of the hearth and, on occasion, ruler and warrior, managing the affairs of her people, sporting war paint as well as necklaces and earrings. Sometimes she was a visionary and a healer, sometimes mother and matriarch. She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Frequently she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage.
The book surveys dozens of North American tribes to explore the chronology the the Native American woman's life from childhood through puberty, marriage, old age and death. The Native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whome those who came after can learn much.
The stories of these early women are enhanced with the fables, songs and incantations that were part of their cultural and spiritual lives.

Also available in German and French