Photo: Amazon

For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.

For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.

These are rituals of a chosen solo cuisine, and Deborah Madison, author of "What We Eat When We Eat Alone", says it's not at all unusual that we're so diametrically opposed.

Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'

Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?

DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.

SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?

Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.

All across the country, farmers markets and CSA programs are gaining popularity. This year my boyfriend and I are splitting a CSA share with a friend of ours and I try to get to at least one farmers market a week. However, I often come home with bags overflowing with food, only to be confronted with the challenge of how to best use these new fruits and veggies. While many are old friends, I've frequently found myself purchasing kohlrabi or foot long Chinese beans without any clue as to how to prepare them. Luckily, Deborah Madison has stepped up with a beautiful book called Local Flavors that often bridges my personal knowledge gap.

Madison opens up the book with a introduction that describes the journey she's been on for many years now, visiting and sampling farmers markets from all over the country. Madison presents information from farmers, market managers and others who are involved in local growing, talking about the ways in which buying food directly from the people who produced it is a huge boon to your local economy. Just before heading into the recipes, she offers ten market tips that are great for people for whom shopping at farmers markets can be a little intimidating.

The recipes included in this book are, for the most part, both deeply simple and totally delicious sounding. Madison demonstrates how if you are using fresh, seasonal food, you don't have to put energy into covering up flavors. Instead, you can add little touches to bring out the inherent goodness of what you have, making meal prep so much easier. One recipe that leaped off the page at me was the one for Spaghetti with Overgrown Arugula and Sheep's Milk Ricotta. The arugula that's been showing up in my CSA share has been getting larger and leggier with each week and this seems like an amazing way to use it up.

If you are a devoted farmers market shopper who is in need of a little inspiration, this would be an excellent cookbook to add to your collection. Same goes for those newer CSA members who keep receiving veggies that were previously unknown to them. Deborah Madison has created a beautiful cookbook that will be of use for years to come.

Tofu is a blank slate for flavors and preparations, but the slightly gelatinous soy product also tends to inspire blankness in the mind of even creative chefs. Stir-frys aside, it can be difficult to figure out how to prepare it if you are not experienced with it. Fortunately, books like This Can't Be Tofu!: 75 Recipes to Cook Something You Never Thought You Would--and Love Every Bite are out there to hold your hand through the basic properties and varied preparations of the high-protein, vegetarian favorite. The book is written by Deborah Madison, who is well known for her other vegetarian books and the accessibly way in which she presents recipes for home chefs.

It starts out with an introduction to the types of tofu and basic things that you can do with it, as well as some instructions for draining, pressing and other prep that may need to be done before using the tofu in a recipe. The recipes themselves, which cover every meal from breakfast through to dessert, are creative and most are quick and simple. With 75 recipes to choose from, one is sure to be appealing, like Scrambled Tofu with Herbs and Cheese, Red Cabbage Salad with Peppered Tofu Crisps, Ice Coffee Frappe and Red Pepper and Miso Soup with Tofu and Black Sesame.