Forgotten Books Of Eden

Finding food

Hank Shaw's black, cigar-thick fishing rod is bent like a question mark.

Twenty miles off the coast of Longboat Key, Shaw is hooked into an amberjack that would rather stay on the cool bottom 100 feet below. The game fish is making that point with a series of long runs that are sending the line on Shaw's reel screaming in the opposite direction rather than around the spool.

But he's done this before. Not in the Gulf of Mexico, mind you. This is his first trip. But the author of the new book "Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast" (Rodale, $25.99), has yanked his fair share of seafood from waters throughout the United States.

Bracing his knees against the stern of the charter boat, he waits out the fish, taking advantage of lulls in the fight to crank the amberjack a few more inches closer to the sunlit surface. The fish runs. He waits. He reels. The process goes on for about 15 minutes.

Eventually, the amberjack's shimmering body appears in the shallows of the denim-colored water below the boat. A handful of equal-size jacks are swimming with their friend in search of a possible meal. Sweat is dripping from Shaw's face. A deckhand leans over the side and grabs the fish, using its gills for a handle. He tosses the bleeding fish on the boat deck. Shaw has the smile of a man who will be grilling amberjack for dinner.

"What a great fish," he says. There is no triumph in his voice. Just an appreciation for the challenge of the food chain.

If it's true that most people live on the world, not in it, Shaw is a one-man immersion project. He's been foraging for berries and wild plants since he could walk. He started fishing even earlier, he says. Hunting came during adulthood, but he's embraced that, too.

A former political reporter in Northern California, Shaw turned a lifelong passion for dining on the outdoors into the blog "Hunter Angler Gardener Cook." Less than two years after its start, Shaw has reaped two James Beard Award nominations for best blog. The International Association of Culinary Professionals this month gave Shaw its award for top blog — the second time the organization has done so.

Shaw's book is an extension of the blog in that it offers recipes for frying shad in a delicate tempura and turning hare into a Sardinian-flavored stew.

But it's also a declaration of eating independence from our grocery-bound existence.

"We've been hunters and gatherers eons longer than we've been farmers," he writes. "Who among even the most urban of us has not eyed a ripe blackberry with interest, even lust, while walking along a path on a hot summer's day?

The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden for $18.11

First issued in 1926, this is the most popular collection of apocryphal and pseudepigriphal literature ever published. Here, in one place, are the infancy gospels, the letter of Jesus to Abgarus, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Legends of Paul and Thecla, the Epistles of Clement and Barnabus, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Books of Adam and Eve, the Secrets of Enoch, the Psalms and Odes of Solomon, the many Testaments of the Patriarchs, and many more ancient books which were highly revered, but ultimately left out of the Bible.

The Forgotten Books of Eden

The Forgotten Books of Eden, Complete Edition

The forgotten books of Eden, writings giving mankind's early pictures of the past and hopes for the future that have survived the devastation of the centuries

The Forgotten Books of Eden, The Apocryphia, Forbidden and Lost Books of the Bible

The Forgotten Books of Eden