Announcing the new cookbook from Hell's Backbone Grill, now available!

This Immeasurable Place, which I co-wrote with my sister Blake Spalding and my soul-sister Jen Castle, is the long-awaited second cookbook from Hell's Backbone Grill and Farm in Boulder, Utah. It continues the inspiring story of how two women—chef-co-owners Spalding and Castle—started their award-winning, Buddhist-based, farm-to-table organic restaurant in a remote, tiny, traditionally Mormon town on the edge of the magnificent, now-threatened Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Filled with seventy-some new recipes, gorgeous images by world-famous photographer Ace Kvale, and stories of the restaurant, organic farm, and town, This Immeasurable Place is much more than a cookbook. It's a food-justice primer, a guide to eating consciously, and a meditation on connecting community to land and table.

Published in late November, This Immeasurable Place was named one of the best books of 2017 on NPR's On Point and immediately sold through its first print run—and now it’s available again!

Here's what people are saying about it.

“The wisdom found in the pages of this beautiful and surprising book is immeasurable. It’s wisdom from the edge, from one of the most glorious hidden kitchens there is.... Land, food, family, stewardship, and spirit all course through these tempting, gorgeous pages. A book that feeds us on so many levels.” -- Davia Nelson, NPR’s Kitchen Sisters

"... Filled with remarkable recipes and essays, it breathed life back into my radical, sometimes flagging hope for humanity, and is as inspiring as it is mouthwatering. We need this book now more than ever.” -- Elissa Altman, author of Poor Man’s Feast

“Blake Spalding and Jen Castle pioneered farm-to-table cooking, creating the Rocky Mountain West’s first women-chef-owned restaurant with full-scale farm. The authors lay out the seasons of the restaurant with humor, gentleness, and joy, but underpin it with their steely, unflinching resolve. Buy this as a cookbook and a keepsake of the truly immeasurable spirit of this community and the land.” -- Cheryl Alters Jamison, four-time James Beard award winner

"Blake Spalding and Jen Castle are alchemists, truly changing the world through their hands, their hearts, their farm, their food. In community, everything is possible.Theirs is a leadership of love." -- Terry Tempest Williams

"As this book shows, horizon and history can’t be separated from the majesty of what we grow and prepare. Among hallowed lands, creators Jen Castle and Blake Spalding channel a culinary spirituality, and through these beautiful pages, the warmth and love abiding at Hell’s Backbone Grill." -- Jacki Lyden, former NPR host

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

Available for pre-order now!

“Tell me,” poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Oliver’s quote opens the The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World. And to answer the question, thirty celebrated and emerging writers invite you to ride shotgun as they travel the globe to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The essays are as diverse as the destinations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling that will make you laugh, weep, wish you were there, or thank your lucky stars you weren’t. The Best Women’s Travel Writing speaks to the reasons why we travel—and how travel changes our lives.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World, you’ll:

· Study the ancient art of belly dancing in Egypt

· Go day-drinking with a sea captain in Croatia

· Scuba dive through an underground cave in Mexico

· Run from massive exploding balloons in Burma

· Embed with the military in Afghanistan

· Experience a different kind of time in Argentina

· Go dogsledding in Finland

· Confront heartache, pain, and a deadly creature in Indonesia

· Negotiate with smugglers in Mongolia

· Marry a stranger at Burning Man

... and much, much more.

Anyone whose passport has been stamped a few times knows the surest method of keeping the travel fire alive: by reading and telling stories from the road, passing them along like a torch in a relay race.

This title is the ninth in the The Best Women’s Travel Writing series, presenting stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 9, readers will:

Featuring stories by Holly Morris, Marcia DeSanctis, Apricot Anderson Irving, Laura Fraser, Amanda Jones, and Laura Resau.

• Tangle with snakes and alligators in Bangladesh
• Chase tornadoes with Chinese celebrities
• Dodge fireballs while half-naked in Ecuador
• Get stuck in the mud by the Ganges in India
• Hunt frogs in a Louisiana bayou
• Get cheerfully deported from South Africa
• Be transformed by a Mexican revolution
• Survive close encounters with rhinos in Namibia
• Experience life under niqab in Egypt
• Climb a volcano during a hailstorm in Rwanda
• Find love in a tree house in Laos…and much more.

Since publishing A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been the recognized leader in women’s travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women’s travel writing of the year. This title is the seventh in an annual series—The Best Women’s Travel Writing—that presents inspiring and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves.

In The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011, readers will:

• Have lunch with a mobster in Japan and drinks with an IRA member in Ireland
• Learn the secrets of flamenco in Spain and the magic of samba in Brazil
• Deliver a trophy for best testicles in a small town in rural Serbia
• Fall in love while riding a camel through the Syrian Desert
• Ski a first descent of over 5,000 feet in Northern India
• Discover the joy of getting naked in South Korea
• Leave it all behind to slop pigs on a farm in Ecuador...and much more.

With a Measure of Grace recounts with sensitivity and wit the tale of a women-owned, Buddhist-based restaurant becoming a community anchor in a small Mormon town. Within the book's 176 beautiful, color-photographed pages, former backcountry caterers and professional river chefs Blake Spalding and Jen Castle share their struggles and successes as the co-owners of Hell's Backbone Grill. Spalding and Castle began with the goal to meld their ideas of place-based, seasonally appropriate cuisine, right livelihood, environmental ethics and social and community responsibility into a restaurant they would operate with compassion, generosity, loving kindness and grace. They were unaware at the time that given the unusual circumstances of their venture, this plan would be the restaurant's only chance of survival.

Located in the heart of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Boulder, Utah, was the last town in the nation to receive year-round mail by mule train. Today it has no stoplight, cell phone service, ATM, grocery store or medical facilities. But it has Zagat-rated Hell's Backbone Grill which, despite all odds, has won the acclaim of national and international media. Sixty-five favorite recipes accompany charming anecdotes, old-fashioned rural wisdom and introductions to captivating local characters, making With a Measure of Grace a warm, earthy, and unforgettable read.