Cooking: Kitchen tactics

“Eat thoughtfully, live joyously.” That’s the mantra of Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the founders of the very popular Food52 website. Their latest cookbook, Food52 A New Way to Dinner: A Playbook of Recipes and Strategies for the Week Ahead, is a perfect guide to maintaining their happy, heartfelt cooking philosophy. It’s hard to eat thoughtfully if you’re racing home from work and don’t have time to shop, let alone cook. Hesser and Stubbs have been there; they run a business and have kids. They’ve found that they need to shop and cook on weekends, and they need to be organized. Therefore, this book is arranged by season and menu, and every dinner includes recipes that can be stretched and varied. Each recipe comes with a game plan, a time-saving grocery list and tactical tips galore. With Hesser and Stubbs at your side, weeknight dinners are not only doable, they’re delectable.

VITAL VITTLES
Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes is Ronni Lundy’s ode to the people, places and food of the southern Appalachian Mountains. To find the culinary soul of Appalachia, Lundy drove 4,000 miles, zigzagging through the mountains, meeting home cooks, growers, curers, preservers of food and tradition and innovative chefs cooking in a way that has long been both seasonal and sustainable. With Victuals, you can hear their stories and cook their regional recipes redolent of past and present—Spring Ramp Pot Roast, Kentucky Kimchi, Real Cornbread, Speckled Butter Bean Cassoulet with Rabbit Confit, Hominy & Wilted Greens, Spiced Pickled Peaches, Sorghum & Apple Sticky Pudding. And Lundy seasons it all with her evocative essays that make the mountains sing and gently undo the stereotypes that have clouded their vitality.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS
Naomi Duguid’s cookbooks belong to their own genre—they are unique travel journals studded with history, geography and ethnography, along with fabulous photos of the people she meets and the places she goes. Then, of course, there are the intriguing, detailed recipes she collects. It’s more than armchair travel—you become immersed in the culinary culture of a faraway part of the world. Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan, Duguid’s latest, is a glorious trip through these five countries that once were part of the Persian empire. They share borders and culinary traditions, even though they speak many different languages and practice many different religions. These are cuisines that use walnuts, pomegranates and other tart fruits, lots of eggplant, chickpeas, saffron and fresh herbs. In this part of the world, kebabs are grilled, rice is celebrated and flatbreads are folded over myriad fillings. Most of us won’t get to these fabled lands, but now their dishes can become part of our own culinary culture.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.