Cookbooks and Recipes This year's collection of summer cookbooks features an exploration of the exotic by ferocious, passionate cooks who aren't afraid to reach into the deepest corners of the pantry.

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Cookbooks and Recipes

This year's collection of summer cookbooks features an exploration of the exotic.

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The 10 Best Summer Cookbooks Of 2009

May 26, 2009 • This year's crop of spring and summer cookbooks is a sprawling, eclectic collection, hard to summarize and harder to sort. In these books we find a world of thrilling arcana, seemingly custom tailored for a summer in which eating in looks to be the greatest adventure of all.

Recipes: 'Real Cajun'

May 26, 2009 • You may not have realized before now that you need to know how to make sausage, but that only because you haven't yet succumbed to the pork-worshiping, boudinacious, jambalayicious world of Real Cajun.

Recipes: 'Memorable Recipes to Share with Family and Friends'

May 26, 2009 • Renee Behnke's emphasis on summer produce make it a good source to turn to after one of those trips to the farmer's market where you accidentally got one of everything and don't know what to do with it (Answer: Ratatouille with Fresh Rosemary.)

Recipes: 'Flavors Of Asia'

May 26, 2009 • The Flavors of Asia is an emancipation from eating out, filled with recipes for dishes many of us are accustomed to letting other people make for us: Singapore Stir-Fried Noodles, Vietnamese spring rolls, samosas.

Recipes: 'Cooking Know-How'

May 26, 2009 • Cooking Know-How is the complete process-engineering of 64 basic dishes, including risotto, roasted birds, frittata and stir-fry.

Recipes: 'Tacos'

May 26, 2009 • In case you were wondering when would be the best time to get beyond the fast-food tacos you grew up with, that time is now.

Recipes: 'The Modern Vegetarian'

May 26, 2009 • There's something sweetly avant-garde about the recipes in Maria Elia's The Modern Vegetarian, a book that loves its grains and vegetables for their own sake, not for their ability to masquerade as meat or camouflage its absence.

Recipes: 'The Spice Kitchen'

May 26, 2009 • In her quirky, globe-trotting book The Spice Kitchen Michal Haines displays a range of culinary endeavor that would dazzle the most jaded spice merchant on the Silk Road.

Recipes: 'Preserved'

May 26, 2009 • Even if you don't want to salt your own pork, smoke your own duck or preserve your own lemons, that's OK. Preserved, by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton, is filled with recipes that will work with dried, canned and preserved goods from the store too.

Recipes: 'Soaked, Slathered, and Seasoned'

May 26, 2009 • In Soaked, Slathered, and Seasoned, Elizabeth Karmel skips the usual macho seminar on flame-taming and gear, and instead trains her laser-like focus on the real prize: where the flavor comes from.

Recipes: 'Vefa's Kitchen'

May 26, 2009 • So many of the elements of the Greek kitchen are well known, yet for one reason or another they don't add up to something we turn to night after night. Maybe that's because there hasn't been a basic, here's-how-we-do-it Greek Joy of Cooking — until now.