Every region has its own style of cooking, influenced by its culture and history. Catalonia is located at the northeast corner of Spain surrounding the great city of Barcelona and has a great history and marvelous culinary tradition. This wonderful cookbook starts...

Few readers know what Keto means. It took reading several pages of Easy Keto Desserts to understood that the Keto diet is a fad diet. Author Carolyn Ketchum should have defined the Keto diet within the first few paragraphs of this cookbook—she did not. Apart...

The Philippines is a melting culinary pot, as their cuisine is a blend of influences of many different countries and cultures, and as such it makes the Filipino cuisine very different and unique. Kulinarya, A Guidebook to Philippine Cuisine is one of few Filipino...

Instant Pot is a brand name of an electric digital pressure cooker. Megan Gilmore did an admirable job creating and altering recipes to work with this pressure cooker. If you already own a traditional stove-top pressure cooker, keep it. The recipes will work well with...

Posh indeed! Posh Rice by Emily Kidd begins with descriptions of twenty different kinds of rice from all around the world. The remainder of the book is how to make Salads/Bowls, Soups/Snacks, Supper Dishes, Side Dishes, and Desserts/Treats using one of the twenty varieties of rice for a range of flavors and textures. Not to be left out is the wonderful use of spices for each dish. Virtually most of the world is represented, from regional areas in North America to Mexico, Thailand, China, Japan, Lebanon, the Middle East, South Africa, West Africa, Spain, and India, to name a few.

It is unfortunate that a good cookbook editor didn’t edit Good to Glow–it would’ve improved considerably. The book has many faults. Authors Tali Shine and Steph Adams had young health-conscious women cooks in mind when writing this cookbook. Their idea was to provide healthy recipes that are easy to prepare and that make the diners’ skin glow. They introduce the book with each of their principles (e.g. no gluten, no wheat germ, bathe in Epsom salt, use detoxing oils).

Here is a very pretty cookbook that focuses on aesthetics to such extent that the cook’s convenience remains ignored. It doesn’t seem a good cookbook editor ever touched Nourish Bowls. The cookbook doesn’t even have an author to blame, and it totally departs from conventional recipe writing. The recipes have no title, no headnotes to explain unusual terms and impossible ingredients (fregola, Cavolo nero, halloumi, sea spaghetti), or anything about the recipe. The index only lists ingredients; thus a cook looking for a previously tested recipe will be at a loss.

If you like good hamburgers, this cookbook is a must for your collection. Byron was written by two professional chefs, Tom Byng and Fred Smith, who successfully downsized their restaurant recipes to home-kitchen level. Byron is the name of a chain of sixty small, high-end hamburger restaurants in London. Thankfully for us American cooks, they converted the metric units to our system for our convenience. This cookbook is beautiful, with awesome photographs throughout illustrating mouthwatering photos of the twenty hamburgers whose recipes they present, including the two basic and most popular ones: the classic hamburger and cheeseburger, also including vegetarian versions.

One of the best ways to get kids more interested in healthy eating is to get them into the kitchen, but many parents simply don’t know how to get started. Fortunately, there are plenty of good children’s cookbooks out there; The Cooking with Kids Cookbook is a fantastic addition here. This cookbook was compiled by the founder and program director of Cooking with Kids, a program in Santa Fe that has helped countless schoolchildren learn about cooking and growing their own food.

Too bad 101 One-Dish Dinners was only published in trade paperback. This cookbook by Andrea Chesman will be heavily used in the kitchen; hardback would have a better survival rate. This is an excellent cookbook with heavy, glossy pages and truly one-hundred-and one very nice, very usable recipes.