If you are a novice cook, Gluten-Free Small Bites by Nicole Hunn is not going to be an easy cookbook for you. Hunn presents a large collection of gluten-free recipes in eight different categories, but they all have one thing in common: they’re small, bite-sized nuggets, including a full dinner of lemon-sized goodies.

Vegan cookbook writers beware! Any new vegan cookbook will have a tough time surpassing Vegan for Everybody. America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks are so thorough, their recipes so well tested by a large professional staff that they satisfy most cooks’ needs for a cookbook on a given subject. This vegan cookbook is no exception.

We have an enormous collection of recipes for marinades, dry and wet rubs, spice pastes, cures and brines, bastes, mops, and slather sauces in this cookbook, Barbecues Sauces, by Steven Raichlen. These are followed by after-marinades and board sauces, salsas, relishes, sambals, and chutneys.

The author of this recipe book, Carol Fenster, found a cooking niche that many cooks will appreciate: small-batch cooking. She is also a gluten-free cook; thus Gluten-Free Cooking for Two has a double niche, giving you one-hundred-and-twenty-five very nice recipes from breakfast through desserts.

As promised by its title, The Colorful Kitchen cookbook’s author, Ilene Godofsky Moreno, assembled a large collection of vegan recipes, selected and created partly for their colorful presentations. With this vegan cookbook you can satisfy any vegan kitchen’s need, from smoothies through main entrées to desserts.

This unusual cookbook is about as inconvenient in the kitchen as it possibly can be. Wit and Wisdom from the Kitchen has no table of contents, no index, not even page numbers. It seems like this is author Dominique Devito’s personal notes waiting to be organized. Should you want to cook a previously tried recipe, the only way to find it is to page through the book.

This beautifully illustrated and expensively produced cookbook, Perfect Paleo, seems like a nice addition to the library of Paleo cooks. Rosa Rigby didn’t write this for the beginner cooks, and even the intermediate home cooks will be challenged. Most of the recipes are complex and time consuming, sometimes preparing three, even four preparations before the final step.

Just looking at this colorful cookbook made me so happy. As someone who views Tasty cooking videos online, I was delighted to receive a copy of Tasty Dessert: All the Sweet You Can Eat (An Official Tasty Cookbook). The book is organized into seven descriptive chapters: “Dense & Fudge,” “Crunchy, Crackly, Crispy,” “Chewy & Gooey” “Juicy & Fruity,” “Creamy Dreamy,” “Soft & Fluffy,” and “Drippy & Oozy.” Now, if just reading those didn’t make your mouth water, I don’t know what will.

Is this a picture book or a cookbook? Alimentari by Linda and Paul Jones is filled with photos—close to half of the pages are photographs: mostly of foods and scenes of the authors’ deli called Alimentari but also of people, dogs, babies, and so on. But where is this deli, besides being on Brunswick Street? Neither in the foreword nor in the long introduction does the name of the city or country appear. The recipe units first listed are metric, inconvenient for American cooks as they end up measuring in fractions. Professionals downsizing recipes into home kitchens are occasionally successful—not these authors. Only the simplest recipes are within easy reach of a home cook. Many items are given in a commercial kitchen like aioli, pesto, tomato chutney, dukkah, and Lebanese pie dough. And where do home cooks find items like haloumi, nigella seeds, burrata, or shanklish, among other impossible ingredients? Or how many home cooks would attempt a wood-fired suckling pig? The recipes are good, many with a long list of ingredients, and are most well beyond the average home cook’s ability or patience. The cooking times acceptable for restaurant range are far too short for home kitchens. The index is good. But you don’t need this cookbook.