When Pies Fly: Handmade Pastries from Strudels to Stromboli, Empanadas to Knishes
Cathy Barrow
Making pie-dough looks more fun than daunting in this globe-trotting roundup of all things dough-wrapped and shaped by hand: “flying pies,” Barrow calls them, “unencumbered, not needing a pan to be formed.” Also the author of Pie Squared: Irresistibly Easy Sweet & Savory Slab Pies, she includes tempting recipes such as chai-spiced plum and walnut empanadas, sweet cheese kolache, cheeseburger hand pies, and pistachio strudel, with instructions on how to make and handle different kinds of doughs.
Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy's Best Home Cooks
Vicky Bennison
This cookbook is essentially a love letter to Italy and its melt-in-your-mouth regional recipes, as well as to the grandmothers (nonne) who keep them alive. The result of Bennison's interviews with Italian home cooks for her Pasta Grannies YouTube channel, it includes recipes such as Franco and Alessandra's corzetti (coin-shaped pasta common in Liguria) with fresh marjoram dressing; Olga's canederli (bread dumplings); and Carmela's cavatelli rigati with beans. The recipes are accompanied by their back stories, plus photos of the nonne and their carb-tacular dishes. If you're Italian American — or maybe even if you're not — they look and taste like home.
How to Cocktail: Recipes and Techniques for Building the Best Drinks
America's Test Kitchen
America's Test Kitchen famously tests its recipes over and over again until, as they put it “we arrive at the best version.” This group of recipes must have been fun to test. It includes the classics — the Manhattan, Negroni, mimosa, mai tai, whiskey sour — plus some fun additions, such as Brandied Caramel Apple Milkshakes. Really ambitious home bartenders can impress their companions.
Weeknight Baking: Recipes to Fit Your Schedule
Michelle Lopez
Some of these recipes are easy-peasy (classic pound cake), others are more complex (vegan and gluten-free peanut butter pretzel pie). But all of them — cookies, cakes, pies, tarts, brownies and more — can be fit into a busy schedule. In some cases that means prepping on night one, baking on night two. Lopez, who has a full-time tech job and runs the baking blog Hummingbird High, notes the active time required for each recipe (the pretzel pie, for instance, takes 30 minutes over three days), and useful guidance on baking basics such as making all-butter pie dough and baking with bananas.
Food: What the Heck Should I Cook?
Mark Hyman, M.D.
The wellness/food guru wrote last year's Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?; now he's telling us how to cook it. Hyman, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, is a proponent of the Pegan diet, which combines what he considers to be the best concepts from the Paleo and vegan diets, such as limiting dairy, gluten and sugar. He explains his food philosophy, then dives into his recipes, some of which are on the complex side — Moroccan Fish Balls in Pepper Sauce doesn't look like a go-to weeknight dish, for instance. But many others, such as Orange-Blackberry Almond Scones (using almond and millet flours rather than wheat) are more straightforward.
More on entertainment
AARP Bookstore
Find e-books, print books and free downloads on health, food, technology and more