Fall Into Seasonal Cooking

Are you curious about cooking with seasonal ingredients but don’t feel confident in your cooking abilities? Authors Ian Knauer and Shelley Wiseman use creative recipes with fresh ingredients in The Farm Cooking School: Techniques and Recipes that Celebrate the Seasons (Burgess Lea Press, 2017) that will help you hone your skills in the kitchen.

The book takes recipes with unfamiliar ingredients or complicated cooking methods and makes them more approachable for the home cook. There are helpful tips on the basics, like canning fresh tomatoes, boning a whole chicken or making caramel. Recipes range from simple to complex and always include seasonal produce, so any cook will find them intriguing. Knauer and Wiseman met while working at Gourmet; in this book they offer full menus (including dessert!) with a variety of themes including Mediterranean, Modern Mexican and “The Fifth Season.” One Fall Favorites menu features Venison Loin with Concord Grape Sauce, Smash-Fried Potatoes with Sweet Onion Vinaigrette, and a Ricotta Tart with Roasted Figs and Candied Lemon Zest. There’s also a section with four seasonal variations for each recipe, like savory tarte tatins or panna cotta, perfect recipes to master as you celebrate the bounty of each season as it comes.

—Catherine Horwitz

In 2007, Melissa Clark captivated food-loving New York Times readers with the debut of her column “A Good Appetite.” She has since become the face of the Times cooking videos and a winner of three James Beard Awards. Favorite Recipes from Melissa Clark’s Kitchen (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2018) is essentially her greatest hits: 100 recipes from two previous cookbooks, In The Kitchen with a Good Appetite and Cook This Now.

The cookbook is organized into six sections by meal, starting with Breakfast/Brunch and culminating with Cocktails and Snacks. Each recipe is then categorized by occasion: weekday staple, perfect for two, family meals or company’s coming. The structure of this cookbook enables you to pick a recipe for the right time and place. For an elevated bring-to-work lunch the Perfect Tomato Sandwich is, well ... perfect. Guests in an hour? Why not try the Roasted Blackfish with Olives and Sage, which bakes for only eight minutes. And finally, for an at-home dinner date, you can’t go wrong with her Tiny Valentine’s Day Cake, a devil’s food cake with butter rum frosting. Clark’s eloquent and charming recipe introductions give this cookbook an aura of familiarity, yearning to have a place on your cookbook shelf.

—Alyssa Gerasimoff