Whether your holiday gift list is filled with gourmet chefs, television addicts or people who just love a good tale, this year's crop of cookbooks and other food-related volumes offers some excellent gift choices.
Here's a guide to help you pick through the deluge.
For Food Network junkies
Can't pry that friend/cousin/husband/wife away from the Food Network? Stash a copy of “Alton Brown's Good Eats: The Early Years” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $37.50) under the tree. Brown's wacky spunk drives the episode-by-episode breakdown of his hit show's first six seasons, complete with 140 recipes and a fold-out poster!
“Ace of Cakes: Inside the World of Charm City Cakes” (William Morrow, $35) offers a photo album-scrapbook of life at Baltimore's Charm City Bakery, the birthplace of those spectacular towers of fondant featured on the show.
Or surprise your aspiring Top Chef with “Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook” (Chronicle Books, $19.95), a collection of 75 recipes from the show plus advice on staging your own Quickfire Challenges at home.
For busy cooks
For harried cooks who nonetheless disdain five-ingredient cookbooks or 30-minute meal solutions, there is no better book than “Mark Bittman's Kitchen Express: 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less” (Simon and Schuster, $26). It's filled with paragraph-long suggestions for delicious, straightforward weeknight fare, as Bittman ditches the traditional recipe format in favor of practical ways to use what you've got on hand.
“Rachel Ray's Book of 10: More than 300 Recipes to Cook Every Day” (Clarkson Potter, $20) offers recipes as simple as the title. From Mediterranean chicken to stuffed cabbage soup, Ray offers her top 10 recipes in categories from Family Faves to $10 Meals.
For beginners
Moosewood Cookbook author Mollie Katzen offers beginners recipes for simple, satisfying fare, as well as tips for rounding out a soup meal, riffing on established recipes and generally getting the hang of things in “Get Cooking: 150 Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen” (HarperStudio, $24.99). Send your kid off to college with this one.
