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Grow, Cook, Eat by Willi Galloway is a handy little book, despite the entertainingly transparent subtitle: A Food Lover's Guide to Vegetable Gardening Including 50 Recipes, Plus Harvesting and Storage Tips. If you're spending your Saturday tending to your vegetable garden rather than pruning roses, we're pretty sure you're more likely an avid "food lover" than a weekend scented-candlemaker sort.

Semantics aside, it's simply a long-winded reminder that agents or publishers often come up with titles and book jacket cover blurbs, not authors, as the book itself is a fun little reference guide. Expect an encyclopedic layout, only here in a large-format, photo-driven style that makes those monologues on growing onions more engaging. In each vegetable category you'll find basics on growing, say, spinach and mustard greens followed by several recipes (spinach risotto, mustard green turnovers).

A side note: Check out Galloway's blog for community garden-friendly vegetable trellis and other handy summer "How not to grow a tomato" ideas. But first, get the rest of our review, and Galloway's citrusy roasted beet recipe, after the jump.

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The publisher's description of The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World is about as boastful in the book world as it gets: "The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published."

Here, it is spot-on.

This 500-page, prose-heavy manual is more an encyclopedia than an actual cookbook, meaning you won't find pretty photographs of homemade yogurt hanging out with beautiful cherry jams inside.

What you will find is a forward by Michael Pollan. And the only resource guide you will ever need for all of your soy sauce, sorghum beer, tempeh and hamanatto (whole fermented soybean "nuggets") weekend fermenting dreams. A Master Food Preservers-worthy guide to fermenting everything edible -- and some things that are not.

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Scandinavian cuisine is newly hip, thanks to René Redzepi and Noma in Denmark.
Now Norway is getting into the act with something that just might steal Redzepi's show: glorious, buttery pastries and rich, creamy desserts. The contender is Norway's star pastry chef, Sverre Saetre, whose book on modern Norwegian baking has just been translated into English.

Its plain title, Norwegian Cakes and Cookies (Sky Horse Publishing), and blue-and-white-checked cover lead you to expect a collection of Grandma's homey recipes. Instead, Saetre twists, tweaks and reconstructs Norwegian classics into stylish new presentations. The photographs by Christian Brun are just as innovative. The one that goes with strawberry jam with star anise could hang in a gallery.

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If you've ever spent too many Google hours typing "Ewald + Notter," hoping to perfect your pastillage (sculptures made from a powdered sugar "dough") technique, The Art of the Confectioner is the book of your blown sugar sculpture dreams.

Notter's The Art of the Confectioner is yet another pastry cog in Wiley's "professional" series, the sort of cookbooks that make you wonder why you spent so much on pastry school when $65 ($25 less on Amazon) perhaps would have sufficed.

Then again, you wouldn't have had the pleasure of watching that Boeing engineer, who enrolled just for the NASA sculpture fun of it, blow out such a remarkable space shuttle sugar sculpture, it made up for all of those simple cookie recipes he never could quite master.

But we were supposed to be talking about The Art of the Confectioner.

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Ryan Robert Miller/Salad For Dinner

Chicken and Orange Salad with Beets

Those low-fat, low-carb, low-trend-whatever cookbooks will likely always have a market. But another positive trickle-down effect of the current farmers market and backyard gardening era has been the really great "healthful" cookbooks we've been seeing recently, Hero Food: How Cooking With Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better by New York chef Seamus Mullen and Salad for Dinner by Jeanne Kelley among them (Disclosure: Kelley is an occasional contributor to this blog).

Even "healthful" is an unfortunate word here, as these are simply really great cookbooks that happen to be free of the current trendy candied bacon and short rib meatloaf restaurant excesses. No health book calorie counts, either. Funny, five years ago, publishers would have simply called them great "farmers market-driven" cookbooks, leaving the Hero Food references (Mullen changed his diet after learning he had rheumatoid arthritis) and Salad for Dinner cookbook titles off the table (Kelley is quick to blush and note her publisher chose the title; for her, this was a realistic catalog of what she likes to cook for dinner from her backyard garden).

Good thing it's the recipes we're really after in both books.

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In the cookbook realm, turning out consistently great books has a downside: We expect more of publishers like the River Cottage and Phaidon. The River Cottage's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, here with co-author Nick Fisher, a seafood journalist and avid fisherman, does not disappoint with the new American edition of The River Cottage Fish Book, the best (600-page!) fish cookbook we have seen in years.

It's part cookbook, part seafood encyclopedia, really, as 200 of those pages are dedicated to a glossary of fish by species described in that signature (read: highly entertaining) River Cottage storytelling voice. And not just the what and where, but whether we should be eating the species, like conger eel, for sustainablility, taste and safety reasons:

"Every sea fisherman has a conger [eel] story to tell; some twisty tale of a huge, snapping eel with a head the size of a boiled ham, teeth so sharp they could fell a pylon, and the attitude of a Jack Russell with a wasp up its nose."

Yeah, we're seriously considering becoming a professional fisherman now, too, just for the horror-film fun of it.

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At a moment in our culinary history when even our everyday weeknight dinner focus -- or fuss, depending on your recipe perspective -- is on (more) sustainable, farmers market-friendly, nose-to-tail cooking, we were curious what we might find among the pages of a modern Betty Crocker cookbook. Slow-cooker pig trotters with Weiser Farm potatoes? Right. But surely, at least no more powdered mashed potatoes?

Just our luck, the latest in Ms. Crocker's series, The Big Book of Weeknight Dinners, was released earlier this year.

Before we go on, we should clarify that yes, we realize Betty Crocker is a commercial brand, much like her imaginary Prudence Penny and Marion Manners friends. All three emerged as part of the home cooking fun in the 1920s and were quite popular through the 1950s.

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It happens every year about this time. Those malted milk-chocolate chip ice cream (p. 82) and blood orange sorbet (p. 162) recipes start appearing in the latest ice cream cookbooks. This year, Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones, to be released in two weeks, starts us down that rocky road to what we hope will be ice cream salvation by summer.

It's a publishing category that is anything but frozen, as there seems to be an open casting call for whatever cherry-almond (p.117) and Meyer lemon (p.156) sweet cream versions the latest pastry chef or ice cream parlor owner has envisioned (here, Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco; the ice cream book is a follow-up to the grocer's Eat Good Food book published last year). Should you be interested in auditioning your best salted caramel recipe (p. 61) for future hardcover consideration, keep in mind that using locally-sourced ingredients, all the way down to your milk, is a must in ice cream cookbooks today, being "the most Yelp-about business in American," per the press release, probably had something to do with that publishing deal.

But we digress. The real homemade sugar cone question (p. 46) in an over-published category like ice cream is whether this book will be settling into our shelves next to Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams and friends.

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Those summer berry and fall holiday pies may get all of the seasonal baking attention, but spring really is the ideal time to Pie It Forward, isn't it? There are those rainy weekends best left to indoor dough rolling, the partly cloudy ones that aren't quite ready for berry picking outings, and those between-seasons sort of days when you really need a slice of Yin Yang cheesecake (in matcha tea and mango form, p. 132) to pull it all together.

Or, should you be more of a tart, torte or galette weekend baker, Gesine Bullock-Prado's new cookbook has plenty of blueberry brown butter and macadamia-coconut-caramel ideas -- even a few savory ones like potato sausage pie and Bavarian calzones filled with chicken, Camembert cheese, lingonberry preserves and aioli with a touch of maple syrup (!) for an added sweet kick.

Yeah, in case you're wondering, Bullock-Prado runs a lot of marathons. And yes, Sandra Bullock is her sister (A Hollywood pie diet! Now that would be fun).

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A Girl and Her Pig

As far as cookbook anticipation goes, April Bloomfield's new release, A Girl and Her Pig, which hits shelves in early April, ranks right up there on the crispy pig ear salad (p. 85) meter. Is it deserving of the hype? Perhaps.

But we're not going there just yet, even though we suspect other Google-searchable reviewers will get right to the sausage-stuffed onion (p. 174) point. For us, this book deserves more restraint than just digging right into that sweet banoffee pie (p. 270) commentary.

For starters, there are a few tricky stewed octopus (p. 107) moments in this book. Not tricky in that cooking octopus is difficult, but octopus requires cooking lightning-quick or long and slow, with very few forgivable text-message diversions in between. In fact, you could sum up Bloomfield's cooking style as one that, at its core, has been stripped down to the simplest country ingredients, yet the chef has a Thomas Keller-worthy attention to the tiniest details of that gnudi texture (more on those semolina-ricotta bites later).

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