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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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Ryan Robert Miller

mini peppers

At first I was skeptical of the colorful mini peppers packaged in the clamshell at the grocery store. I can be wary of produce not sold from crates at farmers markets, and these glossy, firm, petite yellow, red and orange babies looked just too plastic-perfect and remarkably un-heirloom to be any good. But eventually the mini-me cuteness and a giant, bargain-priced bag proved too tempting.

The little peppers turned out to be as fun as they look. Not only are they honeyed as the name implies (they are marketed as both Sweet Mini Peppers and Veggie Sweet Peppers), their flesh is tender and they are practically seedless. Tasty cooked or raw, you can eat the peppers whole, and when roasted or grilled, the skin is so thin it needn't be removed.

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A few of the new booze books

Booze-themed cookbooks have never been terribly high on our everyday shopping lists, but there are those weekend moments when The Food of Morocco isn't quite what we're craving. OK, that's not really true. We'd be content with Paula Wolfert's harissa any day of the week. But we're all for occasionally having a little tipsy fun in the kitchen.

It also seems to be a trendy thing, as we've seen a steady stream of alcohol-inspired books arrive on our doorstep lately. The three that follow -- Beer, A Cookbook; Edible Cocktails; Never Cook Sober -- all happen to be from the same publisher, Adams Media (Beer, A Cookbook is actually a group effort from the Adams Media staff). Yeah, we're pretty sure they have really great office parties. Get a summary of each after the jump.

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Anne Fisbhein

Roy Choi loves cookbooks

​Cookbooks have long faced competition from magazines and newspapers. But now, it's the Internet Age. Print publications are putting their recipes online, and websites such as Epicurious and Food help you find instructions for virtually any dish with just a few clicks. Meanwhile, blogs are offering their own perspectives and kitchen tips. Many of these websites are beautifully designed. (Just check out the tomatoes at Gilt Taste.) Still, cookbooks persist with their hard covers, thick pages and glossy photos.

Saturday, LitFest Pasadena will host a panel on "Cookbooks in the Age of Epicurious" from 3:10 - 4 p.m. with several L.A. food writers. Jeanne Kelley will moderate with Jenn Garbee, Matt Armendariz, Joseph Shuldiner and Squid Ink editor Amy Scattergood as panelists. (We've just gotten word that Shuldiner is unable to attend.)

Kelley is a Squid Ink contributor whose books include Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, Holiday Baking and Salad for Dinner. Garbee reviews cookbooks for Squid Ink and covers history, artisan foods and baking. She is also the author of Secret Suppers: Rogue Chefs and Underground Restaurants in Warehouses, Townhouses, Open Fields, and Everywhere in Between, and is working on a baking book. Armendariz, a photographer, wrote On a Stick!: 80 Party-Perfect Recipes and blogs at Matt Bites. Pure Vegan is forthcoming from graphic designer Joseph Shuldiner. Scattergood co-authored Good to the Grain, and is writing a cookbook for kids.

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www.thejoykitchen.com/

The Joy Website

Sure, we could interpret The Joy of Cooking's new website (!) as yet another sign of the cookbook publishing industry's demise, a near-certain Armageddon of the printed recipe word. If a book that has been in print continuously since the 1930s (and sold nearly 20 million copies) has jumped ship to go online, then maybe we really should all consider using our iPads as cutting boards in protest.

Not to worry, the website is more about The Joy of Cooking brand than about the book. And it's a pretty great place for novice home cooks to learn a thing or two.

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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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White Trash Cooking's anniversary

How fitting, in a marshmallow salad sort of way, that 25 years after Ernest M. Mickler first published White Trash Cooking, the final season of HBO's Eastbound and Down has wrapped up.

If you've missed "the best f--king show on HBO," as MTV's James Montgomery neatly summed up in Kenny Powers-appropriate lingo, you can still shell out those HBO subscription dollars and watch back episodes. Or you could go with the $19.99, cheap white trash spiral-bound alternative: the recently released 25th-anniversary edition of Mickler's cookbook.

Although Mickler died shortly after the first edition was published, we have a feeling the cookbook author would have been an Eastbound and Down fan.

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