After many years waiting tables and working in restaurants my only brush with bitters was as the staff cure all for hangovers. After a late night we'd all belly up to bar for our daily drink of bitters and soda. It cured everything from a headache to indigestion. Then it was only Angostura but now with the cocktail craze comes the bitters boom, and yes a book dedicated solely to this aromatic flavoring agent. More

Home cooks have to be a careful when it comes to a cookbook written by a restaurant chef. There often can be a disconnect between what it takes to get restaurant food onto our home tables when we don't have exotic ingredients flown to our doors and a dozen employees to prep them, not to mention years of professional training and the extraordinarily high btu's of a huge, multi-burner professional stove. So when I picked up San Francisco chef Mitch Rosenthal's new cookbook Cooking My Way Back Home, I'll admit I was a little cautious. Was this going to be one of those books that frustrated me with hours of prep work, and too many ingredients and complicated techniques? Read on for what I discovered. More

Here is a lady after my own heart. And, I'm thinking, yours. Jennifer Reese set out confidently and ambitiously, with grand intentions of crafting her own cheese and making pasta with eggs from her own chickens. She wanted to answer once and for all the question, "Where is that sweet spot between making and buying?" What she found, among other things, is that raising chickens isn't all it's cracked up to be. More

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is un-possible to pass by one of Milk Bar's four New York locations or read one of Pastry Chef Christina Tosi's recipes online and not feel an immediate sugar craving. Just opening this cookbook gave me a sugar rush.

Within these pages, Tosi breaks down how she makes all her now-famous recipes. Crack pie is here. Compost cookies are here. Her cakes and tarts and magic-seeming garnishes: yup, all here. You're going to love this cookbook. More

How do you make no-knead bread even easier? Make no-knead pizzas instead. As Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François say in the introduction to their newest cookbook, "If you have a batch of our stored dough in the fridge, and you've pre-heated your oven, you can be as little as ten minutes away from piping hot pizzas...For busy people, there's no quicker dinner."

Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day is filled with easy-peasy recipes to inspire our weeknight cooking. Take this Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza. Doesn't a slice of that after a day of running hither and yon sound just heavenly? More

Two words: bourbon dubbel. That is the Belgian-style ale that I have fermenting in my kitchen as we speak. And it's all thanks to this new cookbook (brewbook?) from Erica Shea and Stephen Valand, the creative geniuses behind Brooklyn BrewShop. More

The story of stone soup is a great story of cooperation: it teaches us that just a handful of shared ingredients can be transformed into a feast. But it also teaches us that nearly anything can be turned into soup — even a stone, a nail, a discarded bone. Soup can begin anywhere; we've shown you how to make soup from literally any vegetable, for instance (once you know that method, you'll never need a vegetable soup recipe again).

This recipe, from Melissa Clark's new book, takes the stone soup idea and stretches it out, starting with the bone discarded from a ham. It doesn't look like much but it's full of rich marrow, which infuses the soup with flavor. It's the most comforting thing I've eaten all week! More

Stone Brewing Co. co-founders Greg Koch and Steve Wagner have made a career of their "unabashedly arrogant" beers. In this book, written with the esteemed Randy Clemens, we see how they did it.

It's part history lesson, part beer guide, and part cookbook (with recipes of both the edible and the liquid variety). The title pretty much says it all: The Craft of Stone Brewing Co.: Liquid Lore, Epic Recipes, and Unabashed Arrogance. More

Their first cookbook "How to Eat Supper" was all about fitting a home-cooked meal into our busy weeknight schedules.

In this follow-up book, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift tackle the other end of the cooking spectrum. They say, Slow down! It's the weekend! Let's cook something really delicious. And here's how to do it. More

Got a bundt pan gathering dust in your cupboard? Wish you used it more often? Then this is the book for you: A collection of classic and updated bundt cake recipes, from Tunnel of Fudge Redux to Olive Oil-Rosemary and the recipe we have for you today:

A luscious cranberry cake, with the richness of crème fraîche. More