Q: My husband got a smoker for Christmas this year. He is beyond excited but is lacking experience (as am I). We tried one recipe for smoked ribs that came with the instruction manual for the smoker but we were disappointed. I can't seem to find a well-reviewed cookbook on smoking meats and fish. Can you or any of your readers provide some advice?

Sent by Kara
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Sixteen cookbooks, seventeen food celebrity judges, eight brackets, four rounds of judging, one coveted Piglet prize. Winner takes all. The action is heating up over on Food 52's annual Tournament of Cookbooks. I, for one, am on the edge of my seat. More

We have had such fun reviewing and sharing recipes from the avalanche of cookbooks published this year. These were some of our favorite recipes, including dishes from authors like Melissa Clark, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams – all of whom appeared on our readers' top five cookbooks of 2011 list, too! 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

I discovered something in Momofuku Milk Bar that I thought was pretty surprising. Pastry chef Christina Tosi does not scour New York shops for obscure artisan-made ingredients, nor does she order from a secret top chef catalog. Nope, she shops on Amazon and recommends that we do the same. More

We asked our readers about their favorite new cookbooks of 2011, and while a delightful variety emerged, there were a few clear frontrunners. We weighed these with our own favorites, as well as the ones that seemed to receive the most chatter from our friends and fellow bloggers. What were the results? Which books earned our must-buy award for 2011? More

2011 is drawing to a close, and it's time to look back and take stock of this past year's crop of cookbooks. Cookbooks comprise one area of traditional publishing that's still going strong, and this felt like a particularly rich and colorful year for new cookbooks. Here are a couple of my favorites, and we would love to hear from you: Which new cookbooks really stood out to you this year? Tell us, and we'll round up all your answers next week. More

In a perfect world, I'd have a bottomless well of money, time and shelf space, so I could buy all the noteworthy cookbooks that come out each year.

Alas, this isn't a perfect world, which is why I'm bookmarking reviewer T. Susan Chang's list of seven questions she asks herself when rating cookbooks. I think it is going to come in handy when I'm trying to decide if a cookbook is worthy of a spot on my shelf. 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