Dip

Dips began as a uniquely American phenomenon. They arrived on the party scene after World War II and exploded in popularity when someone mixed Lipton's dry onion soup mix with sour cream and dubbed it California Dip. This still-irresistible mixture helped turn dips into ubiquitous party food. Good dips rely on punchy flavors and Kirby uses a range of them, such as garlic mixed with sharp cheeses in Sherried Cheddar and Blue Cheese Spread. You will also love the deep-roasted resonance in eggplant-based Baba Ganoush and the kick in East-West Wasabi and Mustard Mayonnaise. When you want to skip the fat, check out Kirby's 10 salsas. They combine chopped vegetables or fruit with hot chiles and a shot of tartness, as in Watermelon or Roasted Vegetable Salsa. Dips are made to be scooped up or spread on something tasty. Kirby helpfully provides four recipes for dippers to replace store-bought chips. Her Nutty Tortilla Chips are a nice surprise. So are the "Almost Instant" recipes you can throw together. With Kirby's help, all your parties will sparkle. --Dana Jacobi

You can hold this book the way you hold a child's hand. And you can let this book show you a whole new world, the way a child will reveal the secrets of a secret world if you take the time to stop and watch and listen. God bless Mildred Council and the time she took to get it all down in Mama Dip's Kitchen. And it's not just the recipes that come out of a life of good cooking--there's a great deal of Mildred Council in these pages, and we are better off for the reading, the cooking, and the sharing.

In her acknowledgments, Mildred Council thanks a woman who helped with the book. Then she thanks the woman's children, "Shawn and Chelsea, for playing so nicely while we flipped so many pages." She ends her cookbook with a recipe for a child's birthday party. Her enthusiasm for life growing through all its stages can be found on every page. "I realized my name was my earthly soul," she writes, "which needed to be tended like the pumpkin seed--tended, tilled, fed, and harvested, to have a good life. And that's what I tried to do ever since for my family and myself."

Part of that tending has been owning and operating Dip's, a popular Chapel Hill, North Carolina restaurant where she serves the kind of country food she grew up cooking. Mildred Council calls her style of cooking "dump cooking" because she scoops up ingredients without measuring and "dumps" them in the bowl or pan. It took her a good deal of time to measure out what she was doing so instinctively to be able to share her work as written recipes. But she encourages every cook to use her recipes like a sewing pattern, to experiment, to stretch here and cut there to make the food you like.

Mama Dip's Kitchen is a compendium of straightforward, simple, southern American foods in chapters devoted to "Breads and Breakfast Dishes," "Poultry, Fish, and Seafood Dishes," "Beef, Pork and Lamb Dishes," "Vegetables and Salad," and "Desserts, Beverages, and Party Dishes." In simple foods as in a simple life, the complexities run deep. --Schuyler Ingle

"This is a cookbook for vegetable lovers--and vegetable haters," says Andrea Chesman in The Roasted Vegetable. Her argument is that roasting veggies brings out their "hidden sweet, nutty flavors," making them irresistible to carrot-hating kids and vegan adults alike. She supports this theory with 150 tantalizing recipes, starting with a sizeable serving of side dishes, then broadening to include salsas, soups, salads, sandwiches, pasta, pizza, tofu, granola, and more. Beyond obvious inclusions like roasted peppers, french fries, and chestnuts, there's Garlic Puree ("like a basic black dress, it goes with almost anything") and Roasted Kohlrabi, which "looks like a spaceship that has sprouted leaves." Another standout is the Roasted Tomato Sauce, for which tomatoes are roasted up to one and a half hours until they've broken down to form a thick sauce; the recipe also has variations for pasta, enchiladas, and Middle Eastern dishes. In addition, the book covers basic techniques and equipment and includes a handy roasting chart--all aimed to help readers' roasted vegetables come out perfectly "tender-crisp." --Andy Boynton