Tasty cookbooks for the amateur chef

Ah, fall, the season of college football, PTA meetings - and high-profile chef cookbooks.

But entertaining as it may be to leaf through hotly anticipated new books by Thomas Keller and Ferran Adria, Grant Achatz of Alinea, and the Fat Duck's Heston Blumenthal, the home cook is likely to leave the cooking of the complex recipes in those volumes to the professionals.

So instead of enrolling in culinary school and purchasing the special equipment and ingredients (liquid nitrogen canisters, toad skin melons) called for by some chef-authors, consider that this fall's dazzling cookbook lineup has many impressive offerings for the amateur. Six books, some debuts and some by chefs who've penned previous cookbooks, are welcome additions to any home cook's library.

Nate Appleman of A16, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, and David Tanis, longtime chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., New York chef (at 50 Carmine, Il Buco) Sara Jenkins and Los Angeles' Two Dudes, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal, have all written first cookbooks happily suited to the home cook.

Add new family focused books by British chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and you have an impressive list of accessible cookbooks. Of these six, three - by Appleman, Oliver and Tanis - were the most consistent, intelligent and creative.

A16: Food (Plus) Wine is the best of the bunch. This debut book by chef Nate Appleman and wine director Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy strikes a satisfying balance between simple and complex. It reads like a road map to the food and wine served at A16 (fitting, as the restaurant was named for a road in southern Italy), combining recipes and terrific photography by Ed Anderson with primers on wine by Lindgren and tutorials on ingredients from Appleman.

Even the novice cook can make Appleman's raw zucchini salad with green olives, mint and pecorino - an easy no-cook recipe, that combines technique and sophisticated flavor combinations, with impressive results.

Monday meatballs is a basic dish, covered by canned tomatoes and baked under foil. But the extras - grinding the meat (use a food processor), and adding ricotta and bread crumbs - elevate the simple to the extraordinary.

Jamie Oliver's eighth book, Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life, is billed as an homage to his garden. In the preface, television's former Naked Chef explains that he's fallen in love with his "veg." The book is an exploration of what he does with that garden windfall.

A salad combines whole carrots roasted - with a halved lemon and orange - in a spice blend. The juice from the citrus forms the base of a quick vinaigrette. Tossed with garden greens and avocado, it gets another dimension from a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of toasted seeds.

A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes is the first cookbook from Chez Panisse's David Tanis. Like the restaurant, the book offers simple menus of three or four courses.

Tanis' book, interspersed with a narrative of the chef's back story, is a lovely read. The recipes are simple too, although the book can be frustrating for those cooking for fewer than eight.

Zuppa di fagoli, served with garlic-rubbed toasts, is a well-executed white bean soup heightened with fennel seeds and rosemary olive oil.

The books by Sara Jenkins, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Dudes, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, are less reliable but often inspiring.

Olives & Oranges: Recipes and Flavor Secrets From Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Beyond, by Jenkins and Mindy Fox, has a Mediterranean spin. It's Jenkins' first book, though she's cooked at New York restaurants (her restaurant, Porchetta, opens this fall).

Jenkins' dishes are straightforward, interesting for often-striking flavor combinations. But the recipes can be hit-or-miss. Cantaloupe gazpacho is a blend of melon and cucumber with olive oil, sherry vinegar and shallot. Topped with prosciutto and Aleppo pepper, the soup is easy and shot with flavor. But a fattoush, or Middle Eastern salad of toasted pita and chopped vegetables, looked nice on the plate, but tasted flat.

The River Cottage Family Cookbook, by Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr, is the latest book by the British chef and television personality. It's geared to parents and their kids - somewhat of a departure for Fearnley-Whittingstall, who has frequently appeared on Gordon Ramsay's expletive-filled television shows, and whose first book, Cook on the Wild Side, discussed preparing roadkill.

The book does a great job of hitting its target audience, with short tutorials on subjects such as flour and chocolate, recipes for smoothies, and kid-friendly ideas.

A basic chocolate mousse is so easy your kids could start their careers as pastry chefs with it. But the honey fudge never set, remaining a sticky goo. A roast chicken turned out undercooked, bland even for kids; the accompanying gravy was tasty, but there was only one tablespoon.

Shook and Dotolo's first book, Two Dudes, One Pan: Maximum Flavor From a Minimalist Kitchen, is as colorful and scruffy as the chefs themselves. The book is a happy mishmash, with recipes ranging from spicy citrus-glazed duck breasts to basic buttermilk pancakes.

Some recipes are successful riffs on the traditional: Bacon-wrapped meatloaf is shot with herbs, moist and deeply flavorful. But other dishes are disappointing.

Vinny's spaghetti Bolognese was too heavy, thickened with unnecessary butter and cream. Pan-roasted eggplant with shallot vinaigrette turned out underseasoned and undercooked.

Although some new user-friendly cookbooks are uneven, the standouts - Appleman's and Oliver's - are practical yet imaginative, with accessible instructions. They're also a bargain - compared with many of the for-pros books: All six hardcovers come in at less than $40 each.

Meanwhile, chefs, wannabe chefs, and collectors willing to spend ($250 for Blumenthal's The Big Fat Duck Cookbook) or who have a handy immersion circulator (needed for Keller's sous vide book) will have a stack of great cookbooks this fall, too.