When temperatures soar and appetites wilt, nothing is more appealing than a salad packed with cool, crisp greens.  Add a little protein and dinner is ready for the table.

This summer, I’m enamored with the pork tenderloin salad with warm strawberry dressing I found in “The Berry Bible,” by Janie Hibler.  Nominated for a James Beard award when it was first published in 2004, the cookbook is one of the books Amazon Encore is bringing back because customer reviews and other sources indicate they were overlooked and under-appreciated when they were first released. (more…)

Summer books should be entertaining page-turners.  Who wants to get bogged down in obtuse economic theory or convoluted political arguments while stretched out on a beach towel or curled up in an Adirondack chair?

Fortunately for food lovers, there’s a whole crop of fun reads out this year that explore the culinary world.  You don’t even have to be a cook to enjoy these memoirs.  Here are my choices:

Spoon Fed, by Kim Severson (Riverhead Books, 2010, $25.95).

Kim Severson, one of the best food journalists in the country, has been at the New York Times since 2004 but she began building her reputation at the San Francisco Chronicle six years earlier.  I’ve always admired her as an excellent reporter with a great eye for the stories that define our times.  She’s also an engaging writer with a cheeky sense of humor. (more…)

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman always seems to have his finger on the pulse of how America cooks.  His encyclopedic book of pared-down recipes, “How to Cook Everything,” Wiley, 1998, long ago displaced the venerable “Joy of Cooking” as the everyday kitchen reference in our house.  My husband would be lost without it.

Now Bittman has joined the smart phone age with his nifty new iPhone app, “How to Cook Everything On the Go” ($4.99). I’m not going to give up my hardback version of his cooking bible anytime soon but I’m smitten with this clever bit of technical wizardry.  It has everything in the book and more in a to-go format that is much easier to search.

The shortcake pictured here is based on the simple scone recipe I found while browsing among the strawberry entries.   The ingredient list is short, the instructions are simple, and the results are delectable.  This may be the easiest, most tender and flaky scone I’ve ever made even though I switched out half of the white flour for whole wheat pastry flour.  Use a food processor and the scones are ready to bake before the oven has warmed up. (more…)

As far as I’m concerned you can never have too many cookbooks.  My own collection spills out of bookcases in two rooms, upstairs and down.

Shelf space is at a premium, though, so I’m fairly selective about what I add to the collection these days.  A cookbook has to bring something new and unique to the kitchen before I give it a home.  I don’t need another compendium of Italian standards or repackaging of old cookie recipes and I’m hesitant to add a book from a cuisine I rarely cook because the ingredients are such a challenge to find.

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Almost anything goes with chocolate, it seems.

Last weekend at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, I tasted delightful chocolates combined with Guinness, jackfruit, bacon and genmai tea — in separate confections, thank goodness. Even the Van Gogh vodka infused with dusky Dutch chocolate, which I sampled with some trepidation, was lovely.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that dark chocolate and peppery extra virgin olive oil make such a stunning marriage in the almost flourless cake from Fran Gage‘s just-released book, “The New American Olive Oil” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009). The single-layer cake is at once dense, moist and amazingly light, with the silky smooth texture of velvet. Just enough of the oil’s pungent bite hovers in the background to highlight the chocolate’s subtly fruity character. I may never go back to butter. (more…)