I'm usually a sucker for cookbooks with photos that show a recipe in beautifully styled detail (Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers immediately comes to mind), but Jeremiah Cooks goes the big, bold, artful route instead, with paintings by Donald Sultan decorating the pages. I'm usually not much of a fan of Sultan's oversized canvases, but the high contrast and brightly colored images seem to match the bravado of Tower's cooking, and they are a welcome relief to the text heavy pages loaded with detailed instructions for the recipes. 

Strangely enough, my copy of the book has post-it notes on pages with recipes...

"A cook just applies heat over time. Things cook. You go along for the ride, sharing the driving." This is just one of the Zen-like meditations sprinkled throughout The Complete Tassajara Cookbook by Edward Espe Brown. In fact the first one hundred pages or so of this five hundred page tome comprise his philosophy on cooking and handling ingredients, including tips on practicing Zen with vegetables. Never wasteful, Brown notes that veggies on the edge of oblivion often add a distinctive taste to dishes. After tossing the good half of another wise moldy red pepper into a sauce last night,...