Chef Simeon (Cook Real Hawai’i) celebrates the complexity and creativity of Hawaiian cuisine and its many influences in this alluring volume. Numerous recipes draw from East Asian cuisines: teriyaki potatoes, for instance, are the result of 20th-century Korean immigrants settling in Hawaii and adapting their recipes with readily available Japanese ingredients, while the Chinese American classic shrimp egg foo young is a local favorite, according to Simeon. Southeast Asian–inspired dishes include curried mung beans, chicken adobo fried rice, and bulalo (beef shank soup). Elsewhere, the pickled allium and vinegary flavors of pocho bean salad pay tribute to Portuguese influence, and the Hawaiian staple pastele stew originated from 20th-century Puerto Rican immigrants who subbed in green bananas for plantains. Equally intriguing are Simeon’s original creations: he adds ginger and oyster sauce to stir-fried olives to achieve a “slight wok hei flavor,” replaces traditional bucatini with tteok (chewy, tubular Korean rice cakes) to accompany Amatriciana sauce, and boosts the flavor of store-bought animal crackers with a shoyu-nori glaze. Most ingredients can be found at supermarkets, and unfussy instructions make many of the dishes suitable for busy weeknights. Home cooks looking to spice up their repertoire will be inspired. Agent: Katherine Cowles, Cowles Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Council devotes her warmhearted debut to the culinary heritage passed down by her mother, Mildred Council, the restaurateur behind North Carolina’s Mama Dip’s Kitchen, which closed in 2025 after a 50-year run. Drawing on food traditions from Chapel Hill’s Northside Black community, these 100 recipes celebrate classic Southern fare. Melt-in-the-mouth pimento cheese biscuits or grits casserole with shrimp gravy elevate a breakfast or brunch. Fresh okra enhances simple corn fritters, while braised collard greens are simmered in “pot liquor” rendered from fried fatback. Chicken dishes (fried or smothered) and rib options (braised or barbecued) abound. Dessert offerings include corn pudding that, in a French twist, gets bruléed to form a crunchy topping, and pound cake that gets unexpected tang from goat cheese. Wisdom gathered from Council’s multigenerational family kitchen and vignettes describing childhood memories capture the spirit of Chapel Hill’s Black community and the social history accompanying desegregation. The result serves triple duty as a tender homage to a Council’s mother, an appealing portrait of an important American culinary landscape, and an accessible recipe collection that offers plenty of inspiration. It’s a delight. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

“What if wellness wasn’t a series of isolated battles against symptoms but a strategic campaign for vitality?” asks Yang (Achieving Health Equity), a health policy professor at George Washington University, in this comprehensive manual. Yang applies the ancient wisdom of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to health, arguing “your body is not a battlefield where you wage war against disease, but a kingdom you must wisely govern and protect.” Just as Sun Tzu encouraged “moral law,” or harmony between people and their leader, for example, Yang encourages readers to have a food philosophy that aligns with their values. That could look like eating meals that prioritize environmental sustainability, animal welfare, or religious beliefs. Yang cautions against becoming fixated on health metrics, like step counts and heart rate variability scores, while neglecting keys to overall health, like sleep, relationships, and life purpose. Throughout, Yang passionately makes the case for actively taking control of one’s well-being and shares relatable case studies of people like Sarah, who by approaching her multiple sclerosis “not as an enemy to be vanquished but as a territory to be intimately known” found relief. This is an innovative approach to self-care. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Swedish interior designer Dykhoff debuts with an innovative beginners’ guide to candle-making. Encouraging crafters to use sustainably produced stearin, a natural wax derived from animal or vegetable fats; beeswax; and a flat cotton wick, she shows how to melt the wax in a saucepan and outlines different candle-making techniques. A simple one is dipping, which creates taper candles by repeatedly immersing a long wick into melted wax, allowing it to cool between layers until the desired thickness is attained. Crafters can add a spiral look by wrapping the still-soft wax around a dowel. Shaping is another method, which involves rolling a sheet of beeswax around a wick. The candle can be left as is or dipped in melted wax for a more finished look. Crafters can also try casting, which involves pouring melted wax into a mold, letting it harden, and releasing it. Molds can be created with items found around the house, like a soda can, juice pouch, or toilet paper tube. Dykhoff also explains how to add color to candles by blending pigments or wax crayons into melted wax. Offering novel ways to think about candle-making, Dykhoff turns the functional objects into sculptural art forms. Crafters will be intrigued by the endless possibilities. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rubin, a pediatrician specializing in allergy treatment, debuts with a savvy primer on allergies. He begins with a history of humanity’s understanding of allergies, from ancient observations of rashes to the coining of the term allergy in 1906, and explains that allergies occur when the immune system mistakenly identifies harmless substances, such as pollen or certain foods, as threats. This leads to symptoms like itching and sneezing or even a life-threatening reaction called anaphylaxis. After describing how allergies can affect different parts of the body, from the nose and throat to the lungs and gastrointestinal tract, Rubin walks readers through what to expect at an appointment with an allergist, such as allergy skin testing, which involves introducing small amounts of an allergen to the skin to identify triggers. Elsewhere, he discusses specific allergic diseases, including sinusitis, food allergies, eczema, contact dermatitis, and asthma, and outlines treatment options, such as over-the-counter medications and oral immunotherapy, which involves eating increasing doses of a food allergen to desensitize the immune system. Throughout, Rubin includes practical advice, such as not using nasal decongestant sprays like Afrin for more than five days in a row, as it can worsen symptoms. Allergy sufferers will find this illuminating. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Nightingale, creator of craft blog the Yellow Birdhouse, teaches readers how to cut, hand sew, and embroider sheets of felt to create home decor in her whimsical debut. She evaluates different types of felt, noting that although acrylic is cheap and easily available at stores, it’s difficult to cut and manipulate. She prefers using 100% wool felt because it’s easy to cut, less prone to fuzz, and comes in a variety of colors. An illustrated review of 10 embroidery stitches outlines how to straight stitch, backstitch, blanket stitch, and more. Each of the adorable projects, inspired by a “colorful tea-party world,” comes with templates that crafters can cut out, attach to felt pieces, and cut around to produce accurate shapes. The easiest project is daisy-shaped coasters, which involves cutting out a flower-shaped felt piece and stitching white petals and a yellow circle on top. Intermediate offerings include a mug cozy, a photo frame, and a trinket dish. For readers seeking a challenge, there is the butterfly zipper pouch, which requires embroidering with a variety of stitches and sewing a zipper. Enthusiastic fiber artists of all levels will want to check this out. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Naturopathic doctor Jensen (Woman Unleashed) argues in her compassionate guide to regulating one’s hormones that hormonal imbalances aren’t just biological but connected to emotions, environments, and relationships. She outlines how stress disrupts hormones, explaining that endless to-do lists, societal pressures to be perfect, and deeper issues like generational trauma set off a cascade of signals that put the body on high alert. Over time, constant stress can cause fatigue, digestive issues, brain fog, and irritability. To break the cycle, she says, readers need to listen to their body and recognize the signals it’s giving them. Instead of prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution, she posits that each woman has a unique hormonal identity, and provides a quiz to help readers find out if they’re anxious overachievers, silent strugglers, or perfectionists. She lays out a reset plan for each type that includes yoga poses, healthy recipes, and mindfulness practices, like journaling and carving out time to be away from screens. Throughout, she gives readers permission to prioritize their own health, encouraging them to “stop abandoning yourself under the weight of old roles, old pattens, or inherited expectations.” The result is an actionable road map for finding emotional and physical relief. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Chef Castro’s lively and wide-ranging debut collection pays homage to her Puerto Rican roots and her grandmother’s home cooking. After a brief history of the Taíno, Spanish, and African influences on the island’s cuisine, Castro covers equipment and pantry essentials, including a useful guide to viandas, the starchy fruits and tubers such as breadfruit, yuca, and chayote, that serve as the “backbone” of Puerto Rican cooking. Foundational seasonings and sauces include homemade adobo and sofrito, while beverages include horchata and cafecito. There’s classic pega’o, or crunchy, sticky bottom rice, alongside Castro’s unique spin on arroz con pollo, a dish that secured her win on the cooking competition show Beat Bobby Flay. She also shares a recipe for grilled skirt steak or pork tenderloin that took the top prize on Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen. Seafood abounds, from crispy grouper nuggets to saucy crab stew, while plantains and coconut also make frequent appearances. Castro provides useful descriptions for those unfamiliar with the dishes at hand—saltfish serenade is a “down-to-earth Latin cousin of a tuna Nicoise salad”—and shares personal connections (adding beer to black beans is her mother’s “special touch”). Those nostalgic for their home cuisine and those new to Puerto Rican fare will be equally taken with this expansive collection. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

With this zesty outing, Geary (The Cheesecake Bible) offers a love letter to citrus. The collection is divided into eight sections, each devoted to a specific type of fruit—grapefruit, kumquat, lemon, lime, orange, tangerine, citron, and Buddha’s hand, , a segmented Asian citrus,—offering fun facts and quick overviews of different varietals. Recipes range from tried and true, including a “world’s best” lemonade, to more inventive, such as blood orange glazed carrots. Australian finger limes, distinct for the caviarlike “flavorful beads” that make up their innards, make a fun and refreshing topping in a shrimp and sea bass ceviche appetizer. A martini featuring vodka infused with Buddha’s hand is garnished with a finger of the flamboyant fruit. Desserts include a breezy no-bake key lime pie and decadent chocolate fudge cake with tangelo icing. A final section of multi-citrus recipes encourages inventiveness and hybridity in triple citrus cookies and triple citrus vinaigrette. Geary, an Angelino, proves a charming narrator, sharing his love of storied L.A. restaurants in recipes such as chicken salad with mandarin oranges, inspired by a dish served at the tearoom of the now closed department store Bullock and Wilshire. Hollingsworth’s illustrations are vibrant and sweet, but the lack of photography, especially of unfamiliar fruits and dishes, may frustrate some home cooks. Still, this cheerful labor of love is approachable and endearing. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

Nephrologist Fung (The Obesity Code) offers a convincing argument that the prevailing weight-loss advice to “eat less, move more” is overly simplistic. Fung proposes a new framework: People gain weight because they are overly hungry, which causes them to overeat. He identifies three kinds of hunger that can be controlled to promote weight loss: homeostatic (physical hunger), hedonic (eating for pleasure or comfort), and conditioned (eating out of habit). Homeostatic hunger is regulated by hormones, Fung explains: different foods stimulate certain hormones that the body responds to in various ways. Cookies, for example, stimulate insulin, which tells the body to store the incoming calories as fat, whereas eating eggs boosts GLP-1, which causes satiety. To lose weight, he recommends a low-insulin diet, which involves eating fewer refined carbohydrates and being sure to eat carbs with fats and proteins to slow digestion. Addressing hedonic and conditioned hunger, Fung details how the chemical nature of ultra-processed foods makes them addictive and how their cheap cost and prevalence makes them hard to resist. Interspersed amid the explanations are 50 practical tips for losing weight, such as “eat more fiber to satisfy hunger” and “find a weight-loss buddy.” This is an important contribution to the conversation about nutrition. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink