when the seasonal cookbook offerings include titles like "Fifty Shades of Kale" and an updated edition of "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook," choice is not a problem. The yearly avalanche includes something for everyone. There are books from star chefs and famous restaurants, the latest go-rounds from tried-and-true food writers, the now customary exercises in vegetable-worship, armchair-tourist cookbooks and one book that defies description. That's Heston Blumenthal's HISTORIC HESTON (Bloomsbury, $200), the one with the recipe for "ragoo of pigs' ears." Blumenthal is the culinary wizard behind the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and, more relevant in this context, the Hinds Head, a converted 15th-century tavern just down the road that specializes in historic English dishes. Indulging his antiquarian interests, he has taken a wandering route through history's byways, from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period, and recreated his own versions of forgotten dishes like meat fruit (a pre-Hidor bit of trompe l'oeil), the medieval cheesecake known as a sambocade and an alcohol-soaked Victorian "tipsy cake." No one is going to cook from this book. Not many will be able to lift it. "Historic Heston" is a headfirst dive down the rabbit hole, with Blumenthal as the Mad Hatter, pleased to offer you, as it happens, his recipe for mockturtle soup. Years ago, when star chefs and great restaurants began turning out cookbooks, the approach tended to be educational and high-minded, with an emphasis on techniques and the secrets behind the cuisine. Now everything is personal. The chef wants to be your friend, to share his or her experiences. In DANIEL: My French Cuisine (Grand Central Life & Style, $60), Daniel Boulud, the celebrated owner of Daniel in Manhattan and its many offshoots, conducts a guided tour of his life and the parts of France he knows best, beginning with the farm near Lyon where he grew up. From there it's a giant leap to the fearsomely complex, drop-dead elegant dishes from Daniel that take up about half the book. Boulud goes a bit Heston in the second half. With essays by Bill Buford, the book records Boulud's painstaking efforts to recreate a Lyonnais classic like pork leg cooked in hay or a turbot soufflé decorated with zucchini and ovendried tomatoes in a slanted checkerboard pattern. Relief arrives in a chapter devoted to humble seasonal dishes from Lyon, Alsace, Normandy and Provence. John Besh also has an interesting life story to tell in JOHN BESH. Cooking From the Heart: My Favorite Lessons Learned Along the Way (Andrews McMeel, $40). A native of New Orleans, he served with the Marines in Operation Desert Storm, then studied at the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he trained at a game-oriented inn in the Black Forest, at a small French restaurant in Lacombe, La., and in restaurants in Avignon and St.-Remyde-Provence before making his mark back in Louisiana with a highly distinctive reinterpretation of its regional cooking. His restaurant August is consistently rated one of New Orleans's finest. Not many readers are going to take the plunge and try the wild boar's-head pâté, a signature dish at the Spielweg in Münstertal, Besh's first stop as an apprentice, but schupfnudeln (long potato dumplings from the Baden region), slow-cooked rabbit with creamy rosemary turnips and the stuffed pasta known as maultaschen are well within reach. There are a few too many usual-suspect recipes, but Besh makes an engaging guide, with a rich fund of anecdotes, for his somewhat eccentric personal journey. Star-restaurant cookbooks face the same challenge as cookbooks by star chefs. How do you faithfully represent the place without recipes that require a full kitchen brigade to execute? Michael Anthony, the executive chef and a partner at Gramercy Tavern, starts with an advantage in THE GRAMERCY TAVERN COOKBOOK (Clarkson Potter, $50), namely, the restaurant's style of cuisine: clean, contemporary and not too complicated. In an interview with New York Metro, Anthony explained that he wanted his mother in rural Ohio to be able to use the book. Mom can probably handle the recipe for chilled corn soup, bright and fresh with squeezings of lime and a touch of honey, or the one for pickled Swiss chard stems, a minimalist gem. Recipes are organized by season. Slowroasted pork shoulder with bacon broth and corn bread, a winter recipe, feels just about right as the weather turns. There are many more like it. The abiding mystery is this: Why did it take nearly 20 years for one of the city's most beloved restaurants to put all this down on paper? Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, the chefs and owners of the cult London restaurant Ottolenghi, also manage to translate their style in ottolenghi: The Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, $35). This cookbook, their first, arrives belatedly from Britain, its way prepared by the runaway success of their second and third books, "Plenty" and "Jerusalem." Like Anthony, the authors hold a winning card with their cuisine, which emphasizes simplicity, freshness and seasonality, although rooted in different soil, that of the Middle East. The authors dazzle. This is a cookbook with no slack, just page after page of recipes with the kind of nifty twist that elevates humble ingredients - lots of fruits, grains and nuts - without feeling forced. There's a wonderful inevitability to dishes like cauliflower and cumin fritters with lime yogurt or the arugula and horseradish sauce the authors use to dress beef or their oxtail stew with pumpkin and cinnamon. The list goes on and on. Home cooks who want to branch out geographically are in luck. Japan, Thailand and Spain come into focus in unexpected ways in three highly attractive books that seamlessly blend pleasure and instruction. You can read them with profit, then cook adventurously. The few steps to a stove have always been the cheapest and fastest form of travel. POK POK: Food and Stories From the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand (Ten Speed Press, $35), by Andy Ricker with J. J. Goode, comes to the rescue of untold thousands of diners in love with Thai flavors but bored by what Ricker, the founder of the Pok Pok restaurants in Portland, Ore., and New York, calls the "pick-aprotein rainbow curries" and "sweet piles of phat thai" on the limited, highly standardized menus at so many Thai restaurants in the United States. As a tutorial on Thai cuisine and its principal regional styles, "Pok Pok" can't be beat. Ricker is enthusiastic, prodigiously well informed and full of colorful stories from his many trips to Thailand. Nearly every page brings a revelation. Loop meuang, the dark-brown minced pork salad served in northern Thailand, bears no resemblance to the mound of sweetish minced pork from central Thailand served in most American Thai restaurants. When he first encountered it, Ricker says, he didn't even recognize it as Thai. "It was fragrant, pungent, bitter - and wonderful," he writes. "There was no obvious sweetness, except from the crunchy bits of fried garlic and shallots scattered on top. There was definitely no lime or coconut milk." And here it is. The only snag in "Pok Pok" is ingredients. Many can be found, but many can't, or at least not easily. There are more than enough makable dishes, however. Some are disarmingly simple, like grilled corn with salty coconut cream. Others, like Burmese-style pork-belly curry, require many steps but deliver a whopping payoff. Jeff Koehler does justice to another regionally complex country in SPAIN: Recipes and Traditions From the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucía (Chronicle Books, $40). The author, a food writer who has lived in Spain for many years, focuses on roots cooking, the simple, flavorful dishes that warm Spanish hearts. Koehler is an expert guide, providing highly informative headnotes to each recipe, often explaining regional variations in the same recipe and suggesting some clever tips. In his recipe for clams with oloroso sherry, for example, he suggests substituting dry white wine with a little brandy if sherry isn't at hand. These pages abound in seductively rustic dishes like pork baked in a salt crust and served with fruit compote, chestnut purée or a blue cheese sauce. Japanese cuisine can seem chilly and aloof, an endless catalog of refinement. Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explode that stereotype in Japanese soul cooking: Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura, and More From the Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond (Ten Speed Press, $27.50). Spaghetti? Sure. Ketchup? You bet. Mayo on the side? Just try to make it Kewpie brand. Ono and Salat serve up dollops of fascinating food history, and some very good recipes, as they explore the vernacular dishes that constitute Japanese diner food. These are the popular fusion dishes - most dating from the late 19th century, many from the postwar period - that soothe the Japanese soul the way cheeseburgers and fries cheer Americans. With zest and an irrepressible you-can-do-it attitude, the authors explain and write the scripts for gyoza dumplings, curries, tonkatsu, the floured and deep-fried dishes known as kara-age, tempuras, soba, udon and other humble Japanese fare. The ramen chapter is especially rich, but toward the end, some really odd creations await, including hamburg (a ground beef, pork and panko-crumb patty covered in a ketchup-based sauce) and mentaiko spaghetti, a 1960s-vintage pasta tossed with spicy marinated pollock roe. Mollie Katzen leads the vegetarian pack with the HEART OF THE PLATE: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $34.99). It's been more than 30 years since her scribbled notes and recipes evolved into the groundbreaking "Moosewood Cookbook," and she's done a lot of cooking and thinking in the meantime, paring down, eliminating fat and developing a style she describes as "sharper, livelier, spicier, lighter and more relaxed than it used to be." About half the recipes in the book are vegan, without the pain. Some can go either way, like farfalle pasta and rapini in a creamy walnut sauce that becomes vegan when soy milk is substituted for cow's milk. Salads - bright, colorful and vibrant - are particularly well done. Many can do service as a main course, like her grilled bread and kale salad with red onions, walnuts and figs. Unreconstructed meat eaters will want to give a big bro hug to John Currence for pickles, pigs and whiskey: Recipes From My Three Favorite Food Groups (and Then Some) (Andrews McMeel, $40), a culinary rebel yell in a new key. Currence, the chef and owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss., does a lot of hootin', hollerin' and carryin' on. A lot of cussin' too, not something you normally find in a cookbook. Tune out the noise, ignore the idiotic music recommendations for each dish ("Cock the Hammer," by Cypress Hill, for ham stock), and you still have a book full to bursting with imaginative New Southern recipes. Or maybe New New Southern, in the case of Kentucky soycollard kimchi or rosemary-pickled lamb hearts. Currence really works the territory. Steen's cane syrup, a Louisiana classic, brings an earthy sweetness to pork belly braised in ham stock. Bourbon-braised pork cheeks was a dish just waiting to happen, and the recommended side dish - creamy garlic-Parmesan grits - is typical of Currence's approach. Pick a Southern staple and take it on a foreign trip, or make it even more Southern. We have him to thank for a double-Bubba treat: okra and green onion hush puppies, accompanied by Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Finally, two confidence-builders. Some cookbooks challenge. Others perform the neat trick of convincing even beginners that it's possible to make guest-worthy food in a small, ill-equipped kitchen, the french kitchen cookbook: Recipes and Lessons From Paris and Provence (Morrow/ HarperCoiiins, $35) comes directly from the cooking classes Patricia Wells gives at her homes in Paris and Provence, so the lineup includes plenty of uncomplicated dishes that have been tested within an inch of their lives. Most require only a handful of ingredients and a few simple techniques. Even hesitant amateurs can turn out seared duck breast with figs and black currant sauce or tomato tatins made with store-bought puff pastry. Lidia Mattichio Bastianich and her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, do the same thing with Italian food in LIDIA'S COMMONSENSE ITALIAN COOKING (Knopf, $35), based on the public television series of the same name. The cowardly cook might start with the surefire chicken breasts, sliced thin and sautéed and simmered in a pan with olives, red onion, and orange juice flecked with orange zest. It doesn't get any easier than this, or tastier. The authors don't include song recommendations. May I suggest "Acquerello Napoletano," by Claudio Villa? ? online: Still hungry for culinary inspiration? For a quick look at 25 more cookbooks, visit nytimes.com/books. william grimes, a former restaurant criticfor The Times, is the author, most recently, of "Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York."

Already renowned in vegetarian circles for her groundbreaking Moosewood Cookbook (1977), Katzen has productively spent the intervening decades expanding her repertoire and has retuned her remarkable cuisine to twenty-first-century tastes. Incorporating grains in novel ways, she offers a rich version of Stroganoff: mushrooms stewed with cabbage, and served atop dumplings made from barley. A plethora of pasta dishes address the heartiest appetites. One-dish meals ease dinnertime for the busy cook. Katzen clearly appreciates texture's role in producing food that's not just palatable but truly satisfying, incorporating crunchy and crispy accents to enhance what might otherwise be predictable vegetable fare. Desserts include homemade ricotta cheese. Where feasible, Katzen instructs on reformulating recipes to conform to vegan criteria. Thanks to increased public awareness of the importance of consuming more fruits and vegetables and cutting back on meat, there is built-in demand for Katzen's innovative vegetarian cooking even among staunch carnivores.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist

Katzen elevated vegetables from canned side dish to main act in her ground-breaking The Moosewood Cookbook. This collection again shines the spotlight on the glories of vegetables, but focuses on their natural flavors rather than rich accompaniments such as butter, cream, and cheese. Katzen does an admirable job, not only in lightening and simplifying but in creative recipes that combine everyday vegetables in appetizing ways. Her soups, both hot and cold, are particularly satisfying and are reason enough to buy the book. Mushroom wonton soup, tomato-coconut soup with Indian spices, and cucumber-melon-peach gazpacho round out a tasty array of options. Salads abound, including kale Caesar and fattoush. Grains, burgers, and pasta complement stellar chapters on superb stews with equally fabulous accompaniments such as very simple lentil stew with cottage cheese dumplings and black-eyed pea, squash, and shiitake stew with ginger-pecan mini biscuits; cozy mashes that include broccoli, parsnips, and peas; and vegetables with a twist such as brussels sprouts with cranberries, flash-fried kale with garlic, almonds and cheese, and twice-cooked Italian broccoli. While suppers from the oven might conjure images of tired casseroles, Katzen provides refreshing options such as mushroom popover pie and asparagus puff pastry tart. Desserts are equally appealing, from fruit-studded madeleine cake to olive oil-walnut-pomegranate baklava. As an added bonus, more than half of these recipes are vegan. Katzen once again reminds us that simple, fresh, and flavorful vegetables can be inspirational as well as nutritional. Agent: Steve Troha and Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Over the years, well-known vegetarian cookbook author Katzen's (The Moosewood Cookbook) recipes have become lighter, trading generous glugs of heavy cream for flavorful stocks, sauces, and garnishes. Her newest collection of recipes (many vegan and a few repurposed from previous publications) has an easy elegance reminiscent of titles by Deborah Madison and Alice Waters and includes meat-free burgers, vegetable mashes, savory pancakes, soups, desserts, and more. Each recipe (e.g., winter lasagna, soba-seaweed salad) lists alluring "optional enhancements" like a dab of salsa verde or a side of celery-almond-date saladita. -VERDICT A dependable compendium of unfussy, home-cooked vegetarian meals. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.