MAKE FOOD, MAKE FRIENDS: WIN SUMMER VIA STOMACH

Look, cooking isn’t (and shouldn’t) be for everyone, but if you’re gonna give it a go, summer’s probably as good a time to try as any time of year: fire up the grill to make good on warm weather, and take advantage of the garden bounty in season through September.

The Barbecue! Bible by Steven Raichlen

If tossing an exclamation point mid-title didn’t tell you Raichlen likes to barbecue, 500+ pages of the enthusiastic culinary guru’s best grill tips might offer a hint. It’s not the breed of sexy, memoir-style cookbook today’s chefs are writing, but a hard look at classic outdoor cooking and open-flame science designed to ease you gently from basics to best-in-pit. Bonus points if you can score a copy with the original 1998 cover in all of its blazing, earlycomputer-graphic glory.

Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison

When Madison wrote her first produce-forward cookbook in 1987, words like “local” and “plant-powered” were found more frequently in communes than the celebrity kitchens they’ve found favour in lately. The culinary teacher’s 11th cookbook is no fair-weather release. A rich and timeless bounty of accessible vegetablecentric recipes, Vegetable Literacy is also a fresh produce family reunion of sorts: Madison’s neat nod to the botany behind our daily meals is broken down in chapters by taxonomic rank.