READING NOOK

What’s next after the popular HGTV show Fixer Upper wrapped up its final season? Co-host Joanna Gaines has had something else in the works for several months. While the show has ended, you can bring Gaines into your kitchen with her first cookbook.

Gaines’ first cookbook, Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering (William Morrow Cookbooks $29.99), was released in April.

It includes some of her favorite recipes along with several from the Gaineses’ new restaurant in their hometown of Waco, Texas.

I’ve had the cookbook for a few weeks now. And it’s a page turner. A lot of cookbooks cross my desk each year. But this one caught my eye. It has a lot of recipes that will appeal to all, especially families.

Like just about everything Gaines touches, you’ll see the

same style and design in the recipes and throughout the book. The book is beautifully photographed, with nearly every recipe having a full-color photo.

There are seven recipe chapters, including breakfast, appetizers, dinner and desserts. Gaines also provides a sample of pantry ingredients

to have on hand and a list of needed tools, such as whisks, spoons and a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. While she may have a well-stocked pantry and grows a lot of her own vegetables, Gaines is not a stickler with always madefrom-scratch ingredients. As with everyone else, she gets busy too. Gaines writes “I consider store-bought refrigerated dough and boxed broth to be gifts from the heavens.”

A highlight of the breakfast

chapter is JoJo’s Biscuits. It’s a favorite, which Gaines writes that “it took me a year of Saturdays to get these biscuits just right.”

Throughout the pages, you’ll also see Gaines’ flair for decorating as recipes are perfectly styled. There’s also her penchant for gardening and growing her own vegetables. The recipes are very doable, clearly written and most hold to one page.

— Susan Selasky (Detroit Free Press/TNS)