I’m taking a cue from my amazing friend Tanya’s blog and showing you some great recipe books you’ll be glad you bought when you taste how yummy the food is.

• Top Chef: The Cookbook - $21 - This cookbook is an absolute must-have if you’re a fan of the show. Even if you’ve never seen the show, though, it’s got delicious recipes on every page with a glossy photo to match. The recipes are a bit harder than some (with some hard-to-find ingredients), but it’s worth it when you cook something that won a Quickfire challenge on the show!
• Great Food Fast: 250 Recipes for Easy, Delicious Meals All Year Long - $17 - This is one of my favorite Martha Stewart cookbooks. I gave it such good reviews that Ellie bought it as well and has had great results with the recipes too! Keeping with my decision to never buy a cookbook unless it has a photo for each recipe, this has great photos accompanying each dish and separates out meals and sides for each season, if you decide to buy ingredients from a farmer’s market or CO-OP. Some of my favorite dishes are the Risotto with Peas & Zucchini, the Greek-Style Lamb Burgers, and the Pesto-Goat Cheese Pasta.
• America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - $25 - My mother-in-law saw me spying her copy and bought me my own and it is truly fantastic. First, it’s published three-ring-binder style so you can easily flip through or remove the recipe you are cooking from the book for easy access. Second, it has more tips and tricks than one cook could ever possibly need. Want to poach the perfect egg? Covered. How long do you cook meat? That’s there too. This is the ultimate cooking handbook.
• Nigella Express: Good Food Fast - $25 - I don’t have a lot of time to devote to cooking by the time I get home from work (no four hour roasts for me!), so any cookbook with “fast” in the title is a winner. Nigella’s delicious, decadent recipes are shockingly easy to put together and this book-with a photo per page and tons of personal ancedotes-is my favorite of her’s.
• The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl - $15 - THIS BOOK IS RELEASED TOMORROW. I am so excited about this book, I can’t even tell you. Ree has saved my butt so many times with her quick and easy and OMG-DELICIOUS recipes. She uses a stick of butter in everything and salt galore, but it’s all worth it in the end when you sink your teeth into her fabulous food. To tie you over until you get your hands on a copy of this cookbook, check our her personal cooking blog and her MSN recipe website Tasty Kitchen.

Here are some of my additional cooking tips:

• Wear an apron. Oil spatters, messy hands—an apron solves all these problems. And you know how impossible it is to get oil stains out of clothing!
• Check the time. One of the hardest aspects of cooking multiple dishes is timing them to serve. Check all the estimated times of your recipes before starting and if you happen to finish one dish long before another is ready, keep it covered, on a low burner or slightly warm oven.
• Don’t be intimidated! If a recipe calls for a prepared ingredient that you aren’t sure how to “prepare,” just do a quick Google search. A good example of this is leek preparation. They are hard suckers to clean, but a quick web search will help you get them ready.
• Print off recipes you find online. It’s annoying to run back and forth from a laptop to the oven—and it’s even more annoying if you spill something on the computer. Use paper! It’s cheaper!
• Get a sous-chef. It’s much easier when preparing difficult recipes to have a helper cut and prepare veggies or sauces. That’s when my husband Brandon comes in handy! He may not be great at grilling a steak, but he’s fantastic when it comes to peeling potatoes for a side dish!

I picked up Nigella Express at the library this afternoon and can’t wait to try out some of the fast and easy recipes. One of my pet peeves with cookbooks is if they don’t have a photo with each recipe. I want to see the end result! This one has a photo on every page, so it made the cut.