By Katy Wilkens, MS, RD
Nutrition and fitness manager, Northwest Kidney Centers

I love to read. I love to garden. I really love to cook. It comes as no surprise then that I love when all my favorite things are combined into a book about cooking or gardening.

Here are some fun books currently sitting on my coffee table. I highly recommend them:

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Tim Ferriss. I suggest this book to everyone, men especially, who wants to learn how to cook. Ferriss doesn’t just teach you how to cook; this eclectic book is filled with great techniques for teaching yourself virtually any topic from how to make a basketball shot to how to kill and clean wild game.

Food Styling: The Art of Preparing Food for the Camera by Delores Custer. With great stories and fun photographic techniques, this book leads you through everything you need to know to take better photos of food. Learn tips for presenting your food at home and how different sizes and colors of dishware entice or minimize the appearance of food.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson. A great historical tour looking at when and why people developed the utensils we use today. The Victorians, of course, always adding more, might have 80 different pieces of silverware on the dinner table, from marrow spoons to gelatin knives. Tons of great history interspersed with how common people cooked.

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. A satisfying read for any gardener. Over 200 plants are reviewed, including a great story about kudzu, the vine that ate the South, and the story about the weed that likely killed Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Abe’s mom. There are nice botanical drawings coupled with ghastly cartoons that make the book even more interesting.

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan. This book settled a recent argument between my son and me. No, there were no chili peppers in Thailand before Columbus discovered America. There also weren’t any tomatoes in Italian cooking, no potatoes for the Irish, and no vanilla in Mozambique. Nabhan retraces a Soviet botanist’s life and travels around the world developing and saving what we now call “heritage” seeds. You will learn a lot about seed markets, loss of plant diversity and economics, free trade, genetic engineering and threats to the global food supply.

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. A delightful book by someone who knows how to make good food, this book is not so much about how to cook, but about why you should. I love her chapter on what to keep in your cupboard, just in case you need to throw a late-night dinner party or welcome someone whose flight was delayed.

[Katy G. Wilkens is a registered dietitian and department head at Northwest Kidney Centers. The 2014 recipient of National Kidney Foundation Council on Renal Nutrition’s Susan Knapp Excellence in Education Award, she has a Master of Science degree in nutritional sciences from the University of Washington. See more of her recipes at www.nwkidney.org.]