Spring cookbooks include new titles from five metro Atlanta chefs

Springtime brings a fresh crop of books, and this season the cookbook category includes new titles by local culinarians. From creative ways with plants to Southern fusion cuisine, the practical, approachable recipes in these five books will make you want to have them in the kitchen, rather than on the coffee table.

Chef Steven Satterfield of Miller Union has a reputation for produce-driven cooking. In 2015, he explored no-waste vegetarian cooking in his award-winning “Root to Leaf.” He continues his quest to make vegetables as delicious as possible in “Vegetable Revelations” (HarperWave, $50).

The more than 150 recipes include spice blends, vinaigrettes, condiments, toppings, “flavor bombs” and sauces to enhance veggies. And, there are plenty of creative ideas for preparing the produce itself — be it an Indian-inspired mustard greens and spinach saag, bell pepper gravy shrimp and grits, or a lemon-glazed, spiced parsnip cake.

While Satterfield leaves no vegetable off the table, Atlanta author Cynthia Graubart picks just one. Graubart’s forthcoming “Zucchini Love” (Storey, $14.99) is the third in her single-food cookbook series, following “Strawberry Love” and “Blueberry Love.” It’s her 14th book, overall.

The paperback provides plenty of ideas for home gardeners who find themselves with an abundance of zucchini and want to do something besides sneak it into a loaf of tea bread or stuff it into an unsuspecting neighbor’s mailbox.

Graubart grates, chops, slices, spiralizes and blitzes zukes — to make doughnuts, smoothies, egg drop soup, fritters, stir-fries, casseroles, cakes and more. Techniques such as pickling, freezing and preserving enable you to enjoy this summer vegetable throughout the year.

What would Terry Sargent do with a zucchini windfall? He’d make grilled, smoked vegetable kabobs or smoky ratatouille. Those are among the 100-plus recipes in Sargent’s new “Vegan Barbecue” (Harvard Common Press, $24.99).

Sargent is the chef-owner of Grass VBQ Joint, a Decatur restaurant that began as a pop-up in 2017. The Georgia native — and Southern Living magazine’s 2021 Cook of the Year — worked for years as an omnivore chef, but a medical warning from his doctor prompted him to change his eating habits and take up veganism.

In “Vegan Barbecue,” Sargent champions a plant-based diet through a style of cooking more commonly associated with meat. Asparagus, carrots, jackfruit, pineapple and pumpkins are just a sample of the produce that gets the low and slow treatment.

Sargent notes that his aim with all the recipes is to seek “the true flavors and textures of real barbecue.”

He writes in the introduction that his “biggest challenge was never flavor, it was texture! I had to experiment, and test and retest, to approximate the texture of beef, what it feels like in your mouth, or even in your hand.”

The results of his efforts with “mock-meat-making” include such creations as a smoked oyster mushroom banh mi sandwich and smoked “veef” lasagna.

Sargent also finds plant-based substitutes for other nonvegan ingredients, such as cheese. “When I developed the best vegan cheese sauce for our smoked mac ’n’ cheese, the experience, honestly, felt like it was pure science,” he writes.

Cristina Kisner knows a thing or two about food science, also gleaned through trial and error. Even before she and her husband, Sebastian Gracey, moved from their native Peru to Roswell in 2019 and opened Huh Natural and Real Food (later renamed Cristy’s Kitchen), Kisner was busy in the kitchen, treating food as medicine. Two of her five daughters had been diagnosed with health issues that ranged from allergic rhinitis to digestive problems to an autoimmune disease. In addition, her husband suffered a stress-induced heart attack.

She switched to organic ingredients and removed dairy, gluten and processed foods from the family’s diet. That also is the foundation of the “clean” cooking and baking at their Roswell bakery-cafe. With her inspiring debut cookbook, “Cristy’s Kitchen” (William Morrow, $37.50), Kisner shares what she has learned with home cooks.

“Cristy’s Kitchen” features more than 130 wholesome recipes without gluten, dairy or processed sugars. Breakfast might bring kefir cashew yogurt and quinoa porridge. Lunch could be a smoked salmon bowl or sirloin and blackberry salad with goldenberry dressing, while dinner might be turkey cabbage rolls or yuca gnocchi with carrot greens pesto. And, healthful eating doesn’t mean dessert is a no-no. She shares her recipes for raw, dairy-free cherry cheesecake with a brownie base, Peruvian-style chocolate turron and Peruvian jelly roll with dulce de leche.

Helpful notes and ingredient swaps make plenty of recipes possible for vegan, vegetarian, paleo and autoimmune protocol diets, as well. And, information on how to obtain ingredients less common in American households enables her pantry essentials to become yours, too.

“I hope what I have learned in my kitchen for my own family can help you in your own quest for health,” Kisner writes.

Just as Kisner’s recipe collection reflects, in part, her Peruvian background, Natalie Keng brings her heritage to the pages of her debut cookbook/memoir, “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea: Asian Inspired, Southern Style” (Gibbs Smith, $32).

The Smyrna resident is familiar locally as the owner of Chinese Southern Belle, whose Asian-inspired sauces are made from family recipes. In “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea,” Keng shares her food journey, growing up as a first-generation Chinese American in the South. “Between the worlds of egg rolls and sweet tea, I grew up feeling right at home,” she writes.

Among the more than 100 Asian-American and Southern fusion dishes in the book, you’ll find mu shu wood ear burritos, Joy Luck barbecue pulled pork boa buns, and, of course, egg rolls. She calls them “my version of authentic, even if they don’t fit perfectly into any textbook genre.”

The other commonality: They are darn tasty.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Noon-4 p.m. April 22. Cristina Kisner will hold a book signing for her newly published “Cristy’s Kitchen.” Cristy’s Kitchen, 1066 Alpharetta St., Roswell. 404-528-0444, cristyskitchenga.com

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