The most useful cookbooks can provide appetizing recipes for a wide range of events and people with different tastes or dietary restrictions, make recipes clear and easy to follow, and be well-organized enough so the cook can find what they’re looking for easily and quickly at key moments. Having a clever theme and a sense of humor is, well, icing on the cake.

Astrid Winegar’s CELEBRATING COMFY, COZY FOODS FROM NORTH AMERICA (Cooking for Halflings & Monsters) manages to achieve all of these goals, offering recipes from New Mexican New Year’s Soup to Skippy the Jedi Droid’s Powerful Force Cookies, arranged by events (New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Cinco de Mayo) and styles of food (lunch foods, pastas, sweets). This arrangement lets the cook choose recipes that work well together for a given meal or party event. The focus of this third volume of Winegar’s cookbooks is on North American food, but that allows for a wide variety of flavors and ingredients, and many of the recipes are also easily adjustable for vegetarians/vegans (or those who need to avoid certain ingredients because of allergies or simple dislike). She also offers a number of recipes designed to use up leftovers from other recipes, helping reduce waste and curb costs (though the idea of “leftover nachos” is an odd concept indeed).

Her writing style is cheerful and informal, offering family anecdotes and references to Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and other geeky franchises. There’s also room here for a variety of skill levels, from simple sandwiches to an entire Thanksgiving spread. Photos make the final results look deliciously appetizing, and cute little food drawings in cheerful colors brighten the pages. Appendices include a list of baking and cooking utensils used, conversion charts that let the reader quickly translate between volume and weight measurements in English and metric units, and an index of main ingredients that allows the reader to quickly locate, for example, dishes featuring beef, potatoes, or creamy or fruity flavors. Occasionally the recipe titles can be difficult to read due to the elaborate cursive font they’re written in, but the table of contents is clear enough to make that less of a problem. All in all, this is a cookbook that’s both functional and fun—with delicious recipes and a chatty, conversational style.

Astrid Tuttle Winegar’s CELEBRATING COMFY, COZY FOODS FROM NORTH AMERICA (Cooking for Halflings & Monsters) manages to be geeky, funny, and clever while at the same time being practically useful. It offers a wide range of recipes, suggestions for modifications, and ways to use up leftovers.

~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader