The book that keeps rising to the top of this spring’s review stack is Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite, by John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne (North Point Press, $27.50). One reading of this collection of essays culled from Thorne’s on-line Simple Cooking newsletter (www.outlawcook.com/ ) and the plainspoken New England writer hooks you with his intelligent analysis of what we cook and eat, whether it’s food for the flu, Chinese “Cooked Midnight”, or satay (including a potato one I can’t wait to try). Thorne is a vigorous, erudite, amusing writer. Go buy his book and don’t lend it to anyone.

Long-time poster kids for healthy, tasty eating (they were involved in the Tomato Fresh Food Café for many years), Vancouverites Diane and Doug Clement sum up a wealth of knowledge in Start Fresh!: Your Complete Guide to Midlifestyle Food and Fitness (Whitecap, $29.95). Know that it takes eight kilometres to walk off a venti mocha Frappuccino. Aimed at boomers, but applicable to snack-scarfing couch spuds of any age.

“I love this land and its people, covered in lace and church and simplicity,” Tessa Kiros writes in Postcards From Portugal: Memoirs and Recipes (Whitecap, $45), and it shows. From pot-au-feu–like cozido to traditional pork and clams, sardine pâté, caldo verde (so popular a soup that markets have machines constantly shredding the greens for it), and gorgeous little pastries, it all took me right back to Portugal. Stunning photography by Manos Chatzikonstantis captures the tiled façades, shops, and cafés in a way few travel books do. Food looks so real on the page, you could stick a fork in it.

Despite his meticulous instructions, only the most obsessed foodies are likely to cook the dishes Brit chef Heston Blumenthal describes in Further Adventures in Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics (Bloomsbury, $45)—among them hamburger, fish pie, and trifle, as well as Peking duck, chili con carne, and the chicken tikka masala now acknowledged as Britain’s national fave. Vroom—off Blumenthal heads for the kitchens and spice markets of Delhi so that back home he can re-create it. Like all his recipes, it’s a major production, although the six bricks and two pizza stones needed for his chicken tikka masala make it fast-food simple compared to his stupefyingly complex risotto, whose separate components include saffron butter, puffed rice, toasted rice tuiles, pandanus crème fraîche, and Horlicks and coffee salt cubes. Still, an engrossing read.

Where Blumenthal might hand-harvest chilies and grow sugar cane to make sweet chili sauce, Australian food stylist Lucy Broadhurst lists the bottled kind in her recipe for sweet chili chicken and noodles, and buys barbecued chicken for quick-assembling spring rolls. Only North Americans sabotage juvenile taste buds with “kids’ food”, as Broadhurst brightly brings home in Ready, Steady, Spaghetti: Cooking for Kids and With Kids (Whitecap, $24.95). Step-by-step photos show how to whip up nachos, gnocchi, beer-battered fish and chips, chicken nuggets and potato wedges (both baked), Jell-O made with real fruit juice, and more. All in all, a vibrant, flavourful, multiculti repertoire that is tasty family food, period.

Someone else in touch with reality is Victoria writer Eric Akis, who, in the fourth installment of his “Everyone Can Cook” series, zeroes in on Midweek Meals: Recipes for Cooks on the Run (Whitecap, $24.95). Like Broadhurst, Akis is happy to use quality prepared ingredients like already-skewered kebabs, cooked shrimp, and cheese tortellini. Well, why not? He also lifts you out of the rut of serving the same old salad by suggesting greens with candied salmon, goat cheese, and blueberries, or spinach salad with smoked turkey and cantaloupe. Lunches to brown-bag, soups in as little as 15 minutes, dishes you can freeze or that can slow-cook while you’re working all mean you’ll rarely call out for pizza. Why would you, when you can rustle up Akis’s thin-crust tortilla version instead?

I’m not Jewish, but Norene Gilletz’s garlicky Exodus Chicken, Seder Salmon glazed with apricot jam, honey, garlic, and dill, and Chocolate Almond Apricot Clusters (no prizes for ingredient-guessing) are on my to-try list from the extensive Passover section in Norene’s Healthy Kitchen: Eat Your Way to Good Health (Whitecap, $34.95). Every cooking tip imaginable, what you can freeze, how long it keeps in the fridge—and did I mention hundreds of recipes?

Finally, if you tuned in religiously to Bravo reality series Top Chef, you’ll want to buy Top Chef: The Cookbook (Chronicle Books, $32.95). The red-hot creativity behind the recipes, profiles of the chef-testants, and the dishes themselves—they’re all here. I’m out of space. Time to pack my knives and go.