Prune

Okay, I don't cook much from cookbooks—in fact, I don't cook much at all—so take this with a grain of sea salt, but in a season of gorgeous and appetizing cookbooks, Prune is the one (along with, of course, A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus) I keep pawing at and paging through. This is not your usual cookbook: there's no introduction or index, and the recipes are presented as—and may well be—the stained, scribbled-on pages from her restaurant binder. Since she's writing to her staff, she assumes they know the basics and have restaurant equipment, which you may not. But a