23 of the best new and upcoming cookbooks/food books for the holidays

A list of the best new and upcoming cookbooks to diversify your own culinary repertoire or offer as holiday gifts.

18. 'Canal House Cooks Every Day', by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton

This is a lovely book with photography by Hirsheimer, paintings by Hamilton, and – as the authors state in the introduction – “home cooking by home cooks for home cooks.” "Canal House Cooks Every Day" is filled with simple, fresh, seasonal meals, side dishes, and desserts that can be easily assembled in a short amount of time for lunch or a quick dinner. The book is organized month by month, and contains a host of recipes sure to make you excited about seasonal cooking even in the less plentiful fall and winter months.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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