Ladies and gentlemen, start your ovens

Soup’s on
David Ansel's "The Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups" (Ten Speed Press, $17) can actually be read like an engaging novel. Ansel is a laid-back hippie-type who delivers his homemade soup around Austin, Texas, pulling it in a trailer attached to his bike (so he's both a soup peddler and a soup pedaler).

Anecdotes between the recipes sketch out a wacky, friendly world that's straight out of "Austin Stories." Ansel is the Soup Man, his clients are the Soupies, his bike is Old Yellow, and he engages in a running feud with warm-weather competitor The Ice-Cream Man. Ansel says the use of "Slow and Difficult" in his book's title is an unsubtle dig at our fast-food culture. Some of his soups are about the opposite of "slow and difficult" as you can get. His chompy-chomp black bean soup is ready in just 10 minutes with hardly any chopping, and it's amazingly tasty. (You purists who want nothing canned in a recipe, however, run away while the rest of us dig in.)

While the black-bean soup and the equally simple gazpacho were tasty treats, Ansel's Hungarian goulash completely flopped for me. The stew beef never tenderized nor tasted anything but bland. And it can be tough for a home cook to dive into many of Ansel's recipes — he warns that his smoked duck and andouille gumbo will take all day. Others require ingredients that may be tough to find — amchur powder for the pumpkin-pear soup; pasilla chiles, chipotle en adobo and textured vegetable protein for the chili; guascas for the ajiaco.

Reading Ansel's book is like dropping into a Texas version of Maupin's "Tales of the City." It's hard to read about life in Ansel's Austin and not want to move there, buy a house on his soup route and become a regular at his friends' monthly Family Dinner. But as far as the soup recipes go, this cook is sticking to the simpler ones.    —G.F.C.

Accents of Asia
The recipes in “Susanna Foo Fresh Inspiration” (Houghton Mifflin, $30), at first glance, confirmed why my home cooking is only sometimes Asian-inspired instead of remotely approaching authentic.  Her modern approach to Chinese cuisine is tempting, but the long list of ingredients for dishes that required multiple sauces seemed daunting and time consuming. However, the Asian influence in today’s cooking turned out to mean my pantry was already pretty well stocked with such basics as sesame oil, cilantro, and soy sauce,  — the only staple I needed to pick up for most recipes was corn oil. 

Just about every appetizer could replace a light meal for two — which is good, since after preparing crispy tuna spring rolls with fresh herb salad, the accompanying wasabi crème fraiche and honey soy glaze, I was ready to get out of the kitchen.  But the time spent was well worth it. The crunchy fried rolls, with blanched carrots and spinach and still-cold tuna, were both fresh and rich.  A panko-crusted goat cheese salad with tomato and asparagus salad was delicious, the warm and slightly oozing cheese perfect with ripe tomatoes and crisp asparagus — an elegant first course or a light lunch. 

Main dishes were even more exquisite (and simpler to prepare.)  I had always assumed that the lettuce-wrapped chicken served in many restaurants was so bland because it was difficult to flavor chicken quickly — Foo’s chicken soong proved that theory wrong, resulting in a velvety dish so simple yet delicious that it has become a weekly fixture on our menus.  Foo doesn't stick to what we think of as traditional Chinese cooking, either — her crispy pan-fried silken tofu with creamy sun-dried tomato sauce is a surprising revelation, and light sauce could just as easily top some pasta or some sautéed chicken.

It’s rare that a cookbook comes along that shakes up my repertoire as much as this has. I’ll stick to the simpler entrees for busy days, but find myself making time for the fussier recipes- they’re worth it.    —H.M.S.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor; Jon Bonné is MSNBC.com's Lifestyle Editor. Hannah Meehan Spector is a writer in Los Angeles.

MORE FROM SUMMER BOOKS 2006

Redefining the summer beach book

Redefining the summer beach book New cookbooks for summer savoring Nonfiction tales of lawn love, competitive chow   Add Summer books 2006 headlines to your news reader: