The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution
Alice Waters
A nice basic cookbook, and one that is readable cover-to-cover, for the most part. I can imagine this being a good gift for a beginning cook. It kind of falls part way between “The Joy of Cooking” (as a compendium of useful recipes) and something more unusual like “An Everlasting Meal” (as something more focused on philosophy and integration with life)