By B.A. Nilsson

Every year at this time the holidays loom like a marathon. I’m going to be cooking a succession of small meals and two or three big fill-the-table events for family and friends. I look for inspiration in the market, of course, as well as the traditions that have accumulated so relentlessly, but I wouldn’t find fun in the kitchen without something new to try, so I also look to the latest cookbooks for new directions. It’s easy to get entrenched in a way of cooking something, so I count on better chefs to pull me from my ruts.

Ten years ago, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook offered wonderful ideas on preparing and presenting food, albeit in the rarefied manner of his acclaimed Napa Valley restaurant. In last year’s Under Pressure, he redefined a temperature-controlled method of cooking that, given patience and some costly equipment, produces astonishing results. Now Keller has a cookbook for the masses: Ad Hoc at Home (Artisan), inspired by his comfort-foods restaurant but also offering a comprehensive course in kitchen techniques. Every time I read his guides I learn something. When I make my next round of burgers, for instance, I’ll grind a mix of beef cuts, seasoning them before they hit the grinder.

I wanted to design a Thanksgiving meal that would put the traditional ingredients into new or rethought contexts, beginning with a fresh turkey that will be brined before spending a few hours in a 210-degree smoker.

From Ad Hoc at Home I took the concept of turning sweet into savory by putting leeks, one of my favorite flavorings, into a bread pudding. Seasoned with thyme, nutmeg and Emmantaler cheese, it’s also a wonderfully aromatic dish that gives the house a holiday scent.

I wanted another meat course, and turned to pasta as the vehicle. Four years ago we finally got one of Italy’s culinary bibles, The Silver Spoon, in an English version. Don’t dismiss this year’s Silver Spoon Pasta (Phaidon Press) as a mere spin-off: Many new recipes are included, with more great photography.

Adding a little chicken liver to a meat sauce gives it a sneakily different texture. If you don’t identify what’s in there, even the most ardent liver-hater won’t notice. Pappardelle with meat sauce (al ragù misto) combines beef or pork (I’m using both) with chicken livers and pancetta with carrots, celery, red wine and tomatoes. And a pinch of nutmeg. Although sage isn’t called for, it’ll be hard to resist adding a little.

My latest passion is Thai food, which I’m learning to cook and thus now stock lemongrass stalks, galangel and kaffir lime leaves. Putting it all into a healthy context is the mission of The Elements of Life by Su-Mei Yu (Wiley), who is chef-owner of San Francisco’s Saffron restaurant. As she recounts in the introduction, Thai cooks routinely use food as curatives and provide a long-range balance of personal wellness by cooking according to nature’s elements of earth, water, fire and wind.

To start my menu on a healthful note, I’m presenting her version of tom yum, a hot and sour soup filled with bite-sized fish and a mixture of bamboo shoots, arugula leaves, squash, cucumber, leeks and Chinese winter melon.

Momofuku Noodle Bar is the East Village restaurant that put Korean-born chef-owner David Chang on the map. He’s added three more NYC eateries, and his book Momofuku (Clarkson Potter) offers an engagingly written guide to his wide-ranging cooking philosophy. I got my Brussels sprouts recipe from his book. He writes, “I remember walking through the Greenmarket one day after we opened and thinking, ‘What the fuck would I do with Brussels sprouts?’”

Specifically, how to do it without the bacon and chestnuts he found on everybody else’s sprouts. “It didn’t take me long to come around to the bacon thing,” he continues. “I usually do.” He finishes the dish with his own Napa cabbage kimchi and a garnish of julienned carrots. I’ll keep the carrots, but I’m taking the recipe in a slightly different direction, substituting an apple cider glaze for the pickled cabbage. That’s because I’ll have cabbage in a slaw seasoned with lime, among other things, which will resonate nicely with the lime in both the tom yum and my cranberry sauce. “Winter salads can be just as vibrant as June’s blowsy, lazy salads, if you use a little creativity,” write Matt Lee and Ted Lee in The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern (Clarkson Potter). This one uses a mix of red and white cabbage, shredded thin, with baby spinach, roasted spinach, lime segments and flavors of cumin and mustard.

Laura Pensiero’s Gigi Trattoria is a celebrated Rhinebeck restaurant; her new book Hudson Valley Mediterranean (William Morrow) celebrates our area’s ingredients with a season-by-season approach, refining or reinventing classic and original recipes to keep an eye on the health factor.

I’m going to try the restaurant soon; meanwhile, I’m using her recipe for a mashed potato-rutabaga-turnip gratin to see if the flavors meld as well as she promises. The trio is riced into a casserole dish and baked with Grana Padano, thyme and nutmeg, and the benefits of the root veggies within should be delivered with an appealing flavor.

How to Roast a Lamb (Little, Brown) is the incisive title of Michael Psilakis’s new book, but it turns out to be an entire course in Greek cooking as practiced by the author in his Manhattan restaurants, including Anthos and Kefi. His cooking story is also an autobiography, a celebration of family and friends where food is central. I’m eager to roast a lamb according to his precepts.

Meanwhile, I’m borrowing the skordalia portion of a dish that also includes salt cod and pickled beets. Skordalia adds a garlic-vinegar purée to hot, riced potatoes, and I’m eager to taste this alternative to slathering the spuds with butter.

I Know How to Cook, proclaims the title of Ginette Mathiot’s classic French tome, a Gallic cross between The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Spoon that’s been around since 1932, but now it’s been newly revised and translated (Phaidon Press). No question that I’d find a recipe there for chocolate mousse. What surprised me, however, is that it calls for no heavy cream. It’s the classic French version of chocolate, egg whites and sugar, a simple and sweet way to finish this polyglot meal.