cover image BOOTY FOOD: A Date-by-Date, Course-by-Course, Nibble-by-Nibble Guide to Cultivating Love and Passion Through Food

BOOTY FOOD: A Date-by-Date, Course-by-Course, Nibble-by-Nibble Guide to Cultivating Love and Passion Through Food

Jacqueline Malouf, Liz Gumbinner, with Liz Gumbinner. . Bloomsbury, $24.95 (272pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-263-4

If Sex and the City 's Carrie Bradshaw cooked, and wrote a cookbook, this might be it. It's a sassy collection of recipes and menus for the occasions and stages of relationships (from flings to marriage), with dating advice, sex sidebars and a dash of etiquette—a primer on "caviar for newbies"; a key to the pronunciation of wines and international foods; suggestions for successful key exchange—thrown in for good measure. Malouf, co-host of Hot off the Grill with Bobby Flay and host of the WE network's Full Frontal Fashion , offers stories from her own dating life along with simple-chic recipes such as Funky Mimosas for the morning-after breakfast; Pan-Roasted Chicken with Rosemary-Lemon Butter, Blue Cheese Arugula Salad with Honeyed Walnuts, and Grilled Asparagus with Balsamic Vinaigrette for the first home-cooked meal; and Chicken Ramani, Cucumber Raita, and Minty Cuban Mojitos for keeping things "hot." Readers in any phase of a relationship—and especially readers in no relationship at all—will be entertained and informed by this volume and will enjoy its modern design and fun photographs by Ben Fink. (Jan.)