The cookbooks that most move me — move me to cook and move me in the classic sense — are those that tell a story along with the recipe (and every recipe has a story).

I like cookbooks to be dirty (er, with use). I like cookbooks to have a personality, a personality that comes across in the prose as well as in the resulting finished product. Moreover, I just like a good read.

None of the cookbooks below completely fills my hunger for the perfect cookbook, but there's a certain loving straightforwardness in the overlap of each of these light-yet-big-hearted cookbooks that all food writing should aim for. (Note: Being that it's my first love, most if not all of these are Southern-based tomes. It's always said we produce some great literary writers down here, and our cookbook authors often seem to be cut from the same cloth.)

• Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens by sometime Nashville resident Ronni Lundy: if for no other reason than we come from a similar music/food background and share a distaste for the flowery. Plus, she rarely fails me: I've used more of these recipes than most in any other cookbook I own.

• Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook's Corner and Home by Bill Smith: if for no other reason than this knowing line, by way of describing the influences of Crook's Vietnamese and Latino workers on his cuisine: "You can wash dishes in any language." And for meaning that in a way that is the opposite of offensive, and furthermore for being honest about it. To boot, the food at this quirky little Chapel Hill, N.C., joint (as originally prepared by the late Bill Neal) helped jumpstart the whole modern Southern food movement (such as it is).

• A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South by John T. Edge: Great prosody, and a great chance to own, via one book, all the best recipes from every Junior League cookbook ever written. (Earlier this week Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, won a James Beard Foundation Award for a piece on Southern barbecue he wrote in Saveur.)

• The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories by the National Council of Negro Women: Top-notch Southern vittles no matter your race, as the great majority of so-called Southern cooking has African-American origins. Plus, what other cookbook has five, count 'em five, recipes for pig's feet?

• Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney: because it looks unflinchingly (and, moreover, interestingly) at the processes and copious dualities that go into the food we've grown up on and often still eat — truths that some folks would rather remain oblivious to. Which is too bad.

• The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery edited by Linda Garland Page and Eliot Wigginton: a time-traveling compendium of oddball — at least oddball these days — eats and drinks like sassafras tea, fried quail and lime pickles. Added points for keeping alive the arts of preserving foods, dressing wild game and cooking over an open fire.

In this week's issue of the Scene, I talk to Jeremy Barlow, the chef and owner at certified-green dining spot Tayst and sustainable sandwich shop Sloco.

Barlow, who studied philosophy at Vanderbilt before getting his chef degree at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., just published a book, four years in the making. It's called Chefs Can Save the World: How To Green Restaurants and Why They Are the Key to Renewing the Food System (287 pp., $15.99).

The self-published book is available at Tayst, Sloco and Parnassus Books (and you can buy the digital version at Amazon and Barnes and Noble's site). Parnassus is hosting a discussion led by Barlow this Wednesday, March 14, at 6:30 p.m. He'll talk about our current food system and what can be done to set it on a better course, and also sign copies of his book.

In it he makes a persuasive argument that simple changes at America's restaurants could be surprisingly influential in many ways.

"Look at how intrinisically connected the food system is with everything in society from health issues and health costs, to national debt, to economics and job growth, to national security. The list goes on and on about what it affects," Barlow says.

"In our country we spent $1.2 trillion on food in 2010, and according to the National Restaurant Association, diners eat 50 percent of their meals outside the house," he adds.

"How much play do we [chefs] have? A lot. We’re controlling half the dollars. We could make a big difference quickly, and we could effect food system change that’s long-lasting. When you change the food system you automatically affect all these other issues."

Barlow's original intention was something like a how-to guide for green restaurants. But somewhere along the way, what with all the research he did for the restaurant and becoming a dad, he started thinking and writing about the big picture. He's also a volunteer, working to improve school lunches and belongs to a number of groups like the Nashville Food Policy Council.

When he speaks about the environment, he gets passionate and persuasive, so Wednesday's discussion at Parnassus should be lively and edifying. Read my full story here.

Nashville is a different place than it was 25 years ago. A modest influx of immigrants has always been drawn here (the attractions of our universities and the efforts of local charities get some of the credit), but the number and diversity have broadened noticeably in the last two decades. Even my little neighborhood, which is easily overlooked and has a low incidence of residents moving in or out, includes African, Korean and Pakistani families.

The World in a Skillet: A Food Lover's Tour of the New American South(UNC Press, $35), by Memphis-based food writers Paul and Angela Knipple, gives a look inside the foodways of some of the people bringing their foods and traditions to Southern cities and towns.

Four of Nashville's immigrant food purveyors get a chance to tell their stories. Some are already well known in restaurant circles, including Memet Arslan and his Istanbul restaurant, and Hamid Hassan and his House of Kabob.

I especially enjoyed the story of Rauf Ary of Tara International Market (located at Nolensville and Thuss). He tells the Knipples that he was a master electrician before 9/11, but as the only Muslim on his crew, he found the atmosphere too tense to stay at his job. He bought the market from the previous owner, and foodists know it as a source for natural goat, beef, chicken and lamb.

Finally, Mahir Ahmad of Mazi International Market (Elysian Fields Court) shares a recipe for Kurdish Chicken and Rice Soup, which points up my favorite aspect of the book — its recipes. From feijoada to cabbage rolls to plantains in peanut sauce to Vietnamese pickled mustard greens to mapo tofu, there's a lot of good coming from the "skillet" of the book's title.

Former Nashville chef Sean Brock, whose restaurant Husk opened in Charleston, S.C., in 2010 to national acclaim, appears in this short film describing the importance of his notebooks, wherein he records his ideas, his dishes, his musings and his inspiration. "It's all dreams until it's on paper," he says.

Artist and filmmaker Jeff Scott and chef Blake Beshore have re-created Brock's notebooks, which Brock describes as "almost like a diary," in a new cookbook called Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession. Nine other chefs are also included.

"It's a great way to reflect back and see the process of opening the restaurant," Brock says in the film. "You can almost see the stress in my handwriting." I haven't seen the book, but I'm sure his notebooks also reveal stone-cold creativity (as in frozen-nitrogen cold) and persistence.

The book's website calls Notes from a Kitchen "the first book of its kind to accurately portray the daily creative life of a world-renowned chef in a visceral, cinematic format."

A lot of cooks have gotten a good start in their own kitchens with a collection of family recipes. Your own relatives may have put one together for you when you married or moved into your own place.

Now Oasis Center volunteers are doing the same for the young people leaving its transitional housing program.

You can help by submitting reliable recipes for inclusion, the kind "when [they're] cooked and shared with our young people — and I am sure with your own family — they offer the senses of home, stability, belonging and safety craved by our most vulnerable clients."

Ideally, recipes should be moderately easy, with ingredients that are easy to obtain.

The center hopes is to print and bind enough books for the young adults and extras to sell at Oasis Center events.

You can submit anonymously if you like, but why not get credit for your excellent dish? Your recipe may be retitled and edited for clarity. The deadline is 5 p.m. this Wednesday, Feb. 15, so chop-chop. To submit by email, send recipes to asuitter@oasiscenter.org

In this job, I get to interact with a lot of chefs. Some are kind, others are surly. But every now and then I get to meet someone who really seems to have a spark in their soul when they talk about their food. When I first spoke to Sarah O'Kelley of The Glass Onion in Charleston, I just really liked her joie de vivre. After speaking to her about her casual restaurant specializing in Lowcountry and Southern cooking, and receiving a few recipes from her, I mentioned that I really like her writing voice and asked if she'd ever considered writing a cookbook.

"Funny you should mention that," she replied, and last week I received a copy of Glass Onion Classics. Along with her partners in the restaurant, Charles Vincent and Chris Stewart, Chef O'Kelley has put together an entertaining cookbook of recipes from The Glass Onion filled with simple instructions, tips and tricks from the kitchen, and stories of their backgrounds as chefs in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

Fierce advocates for the use of local, all-natural ingredients, the chefs also included profiles of some of their favorite purveyors and lists of vendors to source those few items that might not be easily available locally to home cooks. The recipes are clearly written with an eye toward using tools and staples that should be at hand in most readers' kitchens. There's no sous vide or molecular gastronomy in this book; everything can be cooked with an electric stove using a minimum of gadgets.

As Steve Cavendish told us in last week's dining column in the Scene, chef Stephanie Izard — James Beard award nominee, Saveur cover girl and the first and only woman to win Bravo's Top Chef — is set to appear in Nashville today to sign copies of her cookbook.

Izard, of Chicago eatery Girl & the Goat, is determined to raise $500,000 for Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger organization supported by many culinary professionals. She combined that pledge with a tour to promote her book, Girl in the Kitchen: How a Top Chef Cooks, Thinks, Shops, Eats & Drinks (Chronicle Books).

Izard is making a stop at Turnip Truck Urban Fare in the Gulch. Attendees will have the opportunity to purchase an autographed copy of the book and meet Izard at the event.

The cookbook may be as close as you get to Izard's food: It's nigh impossible to get a reservation at her restaurant, Girl & the Goat. How many restaurants do you know of that start serving at 4:30 and are full by 5 p.m.? At this writing, to get a table at 7 p.m. you'd have to wait until December. Her menu is all small plates offering bold flavors and inventive techniques, and all seasonal.

For a sampling of the creative but entirely cookable recipes from the book, including brilliant combinations like roasted cauliflower and buttered panko crumbs (called crunch butter in the recipes) and lemon poached eggplant with fresh ricotta, click here or go to stephanieizard.com/recipes.

The Turnip Truck signing will begin at 11:30 a.m. (line starts forming at 11) and continue until 1 p.m.

Izard will also swing back through town at a later date for a private CMT Artists of the Year event. This year's honorees, Jason Aldean, Lady Antebellum, Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley and Taylor Swift, and their guests will be treated to Izard's cuisine. (I guess you'll know if you're invited.)

The event will be recorded for a 90-minute special that premieres on CMT and CMT.com at 8 p.m. Dec. 13.

Everybody knows that the Loveless Cafe is famous for their biscuits and their downhome Southern meals, but can you believe that until just a few years ago, they didn't even have a dessert menu? That all changed seven years ago when they hired baker Alisa Huntsman and gave her a small space in their dry storage room to experiment with hundreds of new recipes that she had percolating in her creative mind.

On one little counter in that private space, Huntsman took advantage of all the wonderful fruits that the Loveless had access to for the tankerloads of preserves that they produce for their restaurant and their burgeoning Hams and Jams mail-order business. She reveled in her private kitchen since nobody could see what she threw away during her various trials. Fortunately, her successes vastly outnumbered her failures and now she has chosen a hundred of her best to share with readers in the Loveless' new Desserts from the Famous Loveless Cafe cookbook.

The tome overflows with fairly simple recipes for pies, puddings, cakes and cobblers that have been converted to individual proportions for preparation in the home kitchen. In the beginning, all the cafe asked for was a good banana pudding recipe and maybe some cobblers, but Huntsman would not be limited. Now you can make and bake her versions of Harpeth Valley Hummingbird Cake, Root Beer Float Cake and Chocolate Cherry Cha-Chas for the members of your own household and save yourself the half-hour drive out Highway 100 to the Loveless. But seriously, make the drive and try Alisa's treats.

In addition to all the recipes, the book shares lots of helpful hints for the bakerphobics among us. Huntsman realized that we like our treats sweet and figured out ways to torque up the flavors without making them overly cloying. For example, blackberries share a similar flavor profile as rosewater, so she adds rosewater to her cobbler to enhance the intensity of the berries. Who da' thunk it?

Other tips seem obvious when you read them, but can really help to simplify the process an reduce the mess in your kitchen. For example, if you have trouble handling dough after you roll it out, do your rolling on a sheet of wax paper or parchment. Then you can just carry it over to your pie dish and flip it over to top your pie.

Fun pictures, light tone, lack of ingredient lists: If you could blow up the "cookbook" box to build a better one, comics would be a pretty good place to start.

Earlier this summer, Saveur online asked several comic artists to draw a recipe, calling the results Recipe Comix. Though reading and cooking go hand in hand, there are plenty of cooks who aren't readers. And since it's easier to learn by watching than reading, comics are a natural.

Take this one, from Ryan North (Dinocomix). You think it's going to be your basic ground beef and bean chili, but there are also chick peas and pickled cactus paddles.

The series includes useful recipes like a gingery cocktail, ice cream, cold noodle salad. No technique is too basic — one cartoonist tackled boiled eggs, another, potato wedges. For your amusement, artist Ali Kenifick tackled a Heston Blumenthal recipe (but not, thanks be, his snail porridge).

In an example of life imitating art, back-to-school chaos overtook me at the very moment the Weekly Open Thread held a cookbook giveaway in honor of all the arriving college students. The prize, the I Love Trader Joe's College Cookbook by Andrea Lynne.

Bitesters submitted their stories of cooking and eating on the super-cheap in the college (or college-era) years. Some scrappy tales of smuggled food, hot-pot mac-and-cheese and microwave rice were shared. Besting them all was the cold pizza omelet of BW.

Oh, I had too way many and luckily, have forgotten most, but my favorite college survival dish was the cold pizza omelet. Step one, order pizza late at night, usually while inebriated . Step two, don't finish it all. Step three, wake up a little groggy the next morning and look in the fridge to find only eggs and something that could be a used in a science class for mold reproduction. Step four, choose eggs. Step five, prepare eggs as you would for any omelet. Step six, when eggs are almost set, place piece of cold pizza in omelet and fold over. Serve and enjoy. Seriously, we did this one summer. And that may explain why I am the way I am today!

BW, for your ingenuity in the face of poverty, for your sheer culinary audacity, not to mention the strength of your digestive system and the assault on tastebuds, you're the winner of the I Love Trader Joe's College Cookbook! You find us, we'll find you, to claim your hard-won prize!