I get copies of books to review and have been fortunate enough to start getting cookbooks for review. Most of them have been dreadful. Seriously — they’re food porn with recipes that look beautiful, but no one would ever want to make, let alone could because of the complex and hard to find ingredients.

But some real gems come my way too. I was not expecting one of the gems to be simply titled Hog.

I have a 36″ DCS grill with two side burners and a 50 pound rotisserie. On top of that, I have a large Big Green Egg. I use the grill for most things, but use the Big Green Egg as my smoker. It is flawless. And Hog plays perfectly with both.

The cookbook is essentially a snout to tail cookbook for pigs. It certainly has recipes I would never dream of eating (I’m a picky eater and there are some parts of a pig I’m not going to eat). But most of them are spectacular, accessible, and delicious.

There’s a ham recipe that’s going to appear on my table at the holidays. There are pork chop recipes and brines that are better than what I was using. The boston butt is now a favorite of my wife’s. Again, they are not complex recipes at all.

On top of that, the cookbook is really awesome. The cover design is very thoughtful with a yellow cover and felt outline of a hog. It’s cool up close. The pictures inside are not the glossy food porn of magazines, but are good pictorials of what’s happen.

It’s a cookbook though. The recipes are what matters and the recipes in Hog are pretty awesome.