For this week's Back to School Guide, I wrote about how cooking your own food is easier than you think. Many of us have been tricked into thinking that cooking is precious, an activity best left to chefs and self-proclaimed (barf) "foodies." I call bullshit on that. Cooking is simply taking an active role in feeding yourself/keeping yourself alive. If you end up taking pleasure in it (and, with time, I suspect you might), even better.

While my article is filled with some simple advice on how to get started in the kitchen, you might want to bring in some reinforcements. While I have always liked cooking, I wasn't always great at it, and these three books have helped me become a more confident (and sane) home cook.

• If you are going to own just one cookbook, it should be How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. (Vegetarians, please note Bittman also published How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which also includes around 2,000 meatless recipes.) Over the years I have given at least a dozen copies of this book as gifts because it is totally approachable and empowering, and it literally tells you how to make everything you might need: pancakes, potato salad (there are several recipes, I like the one with multiple kinds of mustard best), roast pork, meatballs (still use the meatball recipe to this day, trust), scones.

Bittman keeps his recipes as simple as possible, but more importantly, he writes them as what they are—guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. His recipe notes include ideas for substitutions, so you never feel inadequate if you don't have the specific type of bean or cut of meat he calls for. Over time you'll find that you feel more confident switching ingredients up and improvising, and I believe he would encourage this.

• If you love food, strolling through farmers' markets, and reading food blogs, but just haven't quite made the leap to doing a lot of home cooking, get a copy of Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. Adler's prose is gorgeous and inspiring, and the essays, titled like instructions—"How to Boil Water," "How to Teach an Egg to Fly"—have lots of practical advice. But the book is just as much about celebrating home cooking as a way of thinking and approaching life. Her writing is unnervingly reassuring.

• When you are a little more comfortable in the kitchen and looking for ideas and inspiration—not necessarily recipes—get a copy of The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. The book is essentially one giant list of ingredients, organized alphabetically.

Under each ingredient is a list of complementary flavors and food items, as well as a short list of "flavor affinities." For example, there are 41 items listed under broccoli, including almonds, ginger, mustard and mustard seeds, olive oil, oregano, and wine. Its flavor affinities include "broccoli + anchovies + lemon" and "broccoli + garlic + lemon juice + olive oil," which are the most basic sort of recipes.

I love The Flavor Bible because it encourages confident creativity. When you go into cooking something trusting that your ingredients will taste good together, the method by which you cook becomes less important, and you can start to play around more. I gave this book as a gift to my husband a few years ago, back when he was hesitantly expanding his kitchen repertoire from fried eggs and frozen hashbrowns to a few homemade soups. The other day when I came home from work, he was in middle of making a pork shoulder braised in beef broth and beer (he would have preferred cider, but canned broth and beer were all we had) with caramelized onions. I'm telling you, it works.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from An Everlasting Meal, which really gets to the heart of what cooking is about: "“We don’t need to be professionals to cook well, any more than we need to be doctors to treat bruises and scrapes. We don’t need to shop like chefs or cook like chefs; we need to shop and cook like people who are learning to cook, like what we are—people who are hungry.”