If you’re a certain kind of cook, the ecstasy of a spring farmer’s market, with its sweet sugar snap peas, bright peppery lettuces and juicy strawberries that are red all the way through, can easily give way to a sense of unease: the fear that you’re not making the most of all that’s on offer. (Perhaps you’re still agonizing over missing those three minutes when ramps were available?) One way to fend off this very fortunate brand of anxiety is to check out some new cookbooks. Thankfully, just in time, there’s the expected flood of vegetable-reverent titles, as well as books that will take you to all corners of the world and personal, nostalgic journeys inspiring the rediscovery of classics that feel just right for the season of rebirth.

EAT A LITTLE BETTER: Great Flavor, Good Health, Better World (Clarkson Potter, $32.50), by Sam Kass, is about cooking for the Obamas when they were in the White House. Not designing menus for state dinners or assembling cookie platters for holiday parties but devising flavorful, nutritious everyday meals for Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha in their private residence, where 6:30 dinner was a command performance for every member of the family, including the president. “It was an inspiring sight,” Kass writes, “the busiest man in the world carving out time for this daily ritual.” Of course, the insider stories are irresistible — there’s “POTUS’s lucky pasta,” which Obama credited with a triumphant presidential debate against Mitt Romney, and there’s the barbecued roast chicken that was the first family’s first dinner in the White House (it “had to serve as a comfort to four people whose lives were changing forever”).