Waterstones How I Cook
111 ratings
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Price: £14.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Entertaining needn't be time-consuming or demanding. Discover the pleasure of cooking for family and friends as bestselling author; Skye Gyngell shares her secrets and techniques to what make her dishes so special. Turning her attention to the joy of home cooking, Skye will show you how to cook for others with over 100 delicious, easy recipes. From breakfast to Sunday lunch, alfresco dining to afternoon tea, simple weekday suppers, dinner parties to celebrations, there are dishes for everyday and special occasions. The ingredients are easy to source and strongly influenced by the seasons, making each dish flavourful and straightforward to make. Including traditional recipes from breakfast pancakes, through to hearty pies, rustic roasts and classic cakes, all with an inventive twist. The layering of flavour through all the recipes is inspiring and typifies the way Skye cooks. This beautiful book reveals how to delight others through simple dishes with ease, generosity and a little finesse. How I Cook is a book that should find a place on every cook's bookshelf.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781849499507
Delivery cost: 0.00
ISBN: 9781849499507
Author: Silvana de Soissons
Rating: 5
Review: This has been a very good year for inspirational, intelligent female cookery writing, and now that Quadrille has published "How I cook" by Skye Gyngell, I do not know how things could get any better. Look up her name on Google and there is very little you will find about Skye Gyngell. Despite being tall, blonde, and attractive, the celebrity, fame and marketing Twitter circus, thankfully, have not lured her in. She is far too busy making the Petersham Nurseries Cafe in Richmond the very best lunch venue in South London, as well as writing for "The Independent on Sunday" and a number of other prestigious cookery magazines. Her previous two works are "A Year in my Kitchen", published to great acclaim four years ago, and named "Cookery Book of the Year" by the Guild of Food Writers, and "My Favourite Ingredients" published in 2008. All her three books are founded on the same creeds: good, simple, seasonal, local ingredients, treated with respect, harmony and care. I could not recommend this book more, as a gift for a loved one or for your own pleasure. For sure, Jason Lowe's talents as photographer, has created the most beautifully photographed cookery book of the year. You will not find more elegant tablecloths, porcelain, glassware vases and flowers. Of course working as Head Chef at one of the country's most stylish plant havens can only be considered a bountiful blessing: fresh, jewel-coloured roses, sweet peas and dalias arranged casually around plates of dewy, kitchen garden picked fruit and vegetables. It is from this rich larder that Skye's recipes are developed and her talent has flourished. This book is all about the food she produces at home, for family and friends, and it is divided into different Menus for different occasions, from "Sunday Lunch", to "Alfresco Eating", "Late Night Supper" and "Time to Spare". Slow cooked belly of pork, with a gratin of white beans, sauteed leeks and a fig tart. Bagna cauda, gnudi with sage butter and roasted persimmon. Her references are mainly Mediterranean, but with accents from homely British and spicy Middle Eastern cookery, as well as a hefty pinch of artistic presentation. I defy anyone to buy this glorious little gem, A5 sized, 110 recipe book and not fall in love with her cooking, its joy, simplicity and beauty. In this frenetic and competitive world, the author encourages you all along to relax and enjoy, and her sincerity carries you through the pages: "When you are planning a menu, consider colour and texture, and choose one dish that dazzles. However competent you are, there is no need to prove it course after course. Do not insist to yourself that all must be perfect, for this is a sure way to spoil the spirit of the occasion. Entertaining isn't about proving you are the world's best cook..... Good entertaining comes from imbuing an occasion with your own personal style. Cook and eat with gusto ...and joy!".
Author: Dr Rich Boden
Rating: 2
Review: I wasn't impressed with this book. Granted, it has lovely photos of lovely-looking food but when you actually read the recipes they are unnecessarily fussing and downright wasteful in places (e.g. making a complex mixture in which to cook something...and then throwing it away afterwards, rather than making it into something else). Skye tries to reinvent the wheel quite a lot with recipes like poached eggs and roast chicken - I'm sorry but we don't need recipes like that in books that have complex and more advanced recipes. Those are things for basic "how to cook" books, not ones aimed at the audience Skye seems to be going for based on the complex, fussy, wierd recipes that use bizarre ingredients. I class myself as a very experienced cook - I've had a go at most things now - but I found some of the recipes used ingredients even I'd never heard of. I've tried sourcing some of them, as these recipes look interesting - but they seem hard to find. Someone like Delia would have added a footnote telling you where to look, but not Skye. It's unhelpful and the whole book is written in quite a snotty tone, which didn't appeal. The book IS very pretty, with lovely photos of food that doesn't look "perfect" and is all a bit rough around the edges, just as it looks when a real person makes it. It HAS, of course, been styled, but it hasn't been doctored to look perfect - as it is in some cook books and in adverts etc. I liked that touch. The book is divided into sections based on meals, but I have to say that I don't think they're things I'd want to serve, but the individual recipes are ok I guess. The desserts look pretty interesting. As per with a lot of these books, they have what is claimed to be "every day food" for everyday meals like "Sunday lunch" etc but can only be made by someone who does nothing else and has lots of free time to shop for fresh ingredients every day and cook these things. It's not realistic, I'm affraid. Finally, if you do buy this book, read the smallprint at the beginning! The oven temperatures and timings throughout are for FAN ovens and you need to convert them if you use a conventional oven. This is only noted in small writing near the start of the book - if you just dipped in to a recipe without reading this, you would waste your time and money trying to cook it. This is really unhelpful and not in the reader's best interests. Why not put Conventional Electric, Fan Oven and Gas Oven temperatures/settings on every recipe, both in C and F, just like other cookbooks?
