Kicking off #FoodieFebruary we’re sharing the cookbooks that we turn to most often when in need of something delicious for dinner:
The Roasting Tin Rukmini Iyer
This is the cookbook we’ve dined out on most often, it’s also the one we recommend frequently to fellow foodies. When you’re short of time and energy you can’t beat a good one pot recipe and this book is full of them, it’s all it contains in fact. Every recipe is a tasty traybake - just bang the ingredients into a tin, whack it in the oven and in a short time you’ll have a great dinner and even better - very little washing up!
There are also a lot of different variants of the book available; The Green Roasting Tin for vegetarians, The Quick Roasting Tin for when you only have half an hour and The Roasting Tin Around the World for a well travelled palate.
Recipes to try: Tarragon Roast Chicken with Potatoes, Onions and Garlic / Smokey Sausage, Sweet Potato and Red Onion Traybake / Crispy Baked Gnocchi with Tomatoes, Basil, Mozzarella and Pine Nuts
Table Manners Jessie Ware/Lennie Ware
Beautiful woman, beautiful music and beautiful food, is there anything Jessie Ware can’t do!? Not to be confused with their also excellent podcast titled Table Manners, here the mother and daughter pair don’t just talk about food while sharing it with their celeb pals they share some of their beloved family recipes with us.
It’s the best kind of fuss free but delicious home cooking, catering for everything from a solo lunch to a pretty impressive dinner party. It’s also the cookbook that managed to push us to master rice, a fairly simple skill that has until recently managed to allude, goes great with the chicken with olive tapenade, which is the only way we will currently roast a chicken. Slap on What’s Your Pleasure? and get dancing around your kitchen.
Recipes to try: Quick Lentil and Tomato Soup / Microwave Onion Rice / Provencal Roast Chicken with Olive Tapenade / Bella’s Cod in Sherry with Roasted Tomatoes and Butter Beans
The Art of the Larder Claire Thomson
The Art of the Larder (that’s cupboard to us non-Tories) is in our opinion one of the best ‘store cupboard cookbooks’ on the shelves. While you won’t strictly be able to create a complete dish from ingredients you already have laying around, some fresh elements are needed for most of the recipes, you will learn new and interesting ways to utilise those packs of lentils and tins of kidney beans collecting dust at the back of the cupboard.
We love being able to create something from nothing and this collection of recipes is a great basis to start learning that skill. The semolina gnocchi is probably the best way to make use of semolina ever envisioned and the chocolate stem ginger flourless cake has become a birthday staple.
Recipes to try: White Beans with Toulouse Sausage, Broccoli and Garlic / Little Gem Caesar Salad / Semolina Gnocchi / Chocolate and Stem Ginger Flourless Cake
The Little Library Cookbook Kate Young
You may have noticed by now that we love a cookbook with a great concept and this one is pretty special - each recipe is plucked straight from the pages of some of the most iconic literary fiction. Who among us hasn’t wondered what it would be like to share a marmalade sandwich with Paddington, or sit in the White Witch’s slay devouring Turkish Delight, slurping some wonton soup with the ladies of The Joy Luck Club is right up our street for sure!
You may be familiar with Kate Young from her pieces in The Guardian, she’s an excellent writer as well as a great cook and you can enjoy this cookbook just as you might a novel and completely by pass the recipes, but why would you pass up the chance to whip up some green eggs and ham!? (Much nicer than you’d expect, we do like like them Sam I am).
Recipes to try: Green Eggs and Ham / Crab and Avocado Salad / Brown Butter Madeleines / Steak and Onions
Cook, Eat, Repeat Nigella Lawson
Don’t trust anyone who recommends cookbooks to you and doesn’t include the undisputed queen of home cooking, all hail the Domestic Goddess. Previous to this latest collection we’d turn to Nigellissima on the regular but in the short time we’ve had Cook, Eat, Repeat we’ve done a lot of cooking, eating and repeating. It’s an instant classic and has so many hits to cater for every mood you barely need another cookbook.
The old-fashioned sandwich loaf is the most hassle free way to bake bread we’ve ever come across and the fish finger bhorta has almost been as prevalent in kitchens across the UK as banana bread! There’s a recipe for brown butter colcannon that seems as close to culinary heaven as you can get, and though we don’t like to use it there’s no one but Nigella who could get us firing up the mee-cro-wa-vay.
Recipes to try: Old-Fashioned Sandwich Loaf / Fish Finger Bhorta / Chocolate, Tahini and Banana Two Ways (the pudding way) / Brown Butter Colcannon