My Favourite Ingredients by Skye Gyngell

Expanding on A Year in My Kitchen focusing on Skye Gyngell's toolbox of ingredients, My Favourite Ingredients looks at sixteen key players in the kitchen that are worked into 100 recipes. These special ingredients include prime foods (fish, cheese, nuts, pulses and grains) along with seasonal favourites and finishing off with flavour enhancers.

PETERSHAM NURSERIES

Skye of Petersham Nurseries fame says that her cooking has become much simpler since her first book. Now flavours whisper and produce tastes more of itself and the season than anything else. Using these key ingredients as starting points for each chapter, the recipes celebrate all that is good about eating with the seasons.

EASY TO FOLLOW

Recipe ingredients are fairly restrained and your average cook will have most of them to hand with herbs and spices playing an important role. Skye serves asparagus with Tabasco butter, a combination of mustard, Tabasco, lemon juice and a pinch of salt - so simple that you wish you'd thought of it yourself. Crab cakes are paired with corn purée and chilli oil, where fresh corn is cooked until tender, puréed and mixed with crème fraiche and Tabasco.

Porcini mushrooms are sliced wafer thin, along with shavings of good quality Parmesan and tossed together with lemon juice and mild olive oil drizzled over the top. Serve simply with crème fraiche and chopped leaf parsley.

SPELL BINDING PHOTOGRAPHY

The recipes are interesting with unusual combinations, topped off by Jason Lowe's enigmatic photography, some of it shot in situ at Petersham, this is a book that is at home on your bedside table as it is useful in the kitchen.

Publication details:
Quadrille Publishing Limited
£25
ISBN 1844006212
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