While I don't mind a good food book (with or without recipes) I was more wanting to read through a more regular cookbook to get new recipe ideas. She doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures—she thinks of all eating as pleasure and doesn’t believe in feeling guilty for that. If, when friends come over for dinner, the best thing to be said about the evening was that the food was great, consider it a failure. There might be some tiny amount of jealousy, but mostly I love reading her thoughts on food and cooking. She starts off with a chapter devoted to the humble anchovy, an ingredient that is small yet mighty.

I first came across pasta cooked in beetroot juice in Felicity Cloake’s wonderful ‘A-Z of Eating’ (she in turn had found it in an American food magazine) and I knew I had to make it. This simple, joyous pile-up of sponge, rhubarb, custard and cream remains my favourite, and will always remain my favourite; it’s time I shared it with you…’From the recipe header:📝 ‘Serves 8-10, although I still make this if there are fewer of us; leftovers are to be relished, or generously boxed up and given to people to take home. She became, among other things, a newspaper-reviewer on BBC1 Sunday-morning TV programme 'Breakfast with Frost'. I have yet to cook much from this book, but it deserves a five-star rating as a collection of essays in any case.And above and beyond the recipes, this is a profound and consoling defence of the pleasures of the kitchen. It is important to spend time with Nigella as each recipe is rich with detail and sentences as beautiful as the food on the opposite page. I feel conflicted with this, while I worship the altar of Lawson and have cooked, and still do, many of her recipes over the years this one was not a hit with me. Food, for me, is a constant pleasure: I like to think greedily about it, reflect deeply on it, learn from it; it provides comfort, inspiration, meaning, and beauty…More than just a mantra, ‘cook, eat, repeat’ is the story of my life.

I also suspect she has a fantastic sense of humour, and is the first to laugh at herself (or at least, her TV self), but that the general public has a hard time letting her show that (just look at how the internet imploded over her pronunciation of 'microwave'). The book, which does have some ‘white space’ dotted around, plays out with a page of ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, on page 344, which includes:📝 ‘JONATHAN LOVEKIN, whose painterly photographs ~ taken under novel conditions ~ illuminate these pages…’The book comes complete with a pinky-red fabric ribbon to keep your place, similar to the colour of the accent shade throughout including the subtitle on the cover and the recipe titles, headings etc. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Pretože do istej miery si myslím, že varenie je jazyk: na úrovni fonetiky registrujete zvuky a vône; na úrovni morfológie kombinujete ingrediencie, až napokon staviate syntax z jedál a chodov. I’m itching to make almost every single thing from this book, and really appreciate the way that she encourages home cooks to experiment and make dishes personal.Some of the recipes seem recycled ideas or borrowing from others (which is fine)- marzipan loaf, the banana and tahini bread, the NYT loaf, another lemon and almond cake- and overall an esoteric collection of ingredients that normally I would default as an 'Ottolenghi' move: marrowbone, celeriac, a lot of chestnuts. This cookbook is for those who enjoy 'food writing' (I'm not sure that's the term, but I think most people know what I mean). I love looking at the recipes and the pictures but I especially love the reflective essays Nigella wrote for this book.