Have cooked 5 or 6 recipes from this book so far and can't fault any of them. The pad thai is a real winner, red fish curry has some lovely flavours (even better the next day) and the fish parcels with lime butter look impressive at the table yet take hardly any work.
The pictures are really fresh and inspiring, and the ingredients lists aren't too long or complex. The recipes I've made have also been quick (about half an hour), so it really is 'everyday' cooking (unlike, say, Jamie O's "30-minute" meals :) ). Top tip - the actual cooking tends to be pretty speedy, so it really helps to chop/measure everything at the start and get it all lined up ready to throw in the wok… Read more
I picked up this book on offer with a newspaper, expecting nothing more than an easy, slightly cheesy read for a long train journey. However, it was far better written and engaging than I expected and I've been recommending it ever since.
The Help deals with some serious subject matter - the shocking racial inequality in the southern USA before the Civil Rights movement - but it does so in an accessible way, through characters you can believe in. At a time when rich white families are building separate outdoor bathrooms for their black maids, aspiring journalist Skeeter decides to write a book from the maids' perspective, collecting their life stories and experiences. The… Read more
This was one of those books I quite enjoyed while actually reading it, but once I put it down I wasn't compelled to pick it up again. It's stylistically well written and covers some interesting recent history (the Balkan war). But I'd struggle to provide a synopsis, as I didn't feel there was much of a central plot driving things forward - it read more like a collection of short stories.
The book jumps back and forth between the present day (where the narrator, Natalia, is a doctor vaccinating children in an orphanage) and her grandfather's past. I found the modern parts the least engaging - not a lot happens and we don't learn much about the characters. These sections really… Read more
