Simon Hopkinson

The excellent chef Simon Hopkinson has much fun lovingly recreating and redesigning what passed as standard 'posh' restaurant and dinner party food in Britain in the 1970s. Hopkinson endearingly rehabilitates Classics such as Duck a l'Orange, Weiner Schnitzel, Moussaka, Garlic Mushrooms and, of course, Prawn Cocktail itself as well as a full menu of other now ridiculed culinary delights from the period.

This is an entertaining and fun cookery book with a serious purpose - to teach us that show more cooked as they should be, these much derided delights can still be still something to enjoy.

A classic cookery book, one to savour. show less

Laid out a bit like your grandmother’s holiday table — everything in its carefully doilied place —, The Vegetarian Option separates recipes by ingredient into more than fifty small sections. Despite this fusty approach, Hopkinson manages a feat most vegetarian cookbooks don’t even attempt: singular focus on the vegetables. While he turns to a handful of rice and pasta dishes at the back, Hopkinson embraces even unpopular veg like watercress, sorrel, and turnips with expert ease. show more Imagine what he does for the usual suspects.

Recipes range from quick, two-step prep to several complicated paragraphs of work before a final, though impressive, meal emerges. Simple dishes like spaghetti al aglio and peperocino (i.e. garlic and pepper) and broiled eggplant with pesto are hearty and manageable dinner options for even novice home cooks. Or spend a few hours creating the asian fried turnip paste or mushroom cannelloni, multi-step meals with breathtaking results.

Despite the high level of ingenuity in his recipes, Hopkinson’s ingredients are widely accessible and budget friendly. Some of the more creative dishes, the tomato jelly with basil and goat cheese for example, feature ingredients like agar agar — an easy to use vegan thickening agent rarely used outside of the raw food realm but available at a decent supermarket. It's the experimental pairings and texture variations that set this cookbook apart.

A few sample recipe titles:
Cheese-crusted fried parsnip stripes with romesco sauce
Cream of fennel soup with garlic butter
Red pepper and potato stew with jalapeno relish
Warm asparagus custards with tarragon vinaigrette

Hopkinson’s compiled a thorough, adaptive collection with enough diversity to keep you thumbing its pages seasonally. Though he's thrown in a few easy ones, his recipes aren’t the simplistic, 30-minute fare so popular lately. But if you’re looking for a vegetarian Sunday dinner that will impress people, start your browsing here.

(Originally posted on www.christinereads.com.) show less

Roast Chicken and Other Stories has been called "the most useful cookbook of all time." While I'm not sure I would go that far, it's certainly in my top five (along with The Best Recipe, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook). I will admit, this is the first time a cookbook has been my bedtime reading selection - and I've had lovely dreams as a result.
Mr Hopkinson does not limit himself to popular show more types of foods - he has recipes for offal (sweetbreads, kidneys, liver, tripe) that even make those relatively unpopular body parts sound appetizing. I suspect more cooks will be grateful for and will use his recipes for simple, well-prepared, and delicious foods such as onion tart, roast potatoes, a variety of custards, and, well, roast chicken. I am particularly looking forward to trying his recipes for the roast best end of lamb with eggplant and basil cream sauce, and to braised endives and baked new garlic with creamed goat's cheese. His directions and detailed explanations make the recipes well within the average cook's grasp.
Mr Hopkinson says he wrote the book because he likes to cook and eat good food, and he thinks the recipes he selected for the book would appeal to all who enjoy the same. It's my opinion that he's right on target. show less

Perhaps one of the more appealing aspects of The Vegetarian option is the relative simplicity of the dishes, simple in that each recipe is based on just one or two main ingredients, yet the resulting dish, far from begin simple, is often quite sophisticated.

The range of recipes include those built around one or two vegetables; pasta dishes; dishes based on pulses and grains, rice or eggs; and include soups and consommé plus a few fruit dishes. They include a few familiar dishes such as show more macaroni cheese with tomatoes, cauliflower cheese, to more unusual combinations such as onion and blood orange salad and a vegetarian version of the more exotic Oriental fried turnip paste. There are many imaginative recipes here, with some the basic ingredients are clearly recognisable in the finished dish, in others they are turned into something entirely new.

The book is well laid out, the recipes clear and easy to follow, and each is accompanied by a few personal comments from the author. Each section opens with an brief introduction, which might include an appealing anecdote; I especially liked the account of the small boy horrified that the haricots had been neither 'topped' not 'tailed'. There are plenty of enticing full colour photographs of the resultant dishes, along with some arty little black and white photographs. The bo0k includes a comprehensive index.

This is not a comprehensive, cover-all eventualities book on vegetarian cookery, but an imaginative and creative collection of honest recipes which do not try to be anything other than the sum of their ingredients. show less