Eric Partaker

I use recipes as guideposts and don't mind adjusting to my own taste. I use common sense and experience to know if a recipe has a typo. This is a UK-based cookbook and I am North American, so I have to google conversions. Not a big deal to me.

This book's format is nice; I like the typefaces and the layout. There are color photos of many of the dishes, and colorful graphics. There is a mix-and-match recipe chart that looks useful, but it is illegible in my Kindle edition. The authorial voice show more is casual and skews young & hipsterish. It's the type of cookbook I'd expect to be sold at Urban Outfitters.

The ingredients and equipment are easy to access in the urban and suburban U.S., keeping regional vocabulary differences in mind . Anyone with a bit of culinary confidence could pull off these recipes.

Some of the recipes are rather original, and they don't stick to the strictly traditional. I like that. In several recipes, Mexican cuisine fuses with Thai, South Indian, Lebanese, Italian, and Thai cuisine. There are some exciting dessert recipes, too. I would be gleeful cooking out of this cookbook once a week or more often. After the pandemic is over and we can have dinner parties again, it will be fun to base a party around this cookbook.

There are recipes that are vegetarian and vegan or adaptable. But there are also many recipes for chicken, beef, pork, and seafood.

Recipes I am most excited to try:
corn & bean salad
chilli non-carne
Lizzy's dessert burritos

PS Horrifying things about English dietary habits are implied -- ketchup on cheese toast?! I am so upset. show less