Yummy, yummy, yummy! (Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen: Simple and Delicious Recipes for Every Family - Tana Ramsay)

Member Name: clairestevens

Product:	Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen: Simple and Delicious Recipes for Every Family - Tana Ramsay
Date:	07/01/08 (728 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great book, great food

Disadvantages: Could do with more pictures of the food and fewer of her kids

I wouldn't want the job of cooking for Gordon Ramsay when he gets home of an evening, so I can only take my hat off to Tana Ramsay for not only doing it but also finding the time to put together a recipe book.

The layout of the book is very simple. It is divided into ten chapters as follows:

Breakfast - All manner of breakfast recipes from fruit smoothies to a Full English with plenty in between. Some of the recipes, such as the Fruit Gratin and the smoked haddock kedgeree look a bit fiddly to be messing around with first thing in the morning and are perhaps better suited to more leisurely weekend breakfasts or brunches, but others such as the porridge with blueberries are spot on.

Lunch Bites - a whole host of recipes for things to put in your child's (or your own) lunch box. The ham and cheese muffins and danish pastry pizzas are particularly nice.

Tea Time Treats - sweet snacks to tide over little and big tummies until dinner time. They are as close as Tana Ramsay comes to junk food, but even then she tries to include fruit where possible, for instance in the banana and apple loaf.

Trying New Tastes - this chapter demonstrates ways of introducing a wider variety of flavours to finicky eaters. Mostly savoury snack recipes, but she also includes a section of interesting soups.

Cooking From The Cupboard - this is my favourite section. A bunch of recipes designed to be made from ingredients that you have lying around. Unlike some cookery writers, she realises that the things people actually have lying around in their cupboards are things like cheese and pasta, not orange blossom essence and juniper berries. They are all dinner recipes and I don't think any of them take more than an hour to prepare and cook.

After School Suppers - Dinner recipes for when you have managed to go out to the Supermarket that day!

Cooking In Advance - more dinner recipes, but this time with slightly more exotic ingredients and longer preparation times. These recipes would be fine to serve up at informal dinner parties. Still nothing too taxing though and still do-able when you get home from work.

Weekend Lunches - delicious Saturday lunch meals including some that could also be adapted to work as dinners.

Puddings - easy recipes that are designed to look impressive and taste delicious. The Raspberry Meringue Bomb is a favourite of mine, purely because it takes ten minutes to cobble together.

Party Food - tasty and (relatively) healthy recipes for children's' party snacks. They find that elusive middle ground between all-you-can-eat-pizzas-and-sausage-rolls and the 'carrot sticks and yoghurt' brigade.

At the end of the book she also includes a nutrition section called 'A Bit About Vitamins And Minerals' I found this quite useful as it tells you everything you need to know about what your body needs and where to find it, without going into too much scientific detail.

The recipes Tana includes in her book are focussed on families who want to provide nutritious yet tasty food for their kids and themselves with the minimum of effort and fuss. She doesn't list any ingredients that you can't find in a small supermarket and there are no recipes that include a teaspoon of some random, expensive ingredient that you'll never use again. The book is designed to be very family-friendly, down to the clear type face and the (many, many) pictures of Tana and her children.

The best thing about this book is the fact that the recipes are about as easy as you can get without resorting to Turkey Twizzlers. The only gripe I have about it is that I counted 48(!) full-page pictures of Tana and her kids in it. Your children are cute. You love them. We get it. A few more pictures of the actual food wouldn't go amiss.

In summary, if you want to rely on one book to provide inspiration for your family dinners (and breakfasts, and snacks....) then I'd say go for this one. There's absolutely nothing sophisticated about it, but that's not what kids are after, is it?

Summary: It's a fab book - I'd recommend it!