Great tasting recipes! (Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen: Simple and Delicious Recipes for Every Family - Tana Ramsay)

Member Name: k81979

Product:	Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen: Simple and Delicious Recipes for Every Family - Tana Ramsay
Date:	17/02/09 (56 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Recipes I would actually use, lovely pictues, variety of occasions catered for.

Disadvantages: None really, make sure you check how many you are catering for!

As a lover of cookery books, but someone who rarely cooks from them, I was on the lookout for a book that would not only be a good 'read' but one that I could get a few decent recipes from, ones I would actually have the time and ingredients to cook. This one stood out and did not disappoint.

The book is divided into several sections, starting with breakfast and snack chapters, moving onto family dinners and party food. There is a section on baking treats suitable for lunchboxes, and one on puddings. All family occasions are catered for and the recipes are simple yet look appetising. There don't seem to be any strange ingredients that would be difficult to get. Some of the recipes are so simple that you think 'why haven't I thought to make that before?', for example the ham and cheese muffins.

I've only really been cooking from the book since I've had more time on my hands after going on maternity leave, however I can recommend all the dishes I have made - the leek and bacon pie, the ham and cheese muffins and the choc chip cookies. Next on the agenda? The danish pastry pizzas and maybe the orange and lemon slices.

The main selling point of this book for me is the appeal of the recipes. I don't want to see 101 different ways to make salads, I don't want to use expensive ingredients, I want simple family food that I can make quickly in the evenings, but that will give us a bit of variety. So many of the books I own seem to focus on the same type of recipe, or just don't seem to have dishes in that I would cook, however nice the pictures. Maybe that's just me, maybe this book is more to my personal taste. But I actually WANT to cook these recipes, rather than look at the pictures and move on.

Some of the recipes make a little too much for me - for example the leek and bacon pie will feed 8 people, which I didn't notice, but I just made it into 2 pies and froze one of them. The choc chip cookies made 40, luckily I read ahead and halved the quantities. Though this might be a disadvantage for me, for others with larger families it would be fine. The recipes are easy to adapt to however many you want anyway.

There are so many suitable dishes for simple family food that I can see this book lasting a long time. It is one of the only cookery books I own that I will use as intended - to cook from!

Summary: A great book, one you will actually use rather than simply read.