This is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I've ever owned. The design is hands down amazing - it feels like you're really there with her, cooking in a 1960s cafe in Lisbon or Oporto, and makes you want to immediately book a trip to Portugal. One of the things I like about this book is that each recipe is prefaced with an introduction and she always credits the person who gave her the recipe - often a neighbour, or the friend of a friend. Also, the recipe directions are meticulous.

Piri Piri Starfish is a book people seem instinctively drawn to. People have seen me with it and immediately explained that it contains the best ever recipe for prego rolls, for pasteis de nata, and for piri piri sauce.

However, I've been doing a big book cull (necessitated by an obsessive book buying habit and a lack of space) and this is one of the books that went. Most of the recipes in this book involve meat or fish, and I'm mostly vegetarian. I felt such a beautiful book deserved an owner who would appreciate it and cook from it often.

However, I did write down several recipes before I let it go: Pasteis de nata (custard tarts), Honey tart, Rabenadas (tipsy bread slices - like French toast), Beer cake, Bolos levedos (yeasted milk breads), Baked butter rice and Tomato rice. I might still Google book it and get the recipe for piri piri oil that way. It does feel a bit silly to write a review when I haven't made anything from it, but I wanted to give people an idea of what this book is like.

Before I buy this book, I'd be interested in whether anyone else has cooked from it or has eaten at Angelica Kitchen. The Amazon reviews were really good and it sounds like the kind of book I'd like to try, with a focus on fresh, healthy and creative vegan cooking. 

We've had this book for a couple of years now and have cooked our way through at least half the recipes. Good vegetarian basics - unpretentious but delicious, all the ingredients are easy to find, prep is quick, and the recipes are hard to mess up. It contains our go-to lentil dal, a great carrot side dish (stir fried with orange juice and raisins), and our summer staple, a green bean, grape and feta salad. Also, the pizza dough is pretty good. 

I love cooking Italian and wanted a book which would be reasonably authoritative without actually being written by an Italian writer. (I'm South African, and some of those ingredients are really hard to find here.) Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers seem nitpicky enough that they would help me produce a reasonably authentic product while still being outsiders in this cuisine.

We've worked our way through the Risotto section, which are all amazing, and tried some of the pastas. Of the other sections, the Grape Foccaccia is especially delicious and one I'll definitely make again. I'd like to try some of the other baking - the breads, cakes and biscuits all look delicious, and I want to try their gnocchi recipes but haven't been brave enough yet.

We haven't made a lot of the recipes as they use a lot of fish, and there are some sizeable meat and poultry sections. Honestly, I found the vegetables chapter a little disappointing, as it mainly describes side dishes, but there are lots of veg-friendly recipes in the book, whether they are pasta, risotto, and gnocchi. 

And I can't wait for summer so that I can make grape foccaccia again!

Dear jnathanson, thank you for your review, which convinced me to try a recipe from this book for the first time. I'd bought it years ago, at a time when I had heard a lot of glowing reviews about A Year in My Kitchen. But when I took home My Favourite Ingredients and paged through it properly, I felt disappointed. It seemed that these were all dishes I either had no interest in making, or dishes for which a hundred almost identical recipes already existed: chickpea and chard soup, apple galette, lemonade, chocolate mousse - none of these is rocket science.

Not to mention the layout is pretty terrible. Each "favourite ingredient" gets an entire chapter to itself, and these ingredients can be as narrowly defined as "apples" or "cherries" or as broad as "fish and shellfish" and "game". I still think it's cheating to describe an entire category of food as a "favourite ingredient". Anyway, practically speaking, this structure makes the book difficult to navigate.

I'm really glad that jnathanson inspired me to take a closer look at this book. Skye Gyngell has the knack of taking a familiar recipe or technique and giving it a little twist, which elevates the entire dish into something new and unexpected. After we cooked the first two recipes, with incredible results, I put post-its on all the recipes I wanted us to try, and we're slowly getting through the list. So far we've made: Asparagus with tomato dressing and creme fraiche, Asparagus with ginger and garlic, Chick pea and chard soup, Wild garlic and white bean curry, Lemonade and Goat's cheese souffle with lemon thyme. Everything has been easy to execute, stood up well to substitutions, and fast enough for a weeknight meal.

I've also bookmarked Chicken with figs and honey, Baked Sauternes and honey custard, Zuppa inglese (hopefully I'll do this for Christmas), and Brandied cherries, among others.

With such good results coming from our humble home kitchen, I started wondering what it would be like to eat at Skye's restaurant, Petersham Nurseries Cafe in Richmond. I was lucky enough to be able to visit last month for lunch. It was simply lovely. We had a fantastic sunny autumn day and the restaurant - really a converted greenhouse with a dirt floor - was covered in magnificent dahlias. It is the most unpretentious site possible for a Michelin-starred eatery. The service was excellently unobtrusive and the waitresses dress in gumboots and jeans. And the food was fantastic, but I didn't think it was substantially better than what we've been able to produce under her direction.