Kirstin: Thank you to everyone who has followed our cooking exploits this year. As ever, we’ve cooked from a wide variety of books. From Alison Roman’s baking book and fast 10 minute recipes from Gordon Ramsay to salads from Elena Silcock and adjacent MOB . We’ve cooked from two books by Jeremys ( Lee and Pang ), we’ve cooked food from the Ukraine , from China , with love from Italy , from a collection of recipes collected by a community ( Food52 ) to those crafted by an individual author (Maehashi from RecipeTin ) and from a renowned food author . We’ve had something to say about each of them, even if we haven’t always enjoyed all the recipes. But if I had to recommend just one book from the year, it would be a tough choice between Mob’s Fresh, Nagi Maeshi’s RecipeTin Eats and Jeremy Pang’s book. They all had easy to follow recipes which provided us with delicious results. If however I was judging my favourite book by the number of copies I have given to others, the winner would be John Gregory-Smith’s Fast Feasts . Although we didn’t choose to blog from this book I have been cooking from it on a very regular basis for most of the year and can recommend his easy takes on tasty Middle Eastern cuisine.
Maureen: It’s always an interesting exercise to look back over the year and see what cookbooks we reviewed. Quite honestly, I had completely forgotten two of them (and no, I’m not going to name them), though the fact that both ended up being completely disappointing had something to do with it. I loved the Ukrainian month, mostly because it featured a great deal of cheese, but also because it introduced me to Ukrainian food, and I always like expanding my horizons, culinary or otherwise.
If I were to gift one book to a foodie, it would have to be Bee Wilson’s “The Secret of Cooking,” mostly because she writes so beautifully about food. If I wanted to give a book to people new to cooking, it would be “RecipeTin Eats Dinner” because there was such a good variety of interesting yet easy dishes in it.
Kirstin: On another note, we were both very sad to learn of the death of Russell Norman. We cooked from his award-winning book Polpo back in 2013 and we have both eaten wonderful meals at Polpo and his more recent restaurant, Brutto. What a loss– he was a great writer and a great restaurateur. We send our thoughts to his family and colleagues. December is a busy time for us all and we will be taking a break to cook for our family and friends. We hope to put our feet up at some time to read all the reviews of the best cookbooks of the 2023 ( here , here and here for example) and return refreshed and ready for new cookbook adventures in the new year. We wish you all a happy festive season and all the best for you and yours in the new year!
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