Well, put a cape on Yotam Ottolenghi, because he is a superhero for vegetarian and vegan cooks. He is doing everything he can think of to add interest and flavor to vegetables. His cookbooks are a love letter to the taste and texture of vegetables, and his latest, Flavor, is his strongest missive to date. I was able to get makrut lime leaves and curry leaves fresh from Etsy for a very reasonable price--and I would recommend buying them as they appear in the most recipes. Rose harissa is great, but I find that I prefer more spice and less perfume, so I have been fine with the brand I use. Sumac and other spices he relies on are readily at Wegmans. So this is classic "I need a lot of things" but less frustrating than in some of his other recipe collections. The first thing I want to say about it is that it is the most interesting cookbook I’ve ever read. The recipes are very different than what I’m used to making, and they all sound easy enough to prepare. The photos were amazing, and the stories shared about his family made me feel as if I knew them. They were very close and I liked that. Turkey and corn meatballs with roasted pepper sauce - I thought this was adequate, but (surprisingly) my kids loved it. The roasted pepper sauce was the star... and would probably work well for other dishes... or possibly on its own as a soup. Roasted butternut squash with burnt eggplant and pomegranate molasses - I adored the squash (especially with all the toasted seeds and nuts), but the eggplant spread was not to my (or anyone else's) liking.

Produce shows the way to bring out the best in your vegetables, by adding the umami of mushrooms, the magic of onions and garlic, the texture of nuts and seeds, and the sugar in fruit and alcohol. The Spicy Mushroom Lasagne, Dirty Rice, Radish and Cucumber Salad with Chipotle Peanuts, or Tangerine and Ancho Chile Flan can demonstrate this with ease.If this all sounds too complex, I assure you no Ottolenghi PhD is required. New readers will be coached and coaxed through each technique, while long-timers will find something new here—even if they own every other book in the chef’s oeuvre. Grouping together multiple recipes steps in one bullet point is a real bugbear of mine - I don't like one step in a recipe to be a dozen lines long with a dozen substeps and taking several hours to complete. Feels like a case of trying to hide the complexity when the recipe could also afford to be a little simpler. Summarises all the cool sauces, marinades and dressings that can be made in batches and stored for later use to spice up other meals. Ottolenghi and Tamimi have a genius for adding intrigue to every dish, for making spices and herbs surprising, and for combining flavors that draw us in and warm our hearts. Each recipe in this book has the mark of originality and the power to inspire.”

The only vegetables book you'll ever need reveals hundreds of ways to cook nearly every vegetable under the sun. Nearly 1/2 of the book is devoted to breads and pastries and other carb-heavy items. This is the problem of writing a cookbook based on a restaurant--restaurants sell all sorts of foods that shouldn't be eaten on a regular basis. Not much healthful here. I will probably make 3 recipes from this book on a regular basis. Also, I tried his "guaranteed best method" for roasting eggplant--not so fast with the superlatives, Chef! Spicy, sweet, and punchy, baked fresh and served warm, this is the sort of starter that can precede almost anything. The generous sour cream base and the lightness of the puff pastry carry the sweet potato easily without the risk of a carb overdose. Serve with a plain green salad. Roast potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes with lemon and sage - missing the artichokes, so otherwise a standard potato dish. Yotam Ottolenghi is an acclaimed chef, food writer and restaurateur. He is the owner of four incredibly successful ‘Ottolenghi’ deli/restaurants in central London as well as his new restaurant venture, NOPI in Soho.I had never heard of Ottolenghi before and when I saw this cookbook, the title was the first thing that grabbed my attention, and then the blurb sealed the deal. Apple and olive oil cake with maple icing - This wasn't well received the night I made it (I wasn't overly excited about it either). The next day, after school, I encouraged my kids just to have another slice. My daughter happily ate it. When I tossed the rest that evening, she was furious. "I LOVED that cake!" Huh. I have been searching for great ways to eat garlic that don't involve cream and cheddar cheese--healthy ways to eat this vegetable that is widely available year round. I have had a very good summer of eating what is available in the Farmer's Market, keeping to a more vegetarian, sometimes even vegan meal plan, and the key to long term success, for me, is to have a lot of choices about how to cook the raw ingredients, especially once winter comes and the options do not include flavorful tomatoes and corn on the cob any more. My daughter spent her hard-earned money buying me this book for my Christmas present. She was fooled by its trendy looking cover and colourful photos. A] book that has barely left my kitchen…the fact that Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have been generous to put their recipes in a book is something I had long dreamed of’ Nigel Slater, The Observer Magazine

Danielle's sweet potato gratin - Despite the instructions not to use a pale sweet potato, I did (because I didn't read ahead before I went shopping!) and used the pale ones anyway. It was fantastic! I made it a second time with a mixture of red and pale sweet potatoes and loved it as well. A super easy dish, that looks beautiful at the table. So, I always thought rating cookbooks was strange. But I have actually read this, and cooked some of the recipes and planning to do more. I am hooked.

I love Ottolenghi’s previous cookbooks, but I thought he had more or less exhausted what he could do. As he says, “how many ways can there be to roast an eggplant?” But this cookbook is an evolution from his previous work. Where most of his previous recipes have been focused in Middle Eastern cuisine, this cookbooks is… not “fusion,” which to me implies a mixing of different cuisines, but rather post-national cuisine. With the help of Ixta Belfrage, Ottolenghi is now into using ingredients with big, bold flavors. Sometimes this is in context of the cuisine they come from, other times, like with the cascabel chile oil with butter beans, it’s just because that’s the big flavor they want to play with for the dish. Although this is the first of Ottolenghi's cookbooks, I have come to it just now, after knowing and using his others, especially Jerusalem: A Cookbook, Plenty and Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London's Ottolenghi. Perhaps if I'd discovered it first I would give it five stars, but I think there are more interesting recipes in the later books, as he experimented and explored more in using vegetables creatively. And that flavor expansion works particularly well here, in the chef’s most technique-focused work yet. Flavor, you see, could just be used as a recipe book—but if you only use it that way, you’ll be missing out. Long chapter introductions teach cooking technique (browning, braising, aging, infusing) and offer advice on pairing flavors, as well as how to coax texture and oomph out of some of the chef’s favorites: mushrooms, nuts and seeds, alliums. Instead of just demonstrating how to properly perform these techniques in the safe confines of beloved recipes, Ottolenghi and Belfrage invite us to own these methods and branch out, delighting us with cross-cultural flavor combinations along the way. Yotam Ottolenghi is a seven-time New York Times best-selling cookbook author who contributes to the New York Times Food section and has a weekly column in The Guardian. His Ottolenghi Simple was selected as a best book of the year by NPR and the New York Times; Jerusalem, written with Sami Tamimi, was awarded Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals and named Best International Cookbook by the James Beard Foundation. He lives in London, where he co-owns an eponymous group of restaurants and the fine-dining destinations Nopi and Rovi.

Ottolenghi is an award-winning chef, being awarded with the James Beard Award 'Cooking from a Professional Point of View' for Nopi in 2016, and 'International Cookbook' for Jerusalem in 2013. In 2013 he also won four other awards for Jerusalem. http://kahakaikitchen.blogspot.com/20...) and the Panfried Fish with Green Tahini Sauce & Pomegranate Seeds http://kahakaikitchen.blogspot.com/20...) which were all fabulous.I love his use of ingredients and style of cooking, which suits our climate so well (not the adaptations for England, so much), and because of our very diverse population it is easy to get all the middle eastern ingredients he uses and fuses so well. In his position as the executive head chef, Sami is involved in developing and nurturing young kitchen talents and creating new dishes and innovative menus. I want to cook almost everything in this book - it's rare for me to want to make such a high proportion of the dishes. Very nicely presented and just the right length of preamble to chapters and recipes to add context but not detract from the main purpose of cooking. That said (and probably because of some of those reasons), I really enjoyed working my way through Ottolenghi.