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...