Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens

This book is great! So far I've made 3 main meal type recipes and everything has turned out great. What I like best about this is that integral to the recipes is the thought that you can alter and adjust them to what you have/need and there is commentary on how you would approach doing it. So the recipes are inherently flexible but with enough guidance to timings and quantities to so you understand what you're aiming for. They are foundations to set you up to succeed with your improvisation! This is an excellent, reflexive, way to learn and then practice cooking. And I think builds a great cooking culture. I'm a fairly confident cook and will use this to help me try new things, for inspiration when I need it, but also to support days when cooking is hard because tiredness/sadness/executive function has vanished off somewhere! So far, until I'm more familiar with all the recipes in there I'm using ingredients I'm wanting to use as the starting point, so looking up carrots recipes when I had them to use up. But I think once you've had more flicks though you'd remember "oooh I spotted something good for pudding" and try other things because they sound tasty.

Delicious sounding recipes. Very refreshingly centred around accessible and inclusive cooking. Enjoyed the beautiful written portions and stories behind the dishes and I really like her inclusion of suggested reading for each chapter. I just love the whole ethos of "Cook As You Are".

This is a wonderful cookbook. It is inventive in the way it provides variations and substitutions for each recipe & the index at the back where it gives you options for meals which are based around “cheap ingredients” or “low energy” etc are brilliant. It really caters for a whole variety of people, and I think once I’ve re-read through it all it will become invaluable as I have chronic fatigue syndrome and often if I have no energy I just binge on snacks which are devoid of nutrients but this will help me make better decisions.

Initially I wasn’t too sure about a cookbook without pictures - flicking through beautiful photographs of food is one of my favourite things to do when I’m looking for meal inspiration. However, I soon changed my mind when I read Tandoh’s reason why: it means you can’t be disappointed when the end result doesn’t look as pretty as the meticulously staged photograph on the glossy paper. The book provides recipes that suit everyone and every kitchen, which I love as it means I will probably cook many more recipes from this than other cookbooks I’ve bought in the past.There really is something for every taste and every cook and I cannot wait to try out some recipes!

I’ve already selected the first recipes I’m going to try but it’s also a real fun read. I found myself laughing at the little asides and comments Ruby includes. I’m going to read this one in the bath.