Food You Can't Say No To by Tamasin Day-Lewis

I've been a fan of Tamasin Day-Lewis since I first discovered her cooking programmes when I was on maternity leave, so when I was sent a copy of her latest book to review, I was more than happy to oblige.

Tamasin Day-Lewis writes for people who appreciate good food and for people with varying degrees of skills in the kitchen. Her recipes are always creative - quite often they can be familiar, traditional ideas but with a new twist.

Food You Can't Say No To is a book full of just that - food that you can't and won't want to say no to. The recipes are interesting and indulgent and most importantly relatively simple to follow.

The book is divided into sections as follows;

Simple Special Things

Beginnings

The Big Dish

Sweet Things

Feasts

The Feasts section is probably my favourite part of the book - basically set menus for key events through the year. There is a Mothers Day Lunch for 6, Birthday Menu for 6 and my favourite of all the feasts, the New Year's Eve Dinner for 8. The Murgh Makhanwala featured in the New Year's menu looks and sounds delicious. It has a huge list of ingredients so does look slightly intimidating but after reading through it, most are store-cupboard ingredients, especially if you regularly cook curry.

Some of the other recipes that stand out to me as ones I'll definitely have a go at are the Roast Chestnut and Caramalised Garlic Soup, Rhubarb and Strawberry Crisp with Toasted Oats & Hazelnuts, Chocolate and Morello Cherry Fridge Cake and one of my favourite ever dishes, the sublimely simple yet effective, Insalata Tricolore.

Tamasin's recipes are simply laid out with a nice brief introduction to each one. They are easy to follow and full of great, natural ingredients. This is cooking from scratch, and good seasonal-cooking at that.

This book is inspiring and I really hope there will be a TV series to accompany it - I'd love to see Tamasin recreating some of these on screen.

Food You Can't Say No To is published by Quadrille and is available to buy now with an RRP of £20.00.