My recipe book collection

Like most people who love to cook I have quite a collection of recipe books, some of which I have gone out and bought but most of which have been gifts. You can never have so much recipe books and each one has many great recipes inside.

Nowadays almost every recipe you need you can find online with just a simple Google search but it’s great to have a nice collection of cooking books around that you could just sit and flick through and find a nice recipe to try, I hope one day I have enough of my own recipes to make a book.

As well as this collection of books I also have a number of notepads filled with recipes I have learned and jotted down, and a few that have been passed to me or that I have learnt in my time at college

My favourite recipe book has to be the one that my granddad gave me. He lives in Mexico and when he came to visit a few years ago he gave me two books which he had handwritten with recipes of his many of which were local to his hometown. All the recipes are written alphabetically and next to each recipe it says where the recipe originates from, it must have taken so long to write and these books are very precious to me.

My first cooking book was a book called comfort food and was a gift from a good friend of mine called tom it’s a nice book and it made me want to cook more at home rather than just at work as a job. I also was given The Larousse collection by my first head chef mark which has hundreds of recipes in and has taught me a lot.

Another of my favourite books is the Mark Hix fish book, I love cooking fish and it has so many great recipes in such as Cullen skink the pork stuffed bream with ginger sauce and the tempura prawns and asparagus. As well as this it also gives tips on things like how to open oysters and how to prepare squid. It is also great because Mark Hix attended the same college I went too.

I also love the Fat Duck Cookbook which although I have to admit I haven’t really attempted to cook much from it, I do just look at it in awe. It describes all about when the restaurant was first establishing itself and the recipes they do have are amazing. There are about 30 different ingredients to component of the dish and it all looks extremely mesmerising. It is the number one place I would go to eat if I ever got the chance.

Without these books I would not have had a lot of the inspiration for cooking that I do now, they are great to have around although whenever I get a takeaway for dinner I do feel like they are judging me.