Spring and summer flavours with Valentine Warner
In What To Eat Now: More Please!, Valentine Warner serves up culinary creations perfectly suited to the warm summer months
Valentine Warner is hunter, forager and fisherman but above all a very good cook. Having covered the colder months in his first book, he now warms things up in What To Eat Now: More Please! - covering the seasons of spring and summer.
Eating for the seasons is definitely the focus here, with food designed for alfresco dining throughout the day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner all accounted for too, alongside treats designed for picnics and barbecues.
Veering away from the typical cookbook rundown, Valentine’s book is divided into more alluringly titled chapters such as "Plump birds", “Leaf, stem and root” and “Flowers and a drop of honey”. The recipes chronicled in each chapter are no less enticing such as “Quails with romesco sauce”, “Lavender cream meringues” and “French beans with rosemary and garlic”. There are some quirky, old school recipes that crop up too – ones that stand the test of time, like “bobby beans a la grecque”, “ratatouille” and “scallops mornay”.
The same passion for ingredients, seasonal and local is clear in What To Eat Now: More Please! that was present in the BBC2 series that made Valentine a star and had many proclaiming him to be the new Jamie Oliver.
If you are enthusiastic about sourcing quality ingredients, treating them simply and carefully and serving them up casually, then this book is ideal.
Photographs are colourful, bright and summery, Valentine’s own sketches add a light touch to the book and his anecdotes inject a sense of humour and levity to the whole enterprise.
What To Eat Now: More Please! published by Mitchell Beazley, £20
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