Product Description

With over 400 recipe ideas and many wonderful stories from the cook's garden, Tender: Volume I - A cook and his vegetable patch, is the definitive guide to cooking with vegetables from Britain's finest food writer. In his imitable, unpretentious style Nigel Slater elevates vegetables to the starring role in his latest cook book, whether that means enjoying vegetables for their own sake or on the same plate as a piece of meat or fish. From crab cakes and crushed peas to broccoli and lamb stir-fry, luxury cauliflower cheese to a delicious broad bean salad, Tender has everything a cook could want from a recipe book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-17
• Released on: 2009-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

Customer Reviews

How on earth does he do it?
I ADORE THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK. It makes my heart melt as if it was the swede in his pasty recipe (560), or the centre of his chocolate beetroot cake (p.78), or the gratin of white cabbage, cheese and mustard (p.156) or the pumpkin scone (502).

I buy cookery books all the time. None are as useful or as beautiful as Nigel's. If I come across an ingredient in my veg-box or in the fishmonger or wherever, and I think to myself in the shop, "how could i turn this into my dinner?", the recipes and ideas that spring to mind are almost always from Nigel's books, or the folders I have full of Nigel's Observer newspaper recipes. Leafing through 'Tender' this morning with a cup of tea (I did preorder it for yesterday but I was out when the citylink van turned up) it is clear that this book will become the most well thumbed of all my collection. Cooking with a Nigel Slater book liberates you very quickly to cooking in a certain way, adapting recipes, swapping flavourings etc.

'Tender' carries on the precedent set by Kitchen Diaries for breathtakingly beautiful book-design and photography.

I have already decided what we're having for dinner, and everything is already in the house... it's on page 506.

xx

Another gem !
What a book!
First artistically it is a joy to the eye, so even if you only keep it as a coffee table type of book, it is well worth it, and particularly so if you are a cook AND a gardener.
I too am a fan of that other great book, Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook (very highly recommended and if you haven't already done so I would say buy both as they so complement each other!).
Nigel Slater's new book brings the category to another level because, simply put, this is Nigel and his great style both in writing and in cooking: interesting quality recipes as well as a very personal way of presenting them, this time from a double angle: that of a cook and a gardener.
A great read, a great inspiration (ideas as well as tips) and a great comforter (meaning comfort food of course but also the joys of gardening with its highs and lows for every one including the author...)
To me a book addict, a homecook and a (small scale ) gardener the book fitted the bill at all levels, thumbs up from France!
If you never bought anything from Nigel Slater, buy this one, you won't regret it (but beware it will set the mark very high and/or get you hooked...).

Another thing of beauty from Nigel - and practical too!
The best cookery books are practical, inspirational and well-written, offering not only suggestions for interesting meals and practical techniques but a window into the author's life and values. Nigel Slater's new book scores highly on both counts. If you liked "The Vegetable Diaries" you'll love this - possibly even more. It is, dare I say, a little bit less precious - as if he's relaxed into his daily life and let the food speak for itself.

By all means get this out and use it in the kitchen, but it's as likely to end up on your bedside table. I find it relaxing and therapeutic in my busy life to check in on Nigel and his values, which closely resemble my own. He carries none of the aura of perfection and the personality cult that makes some TV chefs dominate their recipes and turns modern cookery books into exercises in narcissism. You get the feeling that if he uses food stylists at all (and I'm not sure how he'd ever get everything done without them) he'd be very clear about briefing them. The food takes centre stage - it's simple, refreshing, organic and beautiful. If you haven't attempted to grow your own until now, he will almost certainly inspire you with the beautiful photographs of his garden in all seasons and his honest account of the ups and downs of his life as an apprentice "home allotmenteer".

This isn't the first "grow you own" cookbook I've come across by any means - I can strongly recommend Sarah Raven's "Garden Cookbook", but it's refereshing that instead of simply taking us through the year like most of them do, Slater groups his recipes alphabetically by vegetable - it makes things that little bit more practical. I'm sure I'll turn to it repeatedly at times like now, when I'm a bit overwhelmed in courgettes and beetroot.

I've only one quibble, and it's very small - whose idea was it to turn the contents page through 90 degrees so we have to turn the book around to find out where things are? But that's sweating the small stuff when you ought to be sweating the garlic and leeks. Buy it as a Christmas present while it's cheap - and get one for yourself as well because you probably won't want to part with it.