Product Description

Sophie Dahl, one of the most glorious women on the planet, shares delicious secrets from her slinky kitchen, funny stories and favourite recipes in a beautifully illustrated hardback. With delectable recipes for each season, this luscious abundant take on food will delight women everywhere. In this beautifully colour illustrated cookbook, Sophie shares 100 of her favourite recipes that show that healthy can be delicious and indulgent. Sophie lived out the latter part of her adolescence under the public spotlight as the first anti-waif model. Flirting with every food fad from Atkins to raw food, she experienced both misadventures and victories in her quest to have a healthy relationship with food. Now she reveals the recipes that allowed her to eat what she wants while being sylphy as a sapling. Sophie cooks with gusto and passion and here she takes us on a delicious journey through a wonderful collection of her favourite recipes for every meal and every season - from her Grandmother Gee-Gee's ginger parkin, to her dad's amazing chicken curry to what she serves her boyfriend for breakfast. Try out her mama's baked acorn squash and the delicious student-days favourite 'Paris Mash', plus childhood-fun puddings like Carnation milk jelly or decadent desserts like Chocolate chestnut souffle. Sophie reveals compassionate common sense about food, and serves up a lashing of healthy recipes that celebrate the joy of eating so you'll never want to diet again. Original, funny, intimate, and quirky with a bit of whimsy, this glorious book is full of wonderful anecdotes and delicious recipes, scattered with Sophie's own lovely Matisse-like line drawings that slope off the page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1682 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
‘…a book that combines a love of food with a love of life, and a perfect celebration of how we are what we eat.’ – Justine Picardie, Red

‘Bursting with family anecdotes and some of Sophie’s personal favourite receipes, it is, as she describes it, a “food-moire”.’ – The English Home

‘…an unbridled delight.’ – London Lite

‘The recipes are simple … all of them look utterly delicious, but it’s the little touches that make this cookbook stand out.’ – Heat

About the Author
Sophie Dahl began modelling in 1996, after being discovered by fashion maverick Isabella Blow. In 2003 her best-selling novella, 'The Man With The Dancing Eyes' was published. Dahl has been published in American Vogue, the Guardian, the Telegraph Magazine and The Spectator. Dahl lives in England after an eight year sojourn in New York. She is now a regular contributor to Waitrose Food Monthly Magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Poached eggs on portobello mushrooms with goat's cheese

I make this when I'm a bit breaded out, but hungry. Portobello mushrooms have a satisfying meatiness about them that sates without the heaviness of a full English.

Serves 2
2 generously sized portobello mushrooms
Salt and Pepper
Olive oil
2 thick rounds of soft goat's cheese
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of white vinegar (for poaching)
1 sprig of fresh tarragon
Preheat the grill. Wash the mushrooms and remove the stalks, season with salt and pepper and give them a glug of olive oil; a spoonful should do. Crumble the goat's cheese.

Pop the mushrooms stalk-side up under the grill for about 5 minutes. While they are searing away, poach the eggs in a pan of gently boiling water (a teaspoon of white vinegar should stop the separating).

You can do one of two things with the goat's cheese: you can add it on top of the mushrooms when you put them under the grill, so it browns; or you can put it on just after they come out.

You should poach the eggs for about 3 minutes if you want them soft in the middle (5 if you want them stern and unyielding.) Drain them, put them on top of your crumbly goat's cheese/ mushroom mix, scatter some chopped tarragon on the top, grind on a bit of pepper and voila!

Customer Reviews

Homely, earthy and realistic cooking
This is a great book for those that love home-style cooking.
So far I am impressed with the recipes that I have made which include: beetroot soup, poached eggs on portobello mushrooms with goats cheese, buttermilk chicken with smashed sweet potatoes and the monkfish with saffron sauce. You can tell the recipes are obviously well-worn favourites of hers, cooked - and tested - over and over again, because they were all a resounding success.

I found the recipes to be easy to follow and the ingredients were easy to find in my local supermarket and (small) village grocery shop! This book is particularly ideal if you are just learning to cook as there are no complicated techniques to master, just good simple recipes that really do taste great. There are a few veggie recipes too.

For those that might be worried about the 'model/celebrity factor', this book is as unpretentious as you can get. The book is written as a type of food memoir. Interspersed with the recipes, there are a few stories that Sophie has written about her background and what lead her to write a cookbook. If this puts you off, then please don't let it... her style of writing is warm, witty and self-deprecating.
Although there are no frills, the book is presented beautifully. The book is divided into seasons, plus a chapter at the back for puddings.
It reminds me of 'Jamie at home' in terms of pictures and style. The food photos are lovely but they don't make you think "Mine will never look like that!"
I would definitely give this as a gift and recommend it, as there are so many easy but delicious recipes in it that even someone who 'doesn't do cooking' would use it regularly!

A top quality cook book - genuinely great recipes and wonderfully written
Saw Sophie Dahl on Jonathan Ross last night, and I would presume that many people watching would have wondered what a gorgeous ex-model is doing writing a cookbook. Just because Roald Dahl is your granddad doesn't follow that you should inherit his talent with the written word. Well as it happens I have read quite a few of her featured articles in Men's Vogue, and always admire her graceful eloquence and mots d'esprits, so whilst in Waterstones this morning I sought out and browsed through a copy of Voluptuous Delights. First impressions were that it has been produced to a very high standard (on Ross Sophie did say that she was a control freak and I would imagine is an aesthete); the design is sumptuous, the photography wonderful and the paper feels pleasantly touchable. Even the ink smells good. So being an amateur foodie, I bought the book and spent a very pleasant hour or so with it on the train home.

It's not uncommon these days for cookbooks to be more than a collection of recipes, but I really have enjoyed reading this one. Sophie engages you from the first introductory pages, and makes it easy to warm to her with funny anecdotes and self-deprecatory tales, but most importantly the writer creates a mouth watering anticipation for each and every recipe. So many cookbooks are quickly relegated to dust gathering duties on kitchen shelves but I can see this household using these recipes again and again. I JUST CAN'T WAIT to get to the shops tomorrow to sate the epicurean hunger that this book has created.

The proof as always is in the pudding, and these puddings not only sound and look delicious, but they are healthy too!

(and at this price on amazon, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights are more that great value for money.

Beautiful... but don't want to cook from it!
When I first got this, I thought it was lovely; it would make a great gift as it's very elegantly put together and looks much more expensive than it is. I enjoyed reading Sophie Dahl's potted biography sections, which separate the seasonal chapters, although I'm not sure I'll ever read those bits again, and the pictures are very stylish.

But... when it came down to it, I struggled to find a single recipe I wanted to eat. Maybe if you're used to being a model on a cabbage soup diet, these meals seem 'voluptous' but to a greedyguts like me they seem the opposite to luxurious. They are mainly vegetarian, with lots of omelette type things, as well as mushrooms and brown rice . Even the flapjacks had no sugar in them. Pshaw!

This book is currently paired up with Fay Ripley's cookbook on Amazon, but I would warn you that they are nothing alike. I much prefered Fay's, which is FULL of things I couldn't wait to eat. This book is not a family cook book at all, almost all the recipes are for 2, and not very child friendly.

Sadly I think this is one of those coffee table cookbooks which is for reading and not for cooking.