Product Description

This is a book of two halves. "The Ingredients Book" arms you with everything you need to know about the basic building blocks of any recipe. Leon chooses it's ingredients above all for their flavour and healthiness but also with a view to the world we live in, so that such shark-infested waters as sustainable fish are tackled and easy to navigate. In the first half of the book Leon's top 250 fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, dairy and store cupboard ingredients are all given their own entries. Nutrition, a bit of history, flavour and the best way to get the most out of any given ingredient are all covered...seasoned with a fair amount of random miscellany. You will also travel to the outer-starburst that is 'Brassica Galatica', discover 'Passports for Herbs' and have your very own pull-out "Rainbow Seasonality Guide".The second half is "The Recipe Book" - this is where you can put your newly found knowledge of ingredients to great use. Here are over 140 recipes: some are familiar favourites taken from Leon's menus such as the Original Superfood Salad, Moroccan Meatballs or Magic Mackerel Couscous and, for those Leon Lovers everywhere, at last a recipe for the coveted Leon Better Brownie. Plus there are some recipes from the founders, their friends and those who helped make Leon what it is today, like Fred's Millennium Octopus and David Dimbleby's Spanish Omlette. Leon's food message is a simple and honest one - cook and eat with the best ingredients available...and don't forget the naughty bits that are so necessary for a fully-rounded life. Food is the greatest pastime we all share, and this book will fill you with interest, warmth and smiles like being shown round a garden you've always loved by a gardener you slightly fancy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #587 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 312 pages

About the Author
Allegra McEvedy founded, with partners Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, Leon, the award-winning, healthy, fast-food restaurant chain, which currently has eight London restaurants, with more planned for 2008. Leon was voted "Best New Restaurant" by judges Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater, Heston Blumenthal and Jay Rayner in the 2005 Observer food awards. In 2008 Allegra was awarded an MBE for services to the hospitality industry.

Customer Reviews

Good Enough To Eat
One of the most original cookbooks I've bought in a long time! Leon: Ingredients and Recipes is an absolute delight, both in terms of its recipes, which are healthy and utterly seductive, but also (and perhaps more so), it's design concept, which imaginatively reinterprets that of the Leon eateries. With its interactive pull-out elements, retro motifs, and quirky styling, it is, quite simply, the best fun you can have with a cookbook, without it actually being edible.

Heartily recommend for fans, and for those, like me, for whom the book was the inspiration for a first visit.

Healthy and flavourful
This book has everything I like in a cookery book. The encyclopedia of ingredients in the first half is extremely useful with the different cuts of meat and how to use them to fruits and veg and the vitamins they contain and their benefits to your health.
The second half has the recipes - from breakfasts ( a fab granola recipe) through to puddings such as as Allegra's no fail victoria sponge. All the recipes I have tried such as the beef stew and the goulash have worked and been extremely flavourful without being laden down with fat, though there are a few recipes that have cream - but not many. I had never heard about Allegra before this book but now have her previous ones on my list. I hope that the author brings out more books in the future.

Leon: Ingredients and Recipes
This book is brilliant and a must have. For years I have enjoyed eating at Leon and now we have a book which features all the favourites. This book is not only a recipe book but is full of really useful information about the ingredients used and seasonal food - I love the stickers and charts! I have come back online to order copy for my daughter as she's off to university and armed with this book I now she will eat well!