At Home with Simon Wood: Fine Dining Made Simple

Thank you Simon for the tip about making pasta dough. Brilliant! The sauces are delicious and nothing is too difficult.

Easy recipes to follow

Slightly fussy recipes for weekdays, bit great for the weekend.

Exceptionally good

Some great recipes in here for home cos that want to cook and pkaye something more than your standard affair.My main criticisms of the book, and why I didn't give a 5 star are, the print is too small. The small print means there's a lot of text crammed onto a single page which makes for touring and inaccurate reading.The pastor used in the book is also non gloss. This means the photos don't do the food justice. The images look dull and lifeless. I'm also betting that foods dropped on to the pages will leave marks, not happened yet but my bunch is it will.So 1 star for the pages and text4 star for the recipes.

This book has fantastic recipes that have given me new ideas to try. The photographs are clear and enticing. I really like the plating up section as before my food would just be heaped on a plate as I had no idea on how to present it well. As a family with meat eaters and vegetarians, I appreciate the selection of recipes across all sections.

I've only just started using the book, but really think the recipes are great, easy to follow with ingredients that you can actually find in normal supermarkets. The variety is brilliant, both for dinner parties and mid-week meals. Would definitely recommend.

This is an enjoyable book to use, mostly for the inspiration it gives in terms of plating up and presenting food in a dramatic and modern fashion. I think they have struck just the right balance in terms of introducing a few technical elements that foodie types will appreciate (sous vide temperatures, for instance) yet keeping it well within the abilities of most experienced home cooks. There are interesting flavours and textures without it being over the top (no persimmon spheres with morel veloute and liquorice gel etc!).I have however docked it a star as I don't think the recipes have been tested adequately. The quantities seem to be a bit off on occasion; we made the parfait which was shown to have some small, elegant dots of coulis around the plate. We were left with a full jug of coulis at the end! It might be that this waste is necessary, but it should at the least be mentioned in the recipe so you could plan to use it for something else. A few little things like that have made us feel that that they have not been tested as thoroughly as you might like, and therefore use some common sense and experience to help you get the best results.