Kitchin Suppers [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Tom Kitchin is a Michelin Star chef hailing from Scotland, where he is the proud owner of his popular restaurant 'The Kitchin'. Over the years he has appeared on television on numerous occasions, competing on 'The Great British Menu' as well as appearing as a guest judge and mentor on that firm British favourite 'MasterChef'.

He already has one cookbook under his belt - the 2011 publication of 'From Nature To Plate'. Now in 2012 Kitchin has released his second cookbook - 'Kitchin Supplies'.

The book contains the following chapters:
- One-pan wonders - 20 Pages (9 recipes)
- Quick weekday suppers - 26 Pages (12 recipes)
- Leave it to cook - 20 Pages (8 recipes)
- Breads & savoury nibbles - 16 Pages (9 recipes)
- Easy starters - 22 Pages (10 recipes)
- Saturday supper - 26 Pages (11 recipes)
- Sunday roast - 24 Pages (14 recipes)
- Simple desserts - 22 Pages (10 recipes)
- Basic recipes - 4 Pages (7 recipes)

As you'd expect, throughout the length of the book there's a distinct Scottish note to the vast majority of the dishes. Aside from a one-page introduction, Kitchin gets straight on with the recipes, without any faffing around with pretentious coffee-table-book-niceties or the like.

Pretty much every recipe is detailed over a full page, with the adjoining page offering a full colour photograph of that particular dish. Furthermore, the recipes are detailed in simple, plain English, without the need to over-colourise the various techniques and ingredients involved.

On a number of recipes there's some helpful little hints and tips, such as how best to peel artichokes. This adds enormously to the overall enjoyable experience of using the cookbook to prepare a meal - allowing you to take even more culinary knowledge away with you after trying out each dish.

Almost all of the recipes in the book serve four people. This is pretty much a standard for cookbooks. Also, on the whole Kitchin uses nice, simple and easy to get hold of ingredients, with only the odd recipe making the user search a little harder than your local supermarket for what you'll need.

The cookbook includes a good number of simple family friendly meals such as 'Chicken & Broccoli Bake', 'Pork Chops With Tomato & Cheddar', and 'Beef & Guinness Pie' (a personal favourite so far!).

The 'One-pan Wonders', 'Quick Weekday Suppers' and 'Leave It To Cook' sections are incredibly helpful for day-to-day cooking when you've got some time restrictions on your hands, but still want to knock out a darn tasty family meal.

What's particularly nice within the book is the inclusion of dishes that we all know and love, but done in Kitchin's own particular way. This allows the user to experiment with and adjust recipes and techniques they've been using over the years, and see what small differences to the preparation can make to the final outcome.

The 'Sunday Roast' section is a particular highpoint in the cookbook for us, with some excellent ideas on how to make this 'main meal' a little more impressive. It's like pimping out your joint of meat along with throwing in some top-notch accomplishments to really make the meal something special.

All in all both my wife and I have been pleasantly surprised with how helpful and enjoyable using the cookbook is in preparing everyday dishes. Yeah, obviously the recipes are a bit fancier than you'd incorporate into an evening meal every day of the week. But the book does help with general inspiration and with expanding your overall knowledge with cooking, as well as providing some very good and quite simple dishes to prepare.

The cookbook runs for a total of 192 pages.

Now I may be arguing semantics, but to me 'supper' indicates a light evening meal in contradistinction to 'dinner'. In my mind it there would also be a corollary to this of being quick and easy to prepare.

However most everything in here is quite rich and heavy, and not necessarily lending itself to rapid evening preparation either. Furthermore the recipes feel largely seasonally restricted. Essentially there are a lot of good hearty Autumn and Winter Sunday lunches here (braised duck, venison stew, beef & Guinness pie, braised lamb shanks, roasted partridge and so on). But as for quick & light summer weekday meals? It's not well furnished in that department at all. Frankly the book is mistitled.

Tom Kitchin appears regularly on Masterchef and his restaurant was awarded a Michelin Star, so the initial question for anyone looking at this book is whether it is going to be a cheffy book with lovely pictures. I am pleased to report that (although it has lovely pictures) there is only one dish that I would think twice about (Beef Wellington) and the author delivers a warning on it. The other recipes are eminently cook-able in the average kitchen (even if Tom has to warn you about acquiring mandolins now and then) and most could almost join Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals.

Jamie's books have brought cooking, I believe, to men by rendering the exercise fast, tasty and in the form of an engineering problem. We are thinking number of pans, and orders of starting the heat. Tom Kitchin does not quite go as far into Cooking For Boys country but he does show you how to make some dishes that would not disgrace his restaurant in your kitchen. It is eminently practical and the dishes I have cooked from it were delicious. This is a cook-book that you can and, I hope, will use.

Update: The sausages and white bean casserole with herb crust was a big hit.