Prepped!: Gorgeous Food without the Slog - a Multi-tasking Masterpiece for Time-short Foodies [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Vanessa Kimbell packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus... well not quite, she packed in her former corporate life and put her earlier acquired cheffing skills to good use to write her cookery book, Prepped! inside a year.

The result is a creative family friendly tome to pulling together exciting dinners at the drop of a hat by making use of core recipes for flavoured sugars, syrups and sauces. You could either give this book to someone in its own right or buy yourself a copy and give someone home made gifts packaging up the core recipes from the book. Star recipes are brocolli with hot vanilla vinaigrette and lavender salmon which sound like they shouldn't work but do. Chapters are based around seasonal ingredients such as elderflower, rhubarb and lavender in the first "spring/summer" half of the book moving on to plum, tomato and chocolate for the more wintery half. I especially like the recipes that suggest doubling up on quantities to yield two separate things; custard becomes creme caramel or ice cream, granola becomes a crumble topping etc.

Aspirational in style, this book has look of Country Living Magazine about it but I'm knocking a star off as I think the presentation could have been better. Some of the lovely photos have their focal point buried in the spine which is a shame and an opportunity to stamp Vanessa's personality over the pages has been missed by unsophisticated use of fonts by the graphic designer. If she gets a better designer in for book 2 then Rachel Allen had better watch out!

Prepped is a fantastic new concept - make double of a recipe or component and use it in another dish, for example a soup base also becomes a pie filling. Every recipe is linked to another.

This linked cooking allows you to save time and to produce wonderful food with far less effort. Being a busy mother of 3 with a demanding job Vanessa started to link her cooking and then realised it would be an excellent concept for a book and so gave up her job to write Prepped.

Vanessa is a trained chef with an alchemist's skill for mixing basic flavours into something heavenly. The book is visually stunning, with over 200 colour photos with a full page photo for each recipe. Each recipe is introduced by Vanessa, her words of passion and enthusiasm spill off the page enticing you to make the dish immediately. Most recipes come with some of Vanessa's tips, which help you on your way, vary the dish or save even more time. the one overriding word to describe this book is "happy", everything is a celebration, from the pink cover, photos, flavours and Vanessa's words. This is a book for people who love to cook, love food, love to eat and enjoy life.

The book is organised into 11 chapters by flavours which are loosely listed seasonally, starting off with elderflower of late spring, moving to rhubarb, lavender and lemon. Summer is packed with vanilla, tomato & plum. Then autumn and winter are represented with caraway, chocolate, cardamom and orange & clove.

The elderflower chapter starts with a recipe for homemade syrup which is then used in cocktails, salad dressing, puddings, a stunning baked trout, macarons and cupcakes.

In the rhubarb chapter there is a recipe for rhubarb and mackerel pate (which also doubles as a pasta sauce) a pairing that I would have never thought of, but instantly realise will be insanely delicious. The 100 mph rhubarb and cardamom cake can be thrown together ready for the oven in a mere 6 minutes, perfect for unexpected guests and time pressed cooks.

The book abounds with delicious pairings, a spicy vanilla and mango pork, a modern twist on the traditional plum crumble by adding cardamom. Very simple, but adding another layer of delicious flavour.

I cannot wait to try the savoury chocolate biscuits with some Cheddar, and my love for meringue has me salivating at the chocolate & almond Pavlova cake.

Rarely do I want to want to cook more than one or two recipes from a cookbook. I imagine I will be making nearly everything in Prepped over the coming year.

The story of how Prepped came to be written is as interesting as the book itself. In May 2010 Vanessa Kimbell was talking to a friend who described the difficulties of trying to juggle working for a living, being a parent and putting a good meal on the table after a long day, asking Vanessa how she made it all seem so effortless. The following week, finding herself in a bookshop, Vanessa scoured the shelves for a cookbook that would meet the needs of her time-short foodie friend, which did not just offer fast recipes, but intelligent cooking solutions and versatile recipe links. None could be found, and the germ of this idea remained in her head.

Multi-tasking, juggling and inventiveness are all part of the daily requirements of most cooks, so Vanessa decided that she would fill this gap. She embarked on a year long project to write a cook book that focussed on layered and linked recipes that would enable anyone and everyone to cook great dishes, but with fewer pots and pans and therefore washing up. The structure for "Prepped!", the multi-tasking bible for the time-short foodie cook, was born.

So the creamy chocolate ganache which she used to make truffles was divided into two and with the second half of the recipe a chocolate, orange and cardamom gelato was squirrelled away in the freezer. Out of a plain custard used for one recipe, another portion of the same recipe was used to make an orange and clove trifle. Elderflower syrups were transformed into sorbets on the one side, for the childrens' party, but could also be used for the grown ups' cocktails once the children were in bed. From the beef stew came the mix that went to make the beef patties. Twice the number of meals were created for only half the effort.

The methodology behind "Prepped!" rests on the premise that smart and efficient cooking, in batches, bringing in key note, layered flavours enables those that want to create food that does not compromise on taste to minimise the energy required to create a variety of dishes using minimal equipment. In these troubled times we all need this sort of help in the kitchen, making cooking a joy and a pleasure.