Chefs at Home: 54 chefs share their lockdown recipes in aid of Hospitality Action

As a keen home cook as soon as I heard this book was coming out I immediately put in a pre-order and patiently waited for what I knew would be a great book, and upon arrival it didn't disappoint.Chefs at Home is a collaboration from 54 of the UK's best chefs, each contributing two recipes each across three sections: breakfast & lunch, dinner, and dessert & bakes. If you are into your cooking you will no doubt recognise many of the chefs and you might worry that with the number of Michelin Stars they have between them that this book would risk being stuffy and pretentious, rest assured this is not the case. Recipes are, on the whole, very approachable, most requiring a reasonable amount of ingredients (no real shopping-list recipes) many of which you will probably have knocking around your cupboards. There is something for everyone with a real mix of cuisines, ingredients and techniques. While they differ in style these dishes share a clear overarching theme, that is feel-good home cooking and boy do we all need some of this after 2020.Aside from the recipes themselves I quite like the structure of the book, the photography is great and they include illustrations for many of the dishes that haven't been photographed. The book also includes a section at the back which features a profile for each of the chefs, and also serves as somewhat of an index as it gives you the page numbers of their recipes which I thought was a nice touch.It's important to point out the reason this book exists. The collaboration of these 54 chefs was for the purpose of supporting Hospitality Action, a charity that has been supporting the hospitality industry in the UK for nearly 200 years. They help hospitality workers, past and present, who are suffering with physical, mental and financial problems. With the hospitality industry being one of the hardest hit from the pandemic, it's a great cause that needs support as much as ever. All royalties are donated to Hospitality Action.On top of supporting a great cause this is also a great product. Chefs at Home is one of those books that will make you hungry. It will inspire you to get in the kitchen and your biggest challenge will be deciding what recipe to cook.If you found my review helpful please let me know by hitting the button below. Cheers

Thought this would be a fantastic book with loads of great lockdown recipes from the top chefs, easy to make with store cupboard staples that were easy to obtain, how wrong was I ! Who has ever seen cuttlefish in Morrisons in 'normal times' let alone lockdown times, too many fancy ingredients that cost too much for the average family on limited budget. 99% of the recipes are so out of touch with modern times and what lockdown cooking is all about. Even though it's for charity this book is not worth buying. Mines going back return postage.

As a rule, I don’t do desserts. And then I tasted the custard tart at Hispi and it opened a full-on Pandora’s Box of sweet treats.When I saw that this book included the recipe, I knew I had to buy it, even if I may never make it as the real thing is perfection (although the recipe is extremely easy to follow).But I’ll be honest with you, when it arrived, and I started to scramble through its pages to find my golden ticket, I kept having to stop, salivate and dream as page after page I found amazing recipes (eg Simon Rimmer’s gnocchi with mushroom ragu) that I want to cook and that distracted me from my prize.I’m one of those people who buys cookery books, will may be do 2 or 3 recipes, and then put it away and forget that I’ve got it. I’ve already done 3 recipes and I know that this book, just like an everlasting gobstopper, will have me coming back to salivate over for years to come.

Just received my book of recipes. Some are a little disappointing, e.g Angela Hartnett, Bacon & Fried Egg Bun... really that’s just a lazy entry. But as it’s for charity I will forgive this.

This book is an all rounder - it has a lot of different cuisines by lots of different chefs which is one of the things I love the most about this book. It was something I knew I wanted to buy as soon as I saw it advertised because I liked the idea that the sales from this book go towards a sector I feel so passionate about. I love restaurants (good restaurants anyway) and the hospitality industry has been totally decimated by COVID. I really did feel terrible that for the chefs, overnight that was that, no work, no money, their livelihood taken away just like that. The same goes for the restaurant owners, they had a huge burden, with rent and bills still to pay with nothing coming in just like that. With the constant changing rules and the wave after wave of COVID surviving has become very very difficult.There is a really sad story at the start about a chef who had just a few pounds in his bank account and how desperate he was. For anybody who loves restaurants the tragedy of how many have been lost is dreadful.The book consists of a couple of recipes from the UK's top chefs (and a dud here and there) who have all given a couple of recipes and there are little ditties here and there that are lovely. The idea of these recipes is not that they are restaurant dishes, more that they are home dishes to be cooked at home, that maybe the chefs did whilst they were at home. They were meant to be easy and things you could lay your hands on fairly easily. Some of the recipes did make me wonder because certain ingredients as we all know were incredibly hard to come by during lockdown.I have made a few of the recipes and loved them but my favourite is Clare Smyths Chilli Chicken. It is incredibly yummy, it has a nice kick and tasted good. There were some quantity questions from the book club but I tweaked it and we loved it. Some of it I think has to be a little intuition, if an amount of something looks wrong then it probably is so follow your gut, even if you are fairly new to cooking.The only thing I did not like was the index which is poor. Really really poor (this is a particular bug bear of mine) and so for instance if you looked up lobster you won't find the lobster Thermidor but if you look up shellfish you will find it. This is the smallest thing and the only negative about the book. There are some gorgeous recipes, some new and some you may have done before or may even have your own recipe for. The great thing about that is trying a new recipe for an age old dish and ether loving your find or reaffirming how good your own recipe is.The book has a lot of recipes and is because it is for such a worthy cause it makes it a book to definitely have in your collection.