Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights: Recipes for Every Season, Mood, and Appetite

Honestly, this cookbook was a bit of a disappointment. Ms. Dahl's tastes are very simple - many of her recipes involve grilling some sort of vegetable or fruit and eating it with some type of cheese. Her recipe names also reflect exactly what the dish is such as "Buckwheat risotto with wild mushrooms". It was what originally drew me to her as I saw three of her recipes in a Glamour magazine article and found them to be wonderfully simple with a refreshing twist: such as her no lettuce salad. Most of her recipes don't call for many ingredient nor exotic ones and don't take much time, which is a huge plus.However, some of her recipes are TOO simple. I mean, do we really need a recipe for a berry smoothie or flapjacks??? Additionally, I am very much a visual learner when it comes to cooking so I need pictures of every dish there is a recipe for. What I don't need is a close up shot of cut tofu or pieces of chocolate. It seems like her simplest recipes actually showed you what it looked like but the more complicated ones that needed some visual aid usually had no photo or one of one ingredient in the recipe. But I will say that when the dishes are shown, they are very gorgeous and in color! I also got the hardback and it is definitely hard to keep open when you're trying to cook from it even though the pages are nice and thick. Lastly, while I appreciated the personal touch in the recipe directions, sometimes it comes off as a bit pretentious and generally, the recipes are tailored to suit Ms. Dahl's personal tastes that is sometimes weirdly specific. And she assumes you know a bit about cooking and will tell you to "sweat the garlic" without explaining what that entails.Overall, I can see the appeal Ms. Dahl has (especially for readers who want a lot of delightful personal stories to go with the recipes) but I personally want to be a bit more adventurousness and variety in my cooking (I still shake my head in disbelief that an uninventive smoothie recipe you see was included in the book). HOWEVER if you are a person who has little time and wants to eat healthy beyond just having salads, this is the perfect book for you. I read it twice before I realized most of the recipes were vegan or vegetarian! The book is still nice to have even if it doesn't suit my needs and I am very fond of my copy but I would suggest you buy yours for cheap used like I did rather than splurge on a new book for $25 if you are not 100% sure you will like this book after reading my review.

I bought it because I read a couple of VOGUE reviews, plus an article she wrote explaining a bit of how the book took shape, and telling a little about herself. I've read 'Playing with the grown-ups' by her also, but I didn't like it as much, because I found it too "troublant" to really be able to enjoy reading it (I'm more of a Jane Austen person).But in the other hand, with 'Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights', I was mesmerized... Not only her recipes are really appetizing, but the message of the book itself is beautiful. To me, the strength of it is what it makes the reader feel: we share her utter love for food, and can't wait to lead a peaceful, harmonious and healthy life... It is specially thanks to the little introductory texts she writes at the beginning of each part of the book (it is very originally and cleverly divided: 4 parts, one for each season of the year, and a final part for desserts), which being autobiographical, show how personal her book is, but also how universal. Thanks to her struggles to find balance in her life, we understand the choices of the ingredients, and the dishes, and the kind of life she wants to lead, everything.It is just inspiring. The pictures are also wonderful, and I strongly recommend to read it at least once as if it were a regular novel. Then, when imbibed with the flavour of her funny and delicious narrative, you must give a closer look to the recipes themselves, and be marvelled by their surprising touches and interesting combinations.Her style is very homy, but with a modern touch: she combines traditional cuisine with sparkling touches of italian/asiatic/... gastronomy here and there.As I said, simply inspiring.

I never knew much about Sophie Dahl, but after (sorry for impending pun) devouring this book, I feel as though we're friends. I love cookbooks with stories--not just recipes (this is likely because one of my favorite reads when I was little was Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook"). Here, we have a totally engaging story of the author's life, and how she learned to find balance and peace within herself. Which is not to say that she comes across as preachy or holier-than-thou. And the recipes! I'll admit I read cookbooks far, far more than I actually cook out of them, but this is an exception. Just reading the recipes made me want to get back into the kitchen and be the sort of girl who whips up lovely meals at home. The foods are filling (not heavy) and healthy feeling without making a big fuss about it.The theme of this book is that it's cheaper, healthier, and more satisfying to cook for yourself and loved ones--cooking can be fun and creative. After my first reading--and before cooking anything--I felt as though I had spent a lovely afternoon with my best girlfriend. And I'm pleased to say that that warmth and joy comes through in the recipes. Each one that I've made has been totally perfect. I hope we have more like this from Sophie Dahl!

I could not resist this beautiful volume from the uber-chic Sofie Dahl! It's hard to pull off pink AND sophisticated, but Miss Dahl manages and then some. This book is an aesthetic delight; the hard cover edition is worth every penny. The photographs are exquisite. If you are like me and you read cookbooks like novels, you will especially love this volume, interspersed as it is with snippets from Miss Dahl's biography, centering, not surprisingly, on her changing relationship with food, and with her body, over the course of a live fully lived. As for the recipes, what can I say? This is a book you will actually cook from. The book is a testimony to what I've always believed about food, and cooking: namely, if you start with good quality ingredients, the simpler the recipe, the better. I think my hero Nigel Slater would agree. All of the recipes are accessible, focussed around simple, local ingredients. "Local" and "seasonal" are two of my favorite words when it comes to eating, and I have a special appreciation for cookbooks organized, like this one, by season.

Es una belleza de libro, ella tenía un programa en la BBC de Londres, amé todas sus recetas. Tiene una forma hermosa de escribir. Un must para quien le guste la cocina!

A fun cook book that looks cute in my kitchen!

Well written book, with many little annecdotes for all seasons. Beautiful pictures. Recommended by Jamie Oliver.

Easy to follow, could do with a few more dishes that I seem to recall seeing her do on TV but aren't included in this book, in particular her "fool proof" pilau rice

I coveted this book for a while before buying it. I had seen some of the TV series and I liked her breezy yet sophisticated style. Many of the recipes seemed very mouth-watering and had the added bonus of being healthy too. There's no doubt about it, the book is really beautifully produced. The prose writing is gorgeous and the look and feel of the book are stunning.However, and it't s big 'however', the recipes are disappointingly unreliable. I have tried a few, some more than once, but the quantities are either poorly specified or just seem wrong in some cases. For example, the banana bread which tastes lovely is hard to get right because she just says use 'four bananas' without specifying a weight. The first time I made it the loaf, while it still tasted nice, was overly sticky and stodgy because the bananas I used were too big. The next time I used fewer bananas and it worked. The celeriac fish pie , while the flavours are delicious - GREAT idea to use celeriac mash on top, has what seems to me to be either insufficient cooking time, or too much liquid. Also, I don't think she gives a weight for the celeriac either - she says something like 'one large, ot two small celeriacs'. This leaves too much guesswork for the user and is frustrating.A few people have raved about the chicken curry. I thought that looked nice too but it's very, very mild. I wouldn't really call that a curry myself... The Carnation milk jellies I made because I'd a tin of condensed milk that was nearing its best before date but it was too sweet and artificial tasting though kids would probably love it for that all right. The Paris mash makes an enormous amount of what is tasty but a little boring to eat just on its own. There was too much lemon in the lemon and crab pasta. The curried parsnip soup is very easy and delicious though! The chestnut soup was a weird and unappetising shade of brown and, though it tasted OK, the texture was a little thin. The Quinoa salad just didn't work. We ended up throwing the first batch of Quinoa we cooked according to her instructions out.There were also a disappointly large number of recipes that are just too simple for a cookery book in my opinion. By this I mean many of the breakfast dishes that almost seem to be more 'assembly' than inspired recipes.I do like the fact that she uses some unusual ingredients and the recipes are healthy and nutritious. The book is glorious to look at and there are still a few that I will try but so far the only ones I'd be bothered to make again would be the banana bread, the parsnip soup and the celeriac fish pie if I can get the quantities and cooking time right through my own experimentation! I wanted to love this book. I like Sophie Dahl herself but the recipes need better testing and weight guides for vegetables and fruit rather than vague descriptions.