Plenty of Otto love

Hello my name is Filo and I'm a cookbook addict. I can't help myself. The pretty pictures, the promise of new and exciting meals, heading to the shops little scribbled list in hand to hunt out new spices and ingredients... I've run out of space for new ones. I had to buy a new bookcase. Some are, I hate to admit, hardly cooked from. Others well splattered and pretty much cooked out: Gordon Ramsay Cooking for Friends, and my favourite.... Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Ok, so the baking section is pretty much prisine but the meat, the fish and, sigh, the salads have seen me from lunchbox to dinner party.

So, how excited was I when The Guardian (they know that Otto readers are their prime market) ran an extract from his new book Plenty this weekend? I admit, I gave a little squeal in the newsagent. Choux Boy looked at me oddly. The newsagent looked at me even more oddly. I dropped my change. I was hopping with excitement, hopping right into the kitchen. So first up on a sunny Sunday night:

We didn't have quite enough tumeric/saffron to get that intense sunny yellowy glow, but washed down with a couple of bottles of Waitrose English cider it just tasted of pure undiluted summer. Otto that wasn't Plenty at all: must shop, must Amazon, must... buy... new... cook...book.