At Home by Michael Caines. A few years ago, there was a trend of cookbooks for Michelin Starred chefs to do books of what they cooked at home. Michael’s book is laid out by ingredient, and he shows the time of year that the ingredient is at its best. The book is a bit intimidating in some respects, with lots of preparing of stocks and sauces before actually doing the recipe. I’ll be honest, we usually are pretty faithful to the recipes in the cookbook shelves project, but this week was one where we approximated a few elements here and there. That said, what we cooked this week was very good.

The week started with the lovely Roast Leg of Lamb spiked with Garlic, Rosemary, and Thyme. Now, studding garlic and herbs into a leg of lamb is not exactly groundbreaking – we’ve done that lots over the years, but the combination of rosemary and thyme when doing this was new. Usually, it would just be rosemary in our house. The thyme elevated this to new levels and will be the way we do this in the future. Michael bones the leg out and then rolls it, but we were tight on time, so we fell back on the tried and tested roasting times from Hugh Fernly Whittingstalls wonderful Meat cookbook. I created an iOS shortcut to calculate when to put the meat in, what temperature, and how long, which takes out the calculations on a Sunday morning. I’ll be sharing the shortcut at some point. We served the leg of lamb with Michael’s Roasted Provençal Vegetables and Gratin Dauphinoise. Both of these recipes were excellent. The vegetables were wonderful, quick to prepare, and a real cornucopia of colours and vibrant vegetables. The Dauphinoise were great, not heavy with cream and or cheese as is often the case with other people’s versions of this, and the combination with the lamb and vegetables was just perfect.

We tried Michael’s pizza dough. We often do a pizza or two on a Sunday evening and generally use Katie Caldessi’s recipe – a few years ago, Mrs. B got me a pizza cooking course at the Caldessi Cookery School in London, and this recipe has become the basis of our pizza making. Michael’s recipe included some semolina flour and honey (Wolfgang Puck uses Honey in his recipe too). The dough was good but not remarkable. However, the addition of semolina flour, I think, is definitely an improvement, so I’ll keep that in the mix for our future Sunday night pizza.

Next up was Pan-fried Salmon with Summer Vegetables and Herbs; this was a lovely way with Salmon. Each vegetable was cooked separately and then all brought together at the end in what looked like a bit of vegetable garden at the end, coated in a delightful butter and herb sauce. The Salmon was simply pan-fried and beautifully crispy.

The last recipe of the week was Rost Guinea Fowl with Baby Onions, Lardons, Peas, Gem Lettuce, and Mint. Wow, just wow. Sadly we couldn’t get Guinea Fowl breasts, so we used chicken per Michael’s suggestion. The recipe was straightforward (although in the ingredients and method, we found no reference to the lardons present in the title!). Baby onions are a bit of a pain to peel and use in recipes like this and a beautiful Thomas Keller bourguignon recipe from the Bouchon book that we do from time to time; however, a few years ago, we found some brilliant frozen baby onions produced by Picard – highly recommended to keep in the freezer. These onions helped the dish look spectacular. The sauce was delicious, the recipe simple, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. “At Home” was a great book – a touch cheffy at times, but the food was fab! Next week we are with that most royal of bakers Fiona Cairns.