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• Gyngell, Skye

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At London’s acclaimed Petersham Nurseries Café, head chef Skye Gyngell creates dishes that follow the ebb and flow of nature. The restaurant composes its menus daily, after the fresh fruits and vegetables arrive and the kitchen staff chooses the most tempting of the bunch. This produce-driven ethos is the basis for My Favorite Ingredients, which highlights sixteen of Skye’s most-loved foods.

Each chapter stars one delicious ingredient--from asparagus to fish to cheese to honey--and offers diverse recipes based on a wide range of natural pairings, such as Crab Cakes with Corn Puree and Chili Oil, Goat Cheese Soufflé with Lemon Thyme, and Chicken with Figs and Honey. In this very personal collection of more than one hundred recipes, Skye shares her simple ways of combining foods to coax out their purest flavors. These dishes draw on Skye’s long-standing relationships with local suppliers and farmers (the restaurant works with forty-seven different providers) to highlight unusual varieties of familiar staples like tomatoes, leafy greens, and vinegar that are well worth discovering. This charming cookbook showcases the beauty and bounty that we find in nature--and helps us incorporate a bit of that natural abundance in our own kitchens.

Skye Gyngell is the head chef at the award-winning Petersham Nurseries Café in southwest London. She is also an established food writer with a weekly column featuring recipes for the Independent on Sunday. Born in Australia, Skye has worked as a chef in Sydney, Paris, and London. In 2007, Skye’s first cookbook, A Year in My Kitchen, was named Cookery Book of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers and the Best Food Book at Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards.