Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy

Dec 16, 2008

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in Chefs, Gordon Ramsay, Off The Cookshelf (Cookbook reviews)

Unless you’ve been living on another planet for the last couple of decades, Gordon Ramsay needs no introduction. Famous for his gourmet cooking, excessive use of profanities, Michelin-starred restaurants, best-selling cookbooks, and popular TV progammes, the ubiquitous chef takes a different approach and makes things easy in this cookbook. Allegedly.

The book is accompanied by a DVD of Gordon in his own kitchen making a selection of recipes from the book.

There are lots of good photos in the book but, in my opinion, too many of his family. Sure, the guy is keen to promote his family-man image, but quite frankly I’d rather see more photos of food rather than Ramsay’s kids.

Instead of having a proper contents page, the contents of the book are squashed down and hard to spot on an early page in the book. I keep forgetting they’re there, and flicking through wondering where the heck the contents are. But they are there, if you know where to find them.

After Gordon’s introduction in which he gushes about food, family and loved ones, we get into the substance of the book, which contains the following chapters:

Breakfast and brunch
Great fast food
Family and friends
Summer barbies
Just for kids
Bellinis and blinis
Posh

There are plenty of inspiring ideas and pictures to drool over. I’ve made several of his recipes but even though I’m a reasonably experienced cook, I didn’t find some of them particularly easy. I didn’t mind that as I enjoy a challenge and learning new things.

I liked this book well enough, and use it often enough, for it to merit sixth place on my top ten cookbooks of 2008. But, unlike Ainsley Harriott’s Gourmet Express, I don’t really think Gordon Ramsay does make it easy in this book. With the huge emphasis on promoting his idyllic image as a family man, Gordon Ramsay makes it smarmy might have been a more apt title.