Real Mexican Food - Felipe Fuentes Cruz & Ben Fordham
Ryland Peters & Small - 2012
Photography - Peter Cassidy
Designed to showcase the authentic and heart-felt Mexican food that is prepared in their restaurant this cookbook has a range of easy to more complicated ideas with lots of strong flavours and great basics.
The book itself is beautifully bright and colourful book but some of the photography is a little washed out. There are pictures of every dish so that you can see each recipe before you stated cooking.
As well as wanting to bring good Mexican food to London restaurants Cruz and Fordham are expanding ideas about Mexican food. In this book, there are lots of very authentic styling of dishes with homey foods and basic ideas to adapt to suit yourself. Although a lot of foods are traditional they are not largely known in the UK so this is a nice addition to home cookery shelves.
In the notes there are lots of serving suggestions alongside the recipes. Each dish is easy to follow with the ingredients laid out at the side and a good pantry list at the start of the book.
There is a great range of dishes from quick snacks to full meals, with different amounts of time and difficulty to make them. The sweets section is the least inspirational and also the smallest but the drinks are great and there are plenty of vegetarian recipes as well although they are in amongst the rest of the recipes rather than being in a section of their own. One of the downsides to very different ideas is that some of the ingredients used are hard to find outside of London and alternatives are not always given.
My favourite recipes were the Pork Tamales, Northern-style Refried Pinto Beans, Lentils with Bacon and Tomato, and the Spicy Green Bean Stew.
Real Mexican Food is a cheery cookbook with lots of unusual ideas that is a great introduction into Mexican food and cooking.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of 'Real Mexican Food' from Ryland, Peters & Small publishing.