Welcome to the Nights Out At Home galleries

If you’ve stumbled onto this page by accident, Nights Out At Home is my cookbook, published on September 5 to mark my 25 years as the Observer’s restaurant critic. You can find out more about the book here.

From the very first proposal for Nights Out At Home, I knew it would not be a book full of flashy colour photography. As I explain in the introduction, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, it would make the book much more expensive. And secondly, while I have some full colour cookbooks that I adore, I do worry about some food photography being so sophisticated, that it creates an image of a dish which is impossible to replicate, and that can be off putting.

That said, I do understand that some people like a visual reference for what they’re cooking. Hence, these galleries. Throughout the research and cooking process I was taking pictures of each dish, purely as a reminder for myself. So here they are. They are not professional photographs. Frankly, some of them are awful. But they were only taken as a reminder to me of what the finished dish looked like, for when I came to write about it.

They are generally organised in the order they appear in the book, by section. A couple are missing but over time it should become complete. There is no commentary, because all of that is in the book, a link for which is at the top. I hope they’re useful. Happy cooking.