The Restaurant Review mail arrived a week or so ago containing the usual items along with a new cookbook by Susanne Goin. A well known chef on the West Coast, Susan had obviously reached the recipe book point. I headed over to our pile of cookbooks and was just about to consign Suzanne's book to a brief “what's new” mention item, when I took a look inside the envelope. Sunday Suppers at Lucques has a very striking cover and a quick flick through it revealed some beautiful high quality food shots. It looked good enough to seduce me into sitting down to read it. I then called and spoke with Susanne and organized a quick cooking session of items from the book. As a result this recipe book has made it into my personal library and perhaps onto The Restaurant Review's all time list. It romped passed our trademark cookbook test, with one of the highest scores ever for suitability for use in the home kitchen. I am really glad that I didn't miss it.

What's so good about this book? Well, basically the recipes are really innovative, the dishes taste fantastic and they can be cooked by just about anyone with access to a good grocery store. Suzanne has created a series of concoctions that dazzle the palate and guarantee a high wow factor at any table.

Sunday Suppers at Lucques (pronounced Luke's) is based on the dishes served in Suzanne's successful Lucques restaurant in Los Angeles on Sunday evenings. Apparently, she was trying to recreate the atmosphere of a relaxed Sunday dinner at home. Meals were served family style and the menu changed each week. Her book describes how these eclectic and unusual meals were created and then served to what must have been a very happy clientele. Perhaps this is the real key to why I really like this book. All too often recipes have never been made anywhere except in a food stylist's kitchen. Often it's near impossible to produce anything faintly resembling the pictures in such books. These, however, seem to be real recipes, tried out on real people and as such, they work very well.

The book is broken down into sections for the seasons and then into sets of complete recipes for a meal. There are appetizers, entrees and desserts for each meal. The seasonal idea works well. We tried three recipes from the winter section and I was pleased to be able to source all the required ingredients as they were in peek season (because it's winter!). Suzanne encourages readers to mix and match from the proposed menus and we did just that. I picked a fabulous looking blood orange salad, followed by chicken paillards and a chocolate bread pudding recipe. Pia overruled the bread pudding by staring at my waist line and pointing to a beautiful looking Meyer lemon tart. No prizes for guessing who won out!

We cooked all three dishes and you can see pictures of the results alongside this review. They all came out almost exactly as pictured in the book and forced our tasting team into a happy silence as they munched away on some of the tastiest cooking that we have enjoyed in a long while. There were no complicated ingredients and the meal came together without the normal crisis of a missing item on the recipe list or a mystery ingredient that there wasn't a home for. We spend a lot of time in our test kitchen making dishes from other people's recipes, but these were a breeze.

Of the three things that we cooked the blood orange salad blew me away. This recipe worked perfectly. The almond oil, blood oranges, cheese, toasted almonds, dates and arugula made a stunning looking dish that really delivered on the palate. I love dates and almonds. The various flavors melded into a refreshing and tasty combination that everyone just wolfed down. I have a preference for sweet flavors and I suspect that only those folks who like bitter salad dressings would find anything to complain about here. This one went straight into my entertaining recipe box, as a very definite keeper!

The chicken dish started out looking fairly pedestrian, but turned out to be very different on the plate. Suzanne coats the chicken with a Parmigiano and bread crumb mix that changes the whole texture and flavor of the meat. Combine this with capers, rosemary and chili, and you have a perfect companion to the other flavors. The poultry was served over wilted escarole. I was startled how well it stood up to a few minutes in the pan. It retained a crunchy texture and pleasant flavor that was kicked up by the chili.

The lemon tart was superb. It's hard to approach the presentation level achieved by the average competent pastry chef, but this recipe makes it a breeze. The pastry was easy to make and impressively crunchy with a pleasing biscuit flavor. The chocolate layer added a crunchy sweet note to the sharp smooth flavor of the lemon. I tried it without whipped cream, but decided that the tart was made for a dollop of heart stopping heavy cream, which really balanced the sharp, fresh taste of the lemon. Delicious and good on the eye!

The book is well printed, crowded with recipes and has plenty of high quality pictures. I am on a personal campaign to get publishers to stop putting “see page 142” or the like in cookbooks. There is nothing more infuriating than being covered in flour or some other cookbook ruining goop and having to flick through to another page for a “sub” recipe. Sunday Dinners at Lucques avoids this fairly well. We actually chose one on the few recipes that included a reference to another page, but in its defense the second recipe was for the pastry, which was a separate step and easily prepared in advance. If I have one complaint, it's that several of the recipes require periods of marinating for their ingredients. This needs to be very clearly stated in the opening descriptions. I have actually gone as far in the past as buying ingredients and then abandoning a recipe that slips in “marinate for 24 hours in cold fridge” on the second page. It's not a big deal, but worth watching out for.

That's it then. Buy this book and I guarantee that your cooking reputation will improve. It's a lovely book, definitely not a pro-forma recipe collection, but more a tried and tested set of recipes from a chef who is pushing the boundaries of innovative and creative cooking. It's not over fussy or complex and will keep any modestly competent home cook happy for months. Bravo Suzanne. All she needs now is the equivalent of the “Bam” catch phrase and Emeril is an endangered species.