Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom: Really Good Food Without the Fuss—80 Recipes, Shortcuts and Hacks

In this practical and inventive outing, Dame Prue Leith (The Great British Baking Show: Love to Bake) offers 80 recipes with a focus on time-saving techniques and shortcuts. Dubbed “Handy Hacks,” these tips appear throughout, many linked to supplementary videos via QR codes. Despite the title, recipes and hacks run the gamut from simple (the best way to chop an onion for French onion soup) to sophisticated (how to skin a fish fillet for “Sushi for Scaredy-cats”). Main dishes include herbed salmon parcels using store-bought puff pastry (hack: preventing a soggy bottom by preheating the baking sheet so it’s the same temperature as the oven), and hot-and-sour vegetable noodle soup (hack: peeling ginger with a spoon). A breakfast chapter features “perfect” scrambled eggs, while a small selection of drink recipes includes a pickle juice Bloody Mary. Leith’s dark chocolate and orange trifle is emblematic of her time-saving approach, combining store-bought chocolate Swiss roll with homemade chocolate mousse and offering hacks for segmenting oranges and rescuing overwhipped cream. Leith also encourages experimentation by delineating key elements of a recipe—for example, a pesto should include “a flavouring ingredient, an oil, a cheese, a nut and fresh garlic”—before offering multiple variations. This is sure to inspire. (Oct.)