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About ESSENTIAL Volume One: Best-Ever Meals for Busy Lives

Annabel’s 25th book is an essential contemporary, authoritative and comprehensive kitchen companion for today’s home cook – a 320-page treasury of easy but delicious savoury recipes illustrated with full-colour photography and accompanied by an encyclopedia of tried-and-true cooking tips. 

Featuring more than 650 recipes, ESSENTIAL Volume One: Best-Ever Meals for Busy Lives offers something for all tastes, all seasons and all occasions. Some recipes are Annabel’s own personal favourites. Others are timeless classics, selected by popular demand then retested and tweaked to make them better than ever. Plus there are dozens of new recipes created by Annabel especially for this book, inspired by the food she’s cooking and eating right now. 

This new book celebrates 20 years since Annabel’s enduring bestseller The Best of Annabel Langbein: Great Food for Busy Lives was published. Over two decades The Best of Annabel Langbein has become a bible in countless New Zealand households, but the world has changed a lot in 20 years, and so have cooking and eating tastes, trends and even techniques. This new collection provides a road map for the next 20 years. 

Hard cover, 320 pages, full-colour photography throughout

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:

"Essential Annabel Langbein is a great cookbook. It has a vast variety of dishes to choose from, some of which I have already tried. It's laid out beautifully and the instructions are easy to follow. I'm very pleased with my purchase and would recommend it to those who like or love to cook."

"This book is so well thought out I feel like even though I am not much of a cook I could learn a lot from Annabel's examples. She does a great deal of teaching on each page and the photographs are wonderful. Really looking forward to using her recipes to make a great meal without a great deal of fuss!"

"Her recipes always bring a new and fresh taste surprise. Of the ones I've tried, not one is overly complicated or time consuming. She allows for experimentation and fun in the kitchen."

"LOVE THIS! So organized, so thorough! The book is organized, so simple and helpful for finding recipes that are gluten-free or other preferences."

"WOW, first, I ordered the book in the morning and it was delivered to my home before sunset the same day. Now, onto the book...how do I begin? Gorgeous! I love it! Annabel is stunning on the cover. It's an oversized book, more like a book you would proudly display on your coffee table, approximately 12"x10" with a nice linen like cover. On the inside it is just as incredible. The photography in beautiful, big, bold, and many of the photos are full two page spreads. The recipes look wonderful. If you are looking for a beautiful book filled with Annabel's classics, "best ever meals", along with some new recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, this is it. But, don't expect any desserts in this encyclopedia of Essential Annabel Langbein, according to her, that's the next book. That being said, you won't be disappointed!"

Reviews from amazon.com

Preview PDF here