Our Cookbook of the Week: 'The Fat Radish Kitchen Diaries'

 

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Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week: The Fat Radish Kitchen Diaries (Rizzoli)

The Team: The Fat Radish owners Ben Towill and Phil Winser; The Fat Radish chef Nick Wilber; writer Julia Turshen, and photographer Nicole Franzen.

The Restaurant: The Fat Radish, which opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2010. The team burst onto the scene seemingly out of nowhere and quickly earned a following for its modern take on British classics and the space’s homey-chic atmosphere. (A fashion model following didn’t hurt.)

The Cuisine: Seasonal, veg-focused, updated British comfort food.

Who Should Buy It: Anyone with a lust for life and food who needs or wants to eat more vegetables.

Who Shouldn’t: Vegans and anyone dairy- or carb-averse. However, the book does include the recipe for the restaurant’s best-selling macrobiotic vegetable-rice-pickle plate.

Must-Make Recipes: Phil’s Nearly World-Famous Potato Salad, Kabocha Squash Soup, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Homemade Branston Pickle, Pumpkin Meringue Pie and Rhubarb Eton Mess.

Noteworthy: In the introduction, Towill reveals his bout with chronic fatigue syndrome and a year filled with crippling 20-hour sleeping binges. “With no magical pill to cure me, I looked at alternative ways to get back on my feet… I began healing myself through diet. The results were amazing: my energy levels increased, and all the symptoms gradually subsided. It was a eureka moment, which seems so obvious now—you are what you eat.”