The Family Meal: Home Cooking With Ferran Adrià by Ferran Adrià

Libraries are wonderful places.  It was at my local library that I stumbled across Ferran Adrià's cookbook 'The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià'.  Although there was no-one else in the stacks, I grabbed it quickly and furtively, hugging it to my chest and adding it to the already considerable number of books I'd chosen that day.

I'm ashamed to say I only opened it when I got home - the lure of Adrià's name was too great.  Whilst I devour books like whales swallow krill, perhaps I should have been more discerning?

After all, at first glance 'The Family Meal' appeared to be your typical large format coffee-table-cum-cookbook affair published by Phaidon.

I own another Phaidon book which I have never cooked from ('Breakfast, Lunch and Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery' by Rose Carrarini) and have never had any practical luck with a book of this size and cheffy reputation.  As I write, Tetsuya Wakada's 'Tetsuya' sits languishing on my bookshelf. 
I know I will not make his checkerboard tuna and hamachi with orange oil, or any of the other one hundred and fifty or so recipes that are within.

Thankfully, this book isn't the languishing type.