"Small Planet, Small Plates is definitely an invitation to cook new recipes that will rock your world... At first sight, the self-confessed food porn junkie that I am was overcome with excitement: the book is generously illustrated and the pictures are evocative, modern and tasteful. A second wave of elation hit me when I discovered the simplicity of all the recipes: the method of preparation is spelled out in a few efficient sentences. A quick glance through the ingredients list confirmed how accessible the recipes were: I could find pretty much all the beans, grains and spices in my pantry. Otherwise, a quick trip to any bog standard supermarket would fill in the gaps easily. The main appeal of this cookbook however is the diversity of places it takes you to. Through your cooking, you might have already traveled to Morocco, Mexico, Lebanon, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, China, Vietnam, India, maybe even Russia and Japan. Turning the pages of this book, you might discover that you could easily hop to other less visited food destinations: Syria, Sierra Leone, Chile, Jamaica, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Korea, Ecuador and Malaysia. The method and ingredients are not too antipodean to what you might already know, but the twist in the combination of flavors is enough to bring exoticism to your dinner table. So you can invite a whole new series of dishes to your rota: a crunchy peanut butter spinach stew from Gambia, a coconut rice from Sierra Leone, a pumpkin curry from the Caribbean, a walnut dip with cumin from Syria, a pineapple and avocado salad from Haiti. The last aspect that ticked my 'good cookbook box, ' is that it feeds my eggplant obsession with no less than nine recipes. One of which I had been looking for: a simple but scrumptious Malaysian curried eggplant, that we will publish here soon."