Richard Mabey's sparky, offbeat book is about canny and inventive making-do, or 'busking in the kitchen'. Whether creating a cassoulet which uses English ingredients, making bread from chestnuts or slow-cooking a Peking duck in front of an ancient fan heater, he encourages us to be daring and imaginative in our cooking and our approach to food.

Although it contains wonderful, mouth-watering recipes like broad bean hummus, pumpkin soup and fillet-steak hearts this is more than a recipe book - it is a guide to a whole new way of thinking that embraces scrumping, celebrates picnics, and revels in saving energy wherever it can, whether that's by one-pot feasts or cooling on car radiators. After all, if you care about food 'life's too short not to stuff a mushroom'.

Previously published in hardback asThe Full English Cassoulet.

Among Richard Mabey's acclaimed publications areFood for Free(his first book and never out of print),GilbertWhite(Whitbread Biography of the Year) and the ground-breaking bestsellerFlora Britannica,which won the British Book Awards' Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles' President's Award and was runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize. He collaborated onBirds Britannica(which was his idea) andNature Cure,described as 'A brilliant, candid and heartfelt memoir', had such wide appeal that it was shortlisted for no fewer than four prestigious prizes: the Whitbread Biography, the J.R. Ackerley for autobiography,Mind(for its investigation into depression) and the Ondaatje Prize for the evocation of the spirit of place.

Richard Mabey was born and brought up among the beech woods of the Chilterns, and now lives in Norfolk.