Recipes devised by our finest chefs are renowned for their complexities and the many different processes involved in putting them together. The recipes featured in Relish Cotswolds & Oxfordshire (Relish Publications £20), pictured, devised by the top chefs in our region are certainly complex. Few home cooks would be confident to follow them. But that doesn’t matter, the joy of this superb book is that the food photographs by Mark Green are simply stunning. Indeed, they are inspirational, but how many of us have the skill to recreate them as a master-chef would? Actually, this doesn’t really matter. Instead of cooking these dishes ourselves we can book a table at any one of the fine venues featured in the book and order the dish that set the gastric juices flowing when we were reading the book.

In his introduction to Relish Cotswolds & Oxfordshire, Gary Jones, the head chef of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, explains that this book brings together some of the most talented chefs from this region. He says it shines the spotlight on the exceptional ways in which fresh, seasonal, local ingredients are put to good use, giving the taste of the food that makes this region so special.

The chef at the Feathered Nest Inn, Nether Westcote, Polish-born Kuba Winkowski, for example, is one of many of our first-rate chefs the book features. I speak from personal experience about his food which I’ve enjoyed often.

Kuba aims to bring colour to his food and is passionate about depth of flavour and detailed presentation in even the simplest of his dishes. His recipes in the book include poached rhubarb, sorbet, yoghurt sauce, pistachio crumble and olive oil cake. Although it is a simply delightful pudding, it requires you to prepare six different items including a yoghurt tuile for garnish. The tuile dominates the dish very effectively, but is not easy to make. Far easier to dine at the Feathered Nest and sit back and let Kuba do all the work.

If you have ever visited The King’s Head Inn at Bledington, which is considered one of the most beautiful pubs in the Cotswolds, you will know why its head chef Matt Laughton has been included. This inn stands alongside the picturesque village green which is inhabited by ducks and bantams who arrogantly wander round the grounds. Laughton says one of the advantages of the inn’s location is that he has an unimaginably good larder right there on the doorstep. He believes in classical flavours where the ingredients do the talking, and the Cotswolds supply these ingredients.

For delicious dishes that match the stunning interior of The White Hart, Fyfield, with its minstrel’s gallery and its great hall, all built during the reign of Henry VI as a chantry, it is Mark Chandler we have to thank. Mark runs the pub with his wife Kay. He is the chef while Kay is the perfect host. Freshly harvested vegetables from their garden play an important part in their menu development, most of his other supplies he obtains from local producers. His duck breast hotpot, see recipe opposite, is delicious, so is his beetroot & blood orange panna cotta, mint and candied walnut salad.

The Star Inn has acted as the centre of the South Oxfordshire village of Sparsholt, near Wantage, for more than 300 years. Its kitchen is now in the expert hands of Dave Watts whose passion for locally sourced food and attention to detail is legendary. It was Dave who cooked me the most flavoursome steak I have ever tasted when I visited the Cotswold House Hotel, Chipping Campden, last summer. His chargrilled fillet of beef, which is highlighted in the book, is served with red cabbage, a mushroom puree and potato fondant.

Each printed recipe includes a chef’s tip, that vital piece of information that can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Having met and spoken to several of these chefs and been lucky enough to taste their dishes occasionally, I am able to state that they all appear to possess one particular quality — a passion for the food they serve.

They slave for long hours in hot steamy kitchens and under great pressure, but they love it — their quest for excellence supersedes everything.