Fancy feasting on your favourite restaurant meals from the comfort of your couch?

For the past couple of years my kitchen has been a part-time laboratory. I’ve been working on recipes that have been reverse-engineered from or inspired by my favourite restaurant dishes. They are for my first cookbook, Nights Out At Home, published to mark my 25 years as the Observer’s restaurant critic. It’s not always been plain sailing. Certain dishes defeated me early on. I came up with a version of the fabulous brown crab cacio e pepe from Manteca in Shoredich, east London, a dish that might make a true Roman recoil in horror at the innovation, but mine was a pale shadow of the original. And anyway, there are now recipes for that online.

My cheat’s take on the Ivy’s famed crispy duck salad, which replaces a conscientious chef’s hours of simmering and deep-frying and sauce making with 20 minutes crisping of duck confit and a bit of hoisin sauce, was a triumph. Even Mark Hix, the chef who devised the original, agreed my version made a lot of sense. And then there was my domestic recipe inspired by the tandoori lamb chops at Tayyabs, the famed Pakistani grill house in Whitechapel, also in east London. The original recipe has been handed orally from father to son, and never written down. It involved 10 litres of yoghurt. Wasim Tayyab, the current custodian, wrote it down for the first time and gave it to me. To divide that by a factor of 20 took some doing. But my recipe testers, which included our very own Meera Sodha, gratifyingly said it hit the mark. (You can see a video of me making them over on Instagram).

Making dishes inspired by things you’ve eaten in restaurants is never a replacement for going to the restaurants themselves. Because, as I’ve learned over 25 years of professional eating, a restaurant experience is never just about satisfying hunger. It’s about being somewhere else, about being looked after, about stopping time. But getting under the hood of these dishes, investigating them in a nerdy way to demystify them, has been an awful lot of fun. And it has given me the opportunity to recall a quarter of a century of restaurant going. I’m excited that everyone now has the chance to see what I’ve been up to.

Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and stories from 25 years as a restaurant critic, is available to preorder now. To support the Guardian and Observer, visit our bookshop here

Best meal out | At the risk of sounding like a cliche, I’m just back from a couple of weeks in Provence, southeastern France, where, at the Hotel des Deux Rocs in the beautiful hilltop town of Seillans, I was served snails in a way unique to me. Which is saying something, given how much I eat snails. They came tucked in tiny white ceramic pots, swamped with garlic butter, and then topped with a crisped circular crouton. Delicious. Note to self: obtain tiny, ceramic snail pots.

What I’ve been reading | Autumn is generally a big time for new cookbooks, and this year is no exception. I’ve been given a sneak preview of the new one from Japanese food geek Tim Anderson, to be published this October. It’s called Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan, and it’s a glorious deep dive into a part of the country rich in seafood and dairy. Sweetcorn with soy sauce butter has my name written all over it. The book is also one of the most beautifully designed I’ve ever seen.

Unexpected item in the bagging area | I recently got my hands on a jar of Crispy Prawn Chilli, made by Heng’s, and I can’t now imagine my fridge without it. The stuff is addictive: crisp, crunchy, salty and sweet, rich with the essence of roasted shrimp head. I know I’m meant to put it on things, but I have been spooning it straight from the jar for a mid-afternoon umami hit.