The Meat Free Monday Campaign was launched in 2009 and has grown as more people discover the benefit of taking a day off from meat – health wise and budget wise too. It’s also sensible as most people will balk at the idea of going totally cold turkey on meat, but once a week is do-able given the right incentives.

Robin Asbell’s Big Vegan cook book is a must have for any vegetarian or vegan wanting fresh, nutritious every day meals. Big Vegan is a stylish and authoritative collection of more than 400 gourmet vegan recipes.

Lucy Cufflin, author of Lucy’s Food, loves her leftovers. That’s right, the mangy old salad, the dregs of last night’s curry and the sad looking veg in the back of the fridge. Foodepedia digs into some of her dishes and finds out why.

The Queen [of Twitter] has published extracts from her diaries, revealing her surprisingly candid thoughts about the events of the day and showing that the only way to survive the nonsense we have to put up with from leading public figures is by taking hefty slugs of Bombay Sapphire gin, with or preferably without tonic. Joanna Biddolph went along to meet her at the official launch.

Cooking without Recipes, by Phillip Dundas, as the name suggests, contains no recipes. Instead, it provides a manual for confidence in the kitchen, with information on techniques,food shopping, and cooking various ingredients. Beautifully illustrated, the writing possesses a lightness of touch that never feels patronising.

This is a good book if not The Good Book. Everything you need to bring your cooking up to a higher level. A practical book to help you feel that, actually, cooking needn’t get tougher than this and it’s well worth the investment.

This hefty hard cover from DK is an essential guide to the best affordable wines, telling you everything you need to know buy and enjoy wines from the best wineries in the world, without breaking the bank.

The third Leon cookbook, Baking & Puddings, brings together recipes for the sweeter treats available in Leon’s London restaurants. The result is a treat for home cooks everywhere.

Our Dermot is not a chef himself and so apart from contributing a foreword he is absent from the pages. What you get instead is over 90 recipes for fish and shellfish that are simple to deal with, clearly laid out, photographed with clarity and explained in layman’s terms. His co-owners of the restaurant James Ginzler and Paul Shovlin do the cooking and it’s a tempting seafood platter.

Classic Vegetarian Cookery has been unavailable for almost 20 years, the author Arto der Haroutanian can now be seen to have been ahead of his time. An Armenian by birth he was brought up from the age of 12 in the North West of England and was a painter of international distinction, as well as the owner of a chain of hotels and restaurants where Armenian cookery featured.