A great book with so many brilliant recipes it makes your head spin. Bill is an inspiration but he’s also a mate. Someone to turn to when food gets boring and you need an injection of excitement, flavour and Aussie sunshine style.Bill’s food is unpretentious; it’s not food drawn from a Michelin starred kitchen, it’s food you can easily cook yourself if you simply plug in to Bill’s passion for freshness and flavour above everything else.

They added ‘kitchen’ to the title presumably to stop this great book ending up in the Martial Arts section of the bookshop or, worse, being taken out of the library by South London youths interested in honing their street technique. It does exactly what is says on the tin and is a remarkably informative and useful book for any home cook.

Denise Phillips was lucky enough to have a resolutely Jewish Mama and Grandmother and so her childhood was filled with the meals that marked the many religious occasions which the Jewish religion celebrates through the years. In this book she has faithfully written down over ninety tried and tested recipes passed down to her, as well as giving a fascinating insight into Jewish life and cooking

What a great big beautiful book, a book to keep well away from the kitchen lest you stain its Nordic beauty. It looks a million dollars, or whatever they use as currency oop north, and has clearly had no expense spared in its production. It has the cool allure of freshly fallen snow and the textural quality of a reindeer’s coat. This is as much as status symbol as it is a cookbook.

Throughout this book there are decent pictures that don’t make you feel inadequate by being over styled, and if you’re a fan of Gordon’s beefy features he appears in quite a few of them, often wearing the same shirt. Which suggests either they shot it all in one day, or that his wife has finally left him and taken the Zanussi instruction manual with her.

Ok we know Tuscany has been done to death – too many baying Brits in Range Rovers waving copies of The Guardian at each other at cafes – but let’s not lose sight of the food. In this marvelous book Jason Lowe has focused his superb camerawork at twenty five honest, genuine culinary artisans and Lori Di Mori tells their stories.

Have you seen Valentine on the telly? He’s a bit hard to miss actually. When I first spotted him I thought my box had gone on the blink, as his head seemed disproportionally large for his body. I then discovered he is the son of Sir Frederick Archibald Warner, GCVO, KCMG ex Conservative MP and that his mother is the wonderfully named Simone Georgina de Ferranti. So it’s probably genetic; like floppy fringes.

This is a journey through Serendip (Sri Lanka) by food. To peoples ‘ houses via markets and memories, taking in curries, street snacks, sticky desserts, celebration foods and family favourites. The recipes are easy to follow with handy tips when needed.

Chapters headed ‘Fall off the carb free wagon’, ‘Work to live, live to eat’, ‘Remote control and a meal for one’ don’t exactly inspire me, but I am merely a heterosexual man and what do I know of the modern young woman’s needs? ‘Bugger all’, says my wife.

The book is divided into sensible sections that essentially follow the long timeline of an Italian meal – antipasto, brodo, pasta, carne e pesce, verdura and dolce. Each is punctuated by Rosa’s reminiscences of her life and her family’s life in Sicily and the photographs throughout are in the currently popular style which flattens colours to attractive earthy tones.