Can I just say here, I love food, I'm obsessed by food, my whole world growing up was focussed around food, when food was ready, what we were having for the next meal, how long it would take, where and when to get the ingredients etc etc and here's a little family secret that is no longer a secret but I come from such a food obsessed family that my artist parents, whilst travelling the world drawing things in their little black book that all artists keep, also kept "food diaries" this would consist of a description in great detail of the meal they had just enjoyed and would be followed by a beautiful illustration to show you what it looked like too.

My mother has well over 100 cookery books, some in french so I have to translate them, some in Swedish so I have to guess the measurements and plenty in good old English but more importantly with lovely pictures that I poured over my entire childhood. My mother was, as a result, a very creative improvising cook, she made stuff up all the time, sometimes it tasted odd, sometimes it was over done or under done but more often than not it was amazing, brilliant and very underappareciated, even in our food-crazy household. I now know how she felt. My father is a great appreciator of food, especially when things go well and even a brilliant cook in himself, he likes rich and unusual food regularly travelling to France to top up supplies along with his amazing knowledge of wines (and those supplies too).

Many of my brothers and sisters have taken up the baton since, my eldest sister is a fantastic natural cook, so are her children, my middle brother apparently does the best asian cooking, my other sister is great with bread and cakes, just like my brother in law, her son is also a keen chef, my younger brother has every implement that ever existed for a kitchen probably as well as some that should never have existed, my own daughter enters every cookery competition she can get her hands on and does appear to have a natural ability (really annoying as I had to work like mad to get to even a basic level) and I, like my mother, have a good healthy obsession with cook books, but here's the thing, and it took me about 10 years to figure out, they're not just pretty pictures, you can actually cook with them.

I didn't actually learn to cook though until I had my first daughter, being one of the youngest in my family I had just sat back and enjoyed the fruits of everybody elses labours, I had helped my mother in the kitchen like we all do, but somehow, unbelievably none of it had stuck, I remember the first time I lived on my own, I put a whole tin of baked beans unopened in a saucepan filled with water and set that to cook, I'm sure I'd seen it done that way somewhere, possibly in a film, anyway it dried out and the tin exploded, much like what happens to your stomach when you eat the aforementioned.

So, having had my first child and not wanting to feed it M&S's best, which is what I lived on back then, I invested in Annabelle Carmel's baby's meal planner book and it was great, most of the recipes involved just throwing loads of chopped up things into one pot and voila you had babyfood that was good enough to eat and it went from there, suddenly my cook books seemed so much more interesting and I got to spending a week cooking from one, then a week cooking from another, picking up hints and tips from these and from all the masterchef programmes on television, why doesn't anybody write a cook's manual - just a simple book, not with recipies, but with all those millions of cookery tips that transform our cooking, there's just so many that would make all our lives in our kitchens so much easier and more amenable.

These days, with too little time, too many children, where meal times blurr into the next mealtime, and basically because I'm lazy, I like easy, quick, throw it all in, recipes, if too many bowls are required, too much separation of ingredients etc, then it probably won't happen unless I end up cooking for the Queen, so bare with me, my recipes are for the crap cook, the one who is lazy, hasn't got much time, doesn't have every ingredient known to mankind in their cupboard and who isn't going to nit-pick the fact that I haven't mixed my eggs and sugar together first before adding the flour, sorry, but if you can mix it all together in one go and it still tastes ok, then I'm alright with that. I'm not seeking perfection, just stuff that works, simply!

So this is where I'm at, I love cooking, (though note to husband, I dream of the day that someone cooks for me) and I love food, afterall, food is our life-force, we spend a disproportionate amount of time eating to ignore it's importance, "live to eat" as the French would say, "food is love" as the Italians might add, and when nobody wants a hug or is too embarrassed to ask, I say ....."there's always food"

:-) xoxoxo

I am a cook book dipper or cook book flavour scraper or cook book flasher slasher...hmm I'll stop there, i.e. I have dozens if not hundreds of cook books which I actually use to cook, not always, but at least once a week if not twice, the rest of the time I imagine I'm in my own restaurant and I imagine what I'd really really fancy eating, I see the food clearly in my head and then I try to emulate it, sadly my vision and my talent don't quite match and 'disappointing results' is my middle name. But in this way I have found very quickly which books work for the masses, if you get a recipe successfully past me, that's a 'classic' in my book, like the theory that if you can drive a 2CV you can drive any car, I'm the 2CV of the cookery world, though a 2CV with a rocket launcher shoved up it's.....you know what I mean.

Anyway, these cookery books, I 'refer to' but only on a surface layer, i.e. years of kids and deadlines and a husband that doesn't have any taste buds left mean I look at a recipe 'in a hurry', I change a few ingredients to match my taste and because 'I'm in a hurry', I only work vaguely with measurements as 'I'm in a hurry'...and I still expect the results to be amazing.

A good cookbook in my opinion, should be a guide, not a law and if it doesn't work within my 'need for speed' guidelines, vagueness and inability to see all the text in a hurry, it is doomed to my cookery book dusty shelf forever, I mean what's the use of a recipe that can't be done in half an hour for a rageingly hungry family of 5....And I absolutely hate recipes that at the bottom (or more usually half-way through so you've already wasted half an hour preparing all the veg that will now go off) that say you need to marinate it overnight, leave it in the fridge overnight or soak overnight bla bla bla....recipes should be so tasty you can eat them straight away otherwise they should be in a dictionary, if you have to wait too long you'll probably fancy something else anyway...having said that, I do do marinating, leaving and soaking BUT only if they make it VERY clear at the top of the recipe, and I'm feeling like a hippy...actually I think any recipe that involves after prep waiting time before you can eat it (other than the cooking itself of course), should hereafter be clearly stated alongside the Recipe NAME or I might start abandoning cook books that don't do this, we are a fast-paced, kick-ass, society and we demand speed, flavour and easy-peasiness, that would be the royal WE then h..hmmm.