A gentle introduction to Italian cooking, Catherine's Italian Kitchen is the companion book to Catherine Fulvio's well-received television series, which was nominated for a World Food Media Award earlier this year. Fulvio, who runs the well regarded Ballyknocken Cookery School at her family home in Wicklow, is married to Sicilian native Claudio. With this connection and her teaching experience, she is well placed to translate Italian recipes to an Irish audience.
While Catherine's Italian Kitchen covers all of Italy, the most interesting recipes in the book are those from Sicily, dishes like Arancini di Riso, little balls of rice stuffed with meat, Pistachio and Asparagus Penne (with a sprinkle of the "poor man's Parmesan" or dried breadcrumbs) and an elaborate sponge-ricotta-candied fruit concoction called Cassata. Arab influences on Sicilian cooking - like the addition of pine nuts and raisins to dishes like Pasta with Sardines and Wild Fennel or Panelle, a chickpea fritter eaten as a snack - feature throughout the book. Other Arab imports - aubergines, lemons and the oranges that Sicily is associated with - all make frequent appearances in dishes like Spaghetti with Aubergine Balls, Lemon and Pine Nut Biscotti or Roasted Pumpkin with Shallots and Orange.
A bread, pizza and calzone chapter includes tempting Sicilian breads such as Stromboli (Mozarella and Pancetta Filled Bread) and Sfincione (Sicilian Pizza Bread), alongside recipes for focaccia, breadsticks and pizza. Meat highlights include a Lemon Chicken with Fennel and Lemon Risotto Stuffing, Pork Belly with Lemon, Honey and Thyme and a braised beef dish, sprinkled with a lively mix of chopped garlic, lemon and chilli before serving.
The focus is on simple dishes using seasonal ingredients and nothing is too complicated. Fulvio may not be reinventing the Italian wheel but Catherine's Italian Kitchen is the book to encourage people into the kitchen and try out recipes that are a few steps removed from old reliables like bolognese and lasagna.
Watch out for Fulvio's new series, Catherine's Roman Holiday, starting this Friday, 3 September, on RTÉ One at 8.30pm.
Must Try: the cheese and tomato Aubergine Parmigiana, an easy Oven-Baked Fennel Sausage and Tomato Risotto
Catherine's Italian Kitchen by Catherine Fulvio is published by Gill and Macmillian.
















There is a satisfying heft about Cornucopia at Home, an approachable collection of recipes from one of Dublin's best-known
What do you read while travelling in France? A stack of novels, a French phrase book – and Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. My holidays normally involve dragging
Open any page in A Table in the Tarn and you're likely to be seduced. I got stuck in the Deserts, Petits Four and Chocolates chapter, with recipes for Blackcurrant Leaf Sorbet, Home-Made Vanilla Marshmallows and Cocoa-Nib Florentines but, once I tore myself away from the sweet things, there was much more to recommend this memoir-style cookbook.
It was only a matter of time before Kieran Murphy's entertaining
Could Portugal be the new Spain? Reading Tessa Kiros' Piri Piri Starfish and its references to petisco (tapas, Portuguese-style), chourico (substitute chorizo), port instead of sherry and salt cod (in Portugal - bacalhau, in Spain - bacalao) you could be forgiven for wondering if things are moving that direction. This, the follow up to Kiros' acclaimed parent-and-child-orientated 
This is the book for anyone who has ever gone to Paris seeking French food and been completely waylaid from their Coq au Vin by the rich variety of ethnic restaurants in the city. With a far-flung variety of former colonies and protectorates, Paris is a melting pot for people and cuisines from all over North Africa, Asia and the Middle East. When we were there
While at last year's
There's no nonsense about Judith Tabron. Starting in the restaurant industry as a 16-year-old apprentice, she worked her way up to become the co-owner of
It's the colour that catches your eye first. The bold pink and red cover of Tessa Kiros' Apples for Jam is immediately distinctive, particularly with its eye-catching photo of a pair of red, well-worn children's shoes. And colour is hugely important in this book as Tessa and her colour-coded recipes explore the spectrum of childhood through chapters that include gold and monochrome, pink, yellow and red.
This is the perfect book for any foodie who's ever spent hours puzzling over unfamiliar ingredients in their local delicatessen or ethnic food shop. Glynn Christian, originally from New Zealand, has been a food writer and broadcaster in England for many years, and as a result, has a rare international perspective. His breadth of experience also includes setting up the legendary
Cookbook sections in secondhand bookshops can be a little hit or miss. There's always a pile of microwave cookbooks - no one, for some reason wants to hang onto these dodgy and dated texts - a scattering of horrible diet books and often lots of ancient Family Circle publications, with their "triple-tested in the test kitchens" claim, but, rarely something that you actually want to cook from, let alone buy. Still, I live in hope, so a recent trip to Athlone had to include a browse in the local secondhand bookshop (I still haven't discovered its name) which turned out to be a most amazing example of its kind.
In London there is a wonderful shop called
One of the big advantages of being settled back in Dublin, with book shelves once again, is having all my old cookbooks to pore over and rediscover. Although I did manage to build up a fair collection in New Zealand, it couldn't really compare to my beloved older stacks of books by
As charity cookbooks go, Real Food for Real People is a real gem. The book is part of a fundraising drive for Moneystown National School's building fund and was produced and published by the Parents' Committee in this County Wicklow village. But, even though Real Food for Real People was evidentially done on a shoestring, the design quality still shines out. Illustrated mainly with children's drawings and photos, and scattered with quotations from, amongst others, Shakespeare and Lenin, it is a simple and well laid-out book.
Undoubtedly creative and definitely contemporary, Kevin Dundon's Full on Irish is a book that is easy to admire yet, as a collection of recipes, it is not entirely successful. Too much fussing over presentation, as with the beautifully and immaculately layered Smoked Salmon Cake with Chive Cream Cheese, is a huge turn off for me. I want to be able to look at the pictures and think "I can do that" rather than "it's too complicated for me." Maybe it is to do with my style of cooking, which is all about landing dishes on the table and letting people help themselves, rather than delicately plating up little morsels of food, but I find it very difficult to get excited about cookbooks that devote a paragraph to telling me how to arrange the dish before presenting it.
Although these wee cookbooks are small - just 64 pages - they are beautifully formed. The Irish Food books are from the same stable that produces the Bridgestone Top 100 guides to restaurants and places to stay, as well as the Irish Food Guide -
With a subtitle that says, "Big-time home cooking for family and friends" you can't say that you haven't been warned.
Before I started reading/reviewing these books, Anne Willan was unfamiliar to me but, as soon as they arrived, her name started to crop up in my reading with increasing regularity. An American by way of Yorkshire, Willan established
My first introduction to Ursula Ferrigno was through a book called Bread (published by Dorling Kindersley) that she co-wrote with Eric Treuillé, the owner of London shop/haven
Although already the author of two well-received memoirs -
Derry woman and Sunday Telegraph food writer Diana Henry has again come up trumps with her latest book, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. Her first cookbook, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, focused on the tastes and enchantments of the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa. With praise from Claudia Roden and its appearance twice on the Glenfiddich award shortlist, it became an instant classic.
British organic and Fair Trade food chain
New Zealand cafés do fantastic salads and whenever my tastebuds need a kick and I'm looking for an unusual salad recipe, I turn to former café owner (now cookbook writer)
To my sorrow I must admit that I have only once eaten in Denis Cotter's award-winning
First there was
Since I first saw this book in our local
Why is it that recipe names look so much more evocative when written in French? Gâteau au chocolate et à l'abricot seems so much more sophisticated than just plain Chocolate apricot cake. Still, from the look of this slice of this moist dark cake pictured in
It's not often that chefs can manage to simplify techniques so that they are both intelligible and useful to those of us who confine our cooking to the home kitchen but Auckland-based Genevieve McGough has managed it in Brilliant But Basic. In this slim publication she deals with a total of 19 different techniques, teaching formulas for useful cooking basics such as meringue, risotto, slow-cooked meats and cheesecake.
Taste: Baking With Flavour is the third book from the partnership of professional baker
Australian cook Bill Granger is the darling of the Sydney restaurant scene. He open his first café, Bill's, twelve years ago and hasn't looked back since. Earlier this month he opened his third Sydney restaurant and he has just visited Christchurch to launch his fourth cookbook, Simply Bill. Not bad for an untrained cook who, until he opened Bill's, had no experience in a commercial kitchen.
Now this cookbook is right up my alley. The combination of the words comfort, food, eating and pleasure - especially in winter - talk far more to me that those hated phrases low fat, slimline and reduced calories. Which isn't to say that comfort food is going to have a drastic effect on your waistline, although it might! It's just that the whole idea of comfort food which, by nature, involves things hated by the health police such as full fat milk, real butter and clotted cream, is especially evocative in the winter. With cold and rain outside (here in New Zealand), now is the perfect time to stay indoors, browse through cookery books and decide what tasty treat to cook for dinner tonight. You Northern Hemispherians will have some time to wait but there's no harm in getting ready in advance for dismal, dreary weather.
In a world full of cookbooks, Sybil Kapoor's Taste: A New Way to Cook is truly innovative. Kapoor writes from a far more scientific perspective than most food writers, explaining in great detail about the elementary tastes of sour, salt, umani (savoury), bitter and sweet. She helps the reader to understand basic taste combinations and how these work to enhance and compliment each other.
This distinctive book - its size and multi-coloured stripes will ensure that you won't mislay it in your kitchen - is a veritable tome but it is surprisingly readable. It sat on my coffee table for a month, chapters to be digested along with meals, and it has so many post-its hanging out of it to denote the ideas that interest me or recipes that I would like to try that it runs the risk of most of the 1075 pages (not including the index) being marked.
Michelin-starred Irish chef Conrad Gallagher sets out the ethos of this book in the introduction. Each recipe is to contain just six ingredients - not counting salt (Maldon Sea Salt), pepper (freshly ground) and best quality olive oil.
New Zealand cook Judith Cullen used to run her own café in Dunedin before she changed careers to become a successful teacher of cookery classes, many of which are run from her home. Judith Cullen's Cookery Classes is her first published book but she has a fresh and simple approach that many more seasoned cookbook writers would envy.
Although we're very solidly into autumn now here in New Zealand (autumn! In April! I'm still not quite getting my head around it) with little prospect of camping ahead, Nicola Saker's Blue Sky Kitchen: Creative Cookery For Kiwi Campers still caught my eye, despite the sickly image of the nuclear family that feature on the cover. Although not a Kiwi, I certainly am a camper cooking for a Kiwi so I figure I fall into Saker's target market. Anyway, I'm always looking for good things to cook over our wee gas burner (one-pot options only need apply) and this has plenty of great workable ideas for campsite cuisine.
I've been a fan of Nigella's writing since Nigel Slater (my other favourite cookery writer) gave his readers a tip-off about her first cookery book How To Eat. In fact, How To Eat was so beloved in our house that both I and my housemate had a copy - just in case we parted ways and one of us would end up living without it. Together with all Nigel's books and Darina Allen's impressive Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook, How To Eat sits on that section of the cookbook shelf that gets plundered on a regular basis.