I picked up Nigel Slater's latest book Eat on a quick visit to the library and have enjoyed dipping in to it. I've had a copy of Real Fast Food on my bookshelves for a long time, and use it from time to time for inspiration. I find the lack of illustration almost more inspiring than the lavishly illustrated cookbooks of today, which have carefully composed colour photographs of many recipes.My serving dishes and crockery are not the same as those photographed, and I find the pictures a little distracting - but then I usually prefer the original book to a film based on it, as the latter never matches up to the scenes in my imagination. However I enjoy Nigel Slater's writing and find his recipes usually easy to follow as well as inspiring. One thing I enjoyed about this book is the simplicity of the recipes: most are pared down to the basics, with exact quantities given only when necessary.

Another recent read was Jenny Eclair's Life, Death and Vanilla Slices, which was an enjoyable mix of laughter and tears. I've heard Jenny Eclair on radio and television, and read an occasional article by her, but have only just caught up with her novels. As this is her third, I'll look out for her others. Life, Death and Vanilla Slices follows Anne Armitage as she leaves her comfortable London life to be with her mother, who is in a coma after she was knocked down while crossing a road near her home. The story gives both Joan's and Anne's memories of their lives, Joan's reminiscences are from the depths of her coma, while Anne's are looking back on her life, while also trying to make sense of her mother's life in the Northern town which Anne had moved away from, creating a successful life in London, married to a doctor  and the mother of two spoiled teenage boys. An interesting take on the mid-life crisis scenario.

Are male cooks taking over?

As an avid lifelong reader and collector of cookery and other books about food, I've recently noticed that there seem to be more books , recipe, cookery, call it what you will, by men than women, with the possible exception of Nigella Lawson and her latest offering, Express. The titles I've been buying, reading and sometimes cooking from have all been by men, and include Nicholas Clee's Don't sweat the aubergine and his blog - he wrote about oxtail stew a couple of days after I'd just made a huge one at home, with meat from my local butcher, Upton's of Bassett in Southampton, who also make delicious pies and pasties. Nigel Slater 's Real fast food is another recent buy - I gave the free copy I acquired when I bought a magazine to my son- which has some good recipes and ideas, even though it was first published in 1993. It would now seem to have become one of those kitchen classics, which one returns to again and again. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is another food writer with strong opinions on lots of different aspects of food. His recent collection of journalism "Hugh fearlessly eats it all" is an interesting gathering of articles covering a wide variety of food issues and makes me think that bit harder about what I'm eating. A recent visit to one of the three local branches of Waterstones bookshops showed that the faces on display in the Cooking section were mostly male. A few years ago it was probably more female than male -but there are probably now more professional chefs publishing books and appearing on television. This seems to be a re-run of the early days of cooking on TV, when those appearing on TV were mostly male , for example Graham Kerr, Philip Harben, although not forgetting the terrifying Fanny and Johnnie Craddock