Cooking the books !

A few books !

I have always had a love of cookery books and magazines. I love looking at beautiful pictures of food that in an instant make you hungry and has you grabbing your coat and heading off to the shops to buy the ingredients you need to satisfy your lusty foodie needs !
Creative words describing how the recipe is going to taste can make your mouth water in anticipation.
I love browsing my cookery books time and time again. Everyone has been by side helping me cook over the years in my kitchen at home from Nigella giving me her brownie recipe to Rick Stein helping me with a lovely little Grilled Herring with Mustard and Onion sauce dish from his Taste of the Sea book.
I probably have by now over 150 cookery books and am rapidly running out of room to house them. My biggest problem is going on Amazon.com late at night after a few too many shandies and before I have realised what I have done a bloke turns up in a white van delivering a bookcase full of books and informs me he doesn't need a route master to find my house anymore he just switches on the auto pilot button on his van ! ha ha !
Nowadays if you do not have a junkie like book problem like I have you just need to go onto the Internet and you can find any recipe you want. Most of the good websites have a video facility where if you are unsure about a way of cooking something you just click a button and in an instant you can hear Jamie shouting "..this is a pukka recipe for pie and chips like me Nan used to make ! good bless the old girl ! its pukka pukka pukkastic !!! " ha ha.
To be fair to Jamie Oliver his website is very good. Lots of recipes, beautifully designed and very easy to use.

some of my regular Internet haunts !

Mobile phones are now making recipes even more accessible. You can even wonder around the supermarket with your mobile, stop at the meat counter access your Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsey, Rachel Allen and River cottage app in search of a dish your family might like that evening and then buy all you need to make the recipe.Get home and have a video running while your making it on your phone so you cannot go wrong (???). Its quite Amazing really.
I have quite a few food apps on my iPhone. The one I use the most is called simply "Food Guide" which I think was 69p and basically covers seasonal availability of various ingredients. From vegetables and fruit to meat, fish and herbs. It tells you whats in season and whats being supplied from storage and it does give you a very good guide for your cooking year. BBC Good Food have launched one too which I have just recently downloaded and looks pretty good too !

Today I down loaded an app called Great British Chefs and its a great app for the slightly more advanced  cook featuring some top chefs like Marcus Wareing, Theo Randall and Tom Aikens giving you some of their recipes and featuring videos showing them going through some basic and more advanced food preparation and cooking techniques.

Top Chefs ! Wheres my name though ? ha ha !

Sounds like a nice Christmas pud !

Decide on what course you want to cook and how hard you want to make it !

I know I work as a cook but when some fisherman drops a kilo of Scallops off and I am struggling to prep them I know I can whip this App out and have a refresher course !

 Anything which encourages people to cook more has got to be a plus. You might not see many people wandering around with a cook book but you certainly see them on their phone !