How to be the Perfect Housewife by Anthea Turner.

"How to be the Perfect Housewife": Entertain in Style (Perfect Housewife) is the new book by Anthea Turner and it's available from Amazon at half price.



Obviously Mrs Turner can hardly be described as a telly chef - but this book does have some useful advice on taking the stress out of organising a dinner party and the like.

The new book is a follow up to this one which proved popular and has had good reviews:

Tefal ActiFry

Channel 5's Gadget Show tested the Tefal ActiFry on their show and I think they quite liked it. It is currently on offer at at Amazon with a £28 reduction.



Most of the reviews at Amazon aren't too bad either which is not surprising because it's healthier and safer than the traditional way of frying chips.

Gordon Ramsay's Healthy Appetite

Gordon Ramsay's new book Healthy Appetite is available from Amazon for £9.99 which is a 50% discount. Click on the link below to read more and buy it if that's what you want to do.

The Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi

The Cookbook by Yotam Ottolengnhi and Sami Tamimi is released next month (On the 1st May according to Amazon.)

You can pre-order the book from Amazon for the price of £16.50 which is cheaper than anywhere else I've seen.



Ottolenghi's culinary mini empire is based in the posher parts of London. There are three delis in Belgravia, Kensington and Notting Hill (two of which offer a limited service as a cafe) and there is a restaurant in Islington which the Observer rated as being one of the best places in London to get breakfast. The food seems to be mostly drawn from east Mediterranean cuisine (both authors are from Jerusalem) but is also open to drawing on other region's cuisines. Finally, and I'm never really sure how important this is in cookbooks, the design looks really lovely. (You can see some of the page layouts at Amazon)

Delia Smith's How To Cheat At Cooking. A Review.

Something I want to do with this blog is to try and review some of the telly chef's cookbooks and the best way to do that is by trying the recipes. So I'll start with "Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking," which you can get from Amazon with a 55% reduction.




This review will be an on-going process as I try different recipes but the first thing to say about the book is how well it is designed. The copy I have has a plastic cover which is brilliant idea - as most of my cookery book's covers are creased and stained and ripped.

As for the recipes - well, for a book that is about cheating at cooking I did not find the ones I have tried that straight forward. For example the recipe for Greek lamb baked with garlic and lemon is described as simple, which it is, but there was garlic to sliver and fat to remove and parsley and lemon to grate and blend and chop. It was lovely to eat - and enjoyable to cook - but at no point did I feel like I was cheating.

The book does have a lot of cheats - jarred sauces and the like and a lot of these do seem to be good idea. However I don't think that the cheats take anything away from any enjoyment you might get from cooking a meal. So tomorrow I'm going to try the sizzling scallops with garlic butter crumbs. The scallops are frozen and the breadcrumbs are prepared - but the recipe is not super straightforward and I'm looking forward to trying not to cock it up almost as much as I am to eating the end result.

George Foreman 11480 Big Classic Metallic Grill

This is not really anything to do with celebrity chefs - but George Foreman is a celebrity and the grill is for cooking so I'll happily point out that this grill comes highly recommended - (I don't think it got one bad review at Amazon) and Amazon are currently selling it at a £40 reduction and it can come with free delivery.








For some reason the George Foreman brand of grills has provided a rich seam of humour for stand up comedians. Not sure why- but I've got a story about George Foreman that is not incredibly funny but I'll write it anyway.

A friend of mine is a boxing journalist and he was sent to a hotel in Heathrow to interview Foreman who was over here to promote his grills. The deal was that my friend could talk to him about boxing - as long as somewhere in the article the grills were mentioned. But Foreman did not want to talk about boxing, and ignoring questions about his career and Ali and Frazier and so on he unwaveringly stuck to the subject of his grills. So my friend did not get what he wanted, but despite being crest-fallen he asked Foreman if he could have an autograph for his friend (me). Foreman agreed and pulled out a promotional post card for his grill and asked my friend who to make it out to.
"Ian" said my friend
"I-And" said Foreman
"No-Ian" said my friend
"Ellen" said Foreman
"No- Ian. I. A. N." - said my friend
"Oh Ok" said Foreman
...and I received a promotional postcard which read "Lenny - enjoy the grill. George."

Maybe not the funniest story in the world- the fact that Foreman named his six sons George is much funnier, and I've lost the postcard.

Spanish Cuisine and A Cook's Tour Of Spain

Strangely - there is no book tie in with this series - so if you were inspired by what you saw then you'll have to look elsewhere and some of these books might work for you.

From Amazon - The Spanish cookbook that has has the best reviews is 1080 Recipes It's recipes are modern and are simple. The Moro Cookbook also has great reviews. It's recipes are not exclusively Spanish - it includes North African dishes - but I guess that is one of the points of Spanish cooking. The Real Taste of Spain: Recipes Inspired by the Markets of Spain does not have any Amazon reviews - but it is more in the spirit of the TV show.

If you were taken by the idea of the quite posh presenter who does not mind getting a bit grubby then she has published these two books. Cook: Smart, Seasonal Recipes for Hungry People, which has good reviews and The Wild Gourmets: Adventures in Food and Freedom which one reviewer really hated, mainly because he felt that it was little more than a urban middle class fantasy about rural life. Surely that's the point - I really doubt that the good people of Hampsted and Highgate really want to be peasants and foragers.

Much of this show was set in Spain but it also had Tommi Miers making Spanish dishes in her kitchen in the UK and as she was frying her onions and crushing her garlic, in the background, we could see her washing machine. I liked that. I can't remember many cookery shows that show the other things we use the kitchen for. Maybe next week we will get to see her pedal bin. Hope so.

Away from Tommi's kitchen the show's attention was self consciously visceral. We saw dogs killing rabbits, pigs having their throats cut, old Spanish women squeezing the faeces from the dead pigs intestines and sausage meat kneeded by the grubby hands of elderly Spanish peasants (though I don't think the show called them that - it was just went out of its way to make it clear that that's what they were). They even had old blokes and goats.


I guess it's starting to sound like I'm sneering at the show - but I'm not really. (The Guardian does though). I thought that, like all good cookery shows it has a spine of eccentricity running through it, a posh girl getting grubby in the muddy and bloody world of Spanish peasants is as a good a premise for a TV show as any.


And some of the food looked great.

My favourite Spanish restaurant is in North London where I used to live. It is
El Molino - a Tapas bar on the Holloway Road. It was popular with a lot of North London's Spanish community and I would happily recommend it.

So I have.

Finally - the part of the programme that got me most excited were the bits about the ham and I found this company which sells Spanish hams. Though in warning, a whole leg of Jamon de Recebo was very very expensive, though the mejillones and the chorizos were slightly more reasonable.