Nigel Slater, Appetite: So What Do You Want to Eat Today?

Far and away the most inspirational cook book ever made. Forget Delia and all the other culinary Nazis.

If everyone bought this and used it, within a year everyone would be a pretty good cook.

Inspiring. This book gives you the basic concepts behind cooking that every other book in the world never tells you, and each simple recipe gives you scope to make hundreds of others of your own, and the confidence to have a go.

Rather than just throwing recipes at you like celebrity chefs, Nigel tells you HOW to cook, using your taste, invention and natural ability to know what YOU like and how YOU like it, as well as what sort of things might be useful in your kitchen (probably less than a quarter of what you have already). And he does it all without preaching - it feels more like a conversation.

Even the plentiful photos don't show a pristine white kitchen - they show the real mess of home food preparation.