BOOK REVIEWS: Recipes for every taste

Anyone planning to get pregnant or already enceinte may find The Perfect Pregnancy Cookbook: Boost fertility and promote a healthy pregnancy with optimum nutrition (Piatkus, pbk, $48) useful.

British nutrition experts Patrick Holford, Fiona McDonald Joyce and Susannah Lawson give advice on improving your fertility and health before, during and after pregnancy through diet, and include a lot of healthy recipes.

• Australians Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham have another cookbook in their "4 Ingredients" series, this written with Deepak Chopra, author of numerous books on mind-body health and Ayurvedic medicine. 4 Ingredients: Fast, Fresh & Healthy (Hay House, pbk, $25).

If you are into their minimalist cooking (I usually want to add a couple of other things for better flavour) you may want to look at this.

Unfortunately, like the other 4 Ingredients books, it lacks a good, cross-referenced index which limits its use.

• People who like growing and cooking with herbs will find Ginny Clayton's Herb Handbook (Bateman, pbk, $25) useful.

She gives recipes for using individual herbs as well as herb teas, vinegars and mustards, and information about growing them, although her instructions may be coloured by living in Northland, instead of the colder South.

• With an increased interest in growing your own vegetables, there's always a need for ideas and recipes for using the cornucopia of produce from the garden.

Kirsty Manning-Wilcox and Peta Heine's We Love Food: Family recipes from the garden (Hardie Grant, pbk, $45) has simple ideas, and some fast, last-minute ones, for family meals, most of which use vegetables or herbs.

There are also a few tips on how to grow some common vegetables.

• Australian Women's Weekly cookbooks are popular here and I thought Potato Favourites (ACP, pbk, $30) would be useful, but was disappointed.

First it's difficult to use here as the potato varieties are different from ours and I needed to keep referring to the back of the book to find out whether they were floury or waxy and then to figure out what would be an appropriate local variety.

Pity, because there are a lot of useful everyday recipes for this cheap and nutritious vegetable.

At the end of each recipe is useful information about cooking time and nutrition count - it is an eye-opener to see the amount of fat in some of the dishes with cheese or cream in them.