Cookbooks

British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop has explored many Chinese cuisines, as her earlier books, Sichuan Cookery and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan cuisine) show. Her latest, Every Grain of Rice, Simple Chinese Home Cooking (Bloomsbury), explores dishes from across China that people cook at home. Not surprisingly, many of the recipes are from Sichuan or Hunan, but she spreads her net wide.

The recipes seem more approachable than some in her more scholarly and focused books, but this book also includes some history and background. There is also a glossary with photographs explaining some of the unusual ingredients.

As I browsed through it, my mouth watered - red-braised pork belly, steamed eggs with pork and mushrooms, clams or mussels in black bean sauce, blanched Asian greens with sizzling oil, broccolini with ginger sauce, and numerous tofu, rice, noodle and dumpling dishes. Having already made several dishes and been surprised by how quick and easy they are, I can see this is going to be a favourite on my kitchen bench.

• With more people following gluten-free diets out of necessity or choice, Jim Boswell's The New Zealand Gluten-free Cookbook (Penguin) is sure to find many takers.

Claiming Italian and Sicilian heritage, he produces many delicious recipes based on vegetables, meat, eggs, fish and cheese that are Mediterranean-inspired. He also includes recipes for breads, fresh pasta, pizza, pies, cakes and puddings using gluten-free flour. Italian stuffed meatloaf, mussels with parsley salsa, beef and bean salad, Tuscan salmon, Sicilian roast potatoes, parmesan baked parsnip and baked pears with honey yoghurt sauce sound mouthwatering.

Browsing through it, I couldn't help thinking anyone, on a gluten-free diet or not, would enjoy using it, perhaps substituting regular bread for the gluten-free versions in recipes such as crostini, bruschetta, croutes and canapes.

• Masterchef finalist Cameron Petley comes across as a no-nonsense, blokey guy who happens to have a knack with flavours in his book Hunter from the Heartland (Random House).

As a child, he learnt to forage for eels, watercress, puha, pig, deer, paua and other seafood, and many of his recipes for these ingredients that you can collect yourself are simple.

"I don't reckon you need all that fancy stuff if you know how to put the right ingredients together," he writes.

His experience working in chicken farms and abattoirs gave him a knowledge of meat and how it is best cooked, and his enthusiasm for and love of cooking - and the publicity from the television show - led him to a job as chef at a hotel in Putaruru in the Waikato, where he lives with his family. This is not just a book for serious hunters - you could use pork instead of wild boar, and buy most of the other ingredients.

However, you will have to catch your own trout and maybe eels.

There are recipes inspired by Maori cuisine, such as boil-up, mussel chowder with Maori bread, as well as modern ones - poached eel with coriander dumplings, lamb rack with purple potato and pikopiko salad, or pork belly with cauliflower puree and beetroot and apple chutney.

A cookbook with a difference, but less "cheffy" and probably more usable than many foraging and hunting cookbooks by other chefs.