Rick Stein's French Odyssey [Hardcover]

Having spent the weekend actually using it I can honestly say it is brilliant. The recipes are impressive enough to become a talking point at dinner parties (we made the little ragu of seafood) but easy enough to follow. Once tasted you can't understand how you used to make do with pasta or boring sausages and mash!

The pictures are beautiful - just make sure you don't read it when you are hungry! And each time you pick it up you are inspired to get in the kitchen - even though my kitchen is actually a building site at the moment and my City job doesn't enable me the time spend hours in the kitchen. It is a total pleasure and real relaxant to follow Rick's wonderfully traditional recipes. Together with the glorious photography and imagery of France it is a joy.

I highly recommend this to lovers of France and lovers of food!

It's a great philosophy, and it works marvellously as he tours France in a barge, taking him on a canal-borne pilgrimage from Atlantic to Med. The French cooking he demonstrates en route is not the haute cuisine of the Paris restaurant, but the regional, peasant cookery which is the staple of French culinary genius. Stein offers up, here, a love of food - a love of eating it, a love of the tactile pleasures of preparing it, but also a love of the environment which produces it, an environment rich in nature and in people.

Stein, time and again, gets across the message that cookery is about people. The best foodstuffs, be they ever so simple, are the ones grown and raised by people who love them. The best cooks are the ones who love their ingredients and know what is available locally. Cook to your strengths, cook with the best ingredients available to you locally - that way you show respect for your environment and enrich it by sustaining your local producers and produce.

Stein has already delivered this message in his seafood and fish cook books, but it's a message he re-emphasises in his tour through the Midi. What his cookbook offers is an appreciation of French regional cookery - peasant fare: substantial, delicious, with the character of the land and its peoples etched into its flavours and aromas.

This is a wonderfully packaged evocation of France. It should inspire many of you to go touring, to take a barge holiday. It should inspire you to cook many of the dishes. But, in the best spirit of Rick Stein, it should also encourage you to enjoy your food, to take some time, to sit back. Cookery is a marvellous means of countering stress - unless, of course, you work in a busy restaurant or elect to prepare a dinner party for twelve.

Valuing your food and the time you take to select it, prepare it, cook it, and eat it help define your personality - you are what you eat. Stein's message, of appreciating the local, is inspirational: the beautiful visual quality of the recipes on offer should inspire you to investigate your own local markets and suppliers, should inspire many of you to come up with regional English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh alternatives. Stein's classic recipe, ironically, is his recipe for adventure - don't blindly follow a cookbook but look around you, try, experiment, vary the ingredients, adopt local varieties and specialities.

A sumptuous, inspirational cookbook, one which should encourage a little bit of adventure in the kitchen, and one to savour over the winter months while you plan next year's boating or canal holiday.