Nell Nelson, former editor of Asian Home Gourmet, has been a food and travel writer here for seven years Describe Eat Cook Hong Kong. It is a 120-page full-colour cookbook with 60 recipes, written for anyone who wants to eat and cook in Hong Kong. All the recipes were collected from local and visiting chefs, cooking lessons, Asian travel and inspired by locally available ingredients. It has a restaurant guide section covering gilt chair, expensive restaurants to Sichuan noodle shops and also where you can learn to cook. What/who inspired you to write the book? Susan Sams, as editor of the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine, asked me to write a diary of my weekly food odyssey in Hong Kong. After 2.5 years of writing the column, I had collected a vast bank of food information. People always asked me the same questions - where to eat, could I tell them that recipe again, where to learn to cook and where do you buy such and such - it seemed a waste of knowledge not to share what I had picked up over the years. Who's your target audience? Anyone who visits or who lives here - hopefully the book will encourage the most resistant cook to don a pair of oven gloves rather than frighten them off to the nearest shop window with a menu. Which cookery books have influenced you most? Favourite authors are Nigella Lawson, who wrote How To Eat and How To Be A Domestic Goddess, and Nigel Slater, who always uses good ingredients, but whips them up in a very short time. The Sugar Club Cookbook by chef Peter Gordon. Food magazines such as Vogue Entertaining and Gourmet Traveller for photographs that ooze deliciousness. What, apart from cookery books, do you read for fun? Funnily enough, the last book I read has food in the title: The Cappuccino Years by Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend. I read it on an airplane with gin and tonic on tap. I roared with laughter for two hours - the only way to fly. What don't you eat? I'll always try anything once. I have to say I have a deep suspicion of margarine. What do you cook at home? I hate cooking for myself as there is no one to praise me and offer me adulation, so I always cook for other people, which invariably means testing a new recipe on them. Among chefs, who would you most like to meet? Nacha - from the book Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel - who taught Tita, the heroine, to cook. What has been your worst restaurant experience? Etched in my memory is when my parents took me to a French restaurant when I was quite young. The waiter announced the choices from the dessert trolley - it was the 70s - and my ears picked up at the sound of 'cherry trifle'. I loved glace cherries and was so excited at the prospect of a creamy, custard pudding studded with juicy nuggets of red E numbers. Sherry trifle was a harsh introduction to the vagaries of the French accent.
