Food book: Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries II - a year of cooking

This book, along with several of Nigel Slater's other volumes, has been on my wish list for a while, so when I saw a hardbound copy in a London charity shop, I snapped it up. At £10 (HK$120) it was a bargain.

In the introduction, Slater writes, "For years now I have kept notebooks, with scribbled shopping lists and early drafts of recipes in them. They are … a scruffy hotchpotch, a salmagundi, of anything and everything I need to remember, from shopping lists and baking temperatures to whether it was two or three eggs that went into the cake …

"More than a diary, this is a collection of small kitchen celebrations, be it a casual, beer-fuelled supper of warm flatbreads with pieces of grilled lamb with toasted pine kernels and blood-red pomegranate seeds or a quiet moment contemplating a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread …

"I have always written about the minute details of cookery, the small pleasures that can make it enjoyable and worth our time … What intrigues me about making something to eat are the intimate details, the small, human moments that make cooking interesting … Between the pages of this book there are those days, hours and moments spent in the kitchen that I enjoyed enough to make notes about."

As with the first Kitchen Diaries, the second volume follows Slater as he cooks throughout the year. The book reveals a lot about the author's unhappy childhood (detailed in his memoir, Toast, which was made into a film of the same name) and the depression he feels on the day preceding the Twelfth Night. He calls January 5 "often the darkest in my calendar".