My favourite kitchen things ...

For me cooking isn't just about the food. It's also about the cooking. Sometimes I like to create something quick and easy. Other times I like to mess around for hours. But whatever I'm doing in the kitchen, I have certain bits of equipment and other things that I love.

• My camphor wood chopping board - this is a truly beautiful object - naturally anti-bacterial with a beautiful scent
• My pasta machine - because it's so much fun to roll and re-roll and create beautifully thin, silky pasta sheets
• My microplane grater - it's a fine-tooth one which is perfect for grating parmesan and nutmeg
• My Nespresso Pixie - because whenever I'm cooking (and even when I'm not) I need coffee and this one makes it quickly with minimal effort on my part
• My recipe books - food porn - gotta love it. I have the gloriously heavyweight, outrageously striped tome, The Cook's Companion, by Stephanie Alexander, A couple of books by Greg and Lucy Malouf which are definitely more than cook books, Arabesque and Saraban. Then there's Yotam Ottolenghi's beautiful Plenty and Ottolenghi: The Cook Book.
• My personal recipe collections - recipes pasted in from hundreds of magazines, hand-scribbled notes made at cooking demonstrations, courses and masterclasses, and ideas that I've come up with when I've been messing around (at the moment there are 5 books - sadly I haven't tried all the recipes yet)
• My iPhone - because I use Evernote to store recipes I find on the web, or that people email me and I using an off-line notebook, I can access these wherever I have a phone line or wifi connection
• My chef's knife - a sharp, fine blade that does everything I ask it too, and its complement - a small blade which comes into its own when I'm peeling fruit and veg

Finally, perhaps the most important presence in my kitchen is that of someone to eat the food I prepare. I don't mind cooking for one. I like it really. But just sometimes it's truly delightful to have the opportunity to prepare food for another.