Experienced chef provides helping hand in the kitchen

It seems a well-trodden path for ambitious young New Zealand chefs - head to Europe, work with a big-name chef in a 3-Michelin-star restaurant 16 hours a day for a couple of years, come back to head a fashionable cafe, then write a cookbook or column of trendy recipes, proclaiming your passion for food, fresh local produce, cooking for friends and how easy it all is.

The most recent of these books is Sean Armstrong's Kitchen (Random House, pbk, $50).

The Auckland chef who runs Loaf, an artisan bakery, and writes for magazines, obviously enjoys putting his own spin on some traditional dishes, as well as cooking with good produce and creating clean flavours.

• A couple of books featuring vegetables and fruits make useful kitchen companions - Cooking from the Market: Vegetables and Cooking from the Market: Fruit (Murdoch Books, pbk, $30 each).

They provide information on how to buy, store, prepare and cook each vegetable or fruit and several recipes to use each, ranging from cakes and desserts, through to salads, vegetarian and meat dishes.

These are simple and contemporary with fresh or hearty flavours - just the thing for anyone wanting inspiration for using more vegetables and fruit.

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Keen bakers will find many answers to questions of what went wrong or tips on how to improve their cakes, biscuits, muffins, desserts, pastry and chocolate in The Australian Women's Weekly Q&A Bake ($17).

If you want to know how to fix a broken cake, how to tell if your biscuits are cooked, why your cake cracks on the top, or the best way to cook a pavlova, you'll find answers here.