Kitchen dreaming...

Winter for me is all about food. I start looking at recipe books, flicking through the pages searching for pictures of beautiful summer picnics, salads and grilled seafood on skewers laid out beside sparkling aqua water... what a nice way to escape a dull grey winter.

If I'm cold and feeling slightly rundown (like now actually) then it's the slow food I look for and perhaps even cook... coq au vin, slow cooked lamb shoulder or shanks. Comfort indeed.

Then of course there's the good old Food channel.  Number one for winter escapes at the moment is the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten. It's summer in the Hamptons and she also ticks my top three for food watching.

• Simple recipes that can be scribbled on a scrap of paper and once cooked done again without a recipe
• Kitchen utensils to lust after (I am unashamedly shallow)
• A fabulous kitchen and home as a backdrop.

See? Fabulous. She has a large home in the Hamptons and has built a new barn in the garden (oh yes the garden is to die for and looks even better in snow...) Read all about and see more lovely pictures here.

Ina's kitchen also has good eye candy for the shallow shopper. And I am not just shallow but also stupid enough to think that if I buy the beautiful utensils in a television chef's kitchen then I too will cook like that...  

In my Nigella phase I bought the whisk she swears by  -  I LOVE it and use it every day.

Jamie's favourite Thai-style stone mortar and pestle  is now mine... I waited until I left London to buy it as I could never bear to lug it home on the tube. It weighs a ton. 

Everyone who cooks on the telly seem to have a  KitchenAid in white  - I'd like an original please but I'd settle for a brand new one in red.

 I'm still saving but that's ok. We should all have to wait for some things in life...