Snuggle up with Hugh

Nothing elicits sweet dreams more than snuggling under the duvet with a good book. If it's edible eye candy you're after, the visually sumptuous

The collection has an interesting approach to what constitutes essential recipes. Out of the eight chapters - which take you through the day from breakfast (rosewater fruit salad and Gruyère baked eggs) to basics (roll your own pasta and whip-up-your-own mayonnaise) to desserts (soufflés and winter fruit crumbles) - one is devoted to cocktails and canapés (goat's cheese tartlets and watermelon, mint and vodka cocktail).

Still chasing sweet dreams? Green & Black's Chocolate Recipes, edited by Caroline Jeremy (Kyle Cathie, £14.99), will transport you from the cocoa fields of Belize to Javanese ginger squares and back to London for chocolate-vodka-coated chillies. The name Green & Black was dreamt up by husband-and-wife team Josephine Fairley and Craig Sams in bed one Saturday night.

The recipes are sourced from international chefs and food writers who cook with this organic 70 per cent cocoa-solids chocolate. This luscious-looking colour cookbook is generously sprinkled with chocolate cooking tips and facts, such as that chocolate is created by 550 flavour compounds found in cocoa - a carrot has only 96 compounds. Enough said.

For the fully paid-up carnivore, The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Hodder & Stoughton, £25), is a complete guide to meat, from the ethics of meat eating to knowing your flank from your topside, to roasting, fast/slow cooking, barbecuing and curing all manner of beasts. Be warned - the before cooking pictures are not for the squeamish, but this weighty book is a foodie's alternative to counting sheep.

How many ways there are to cook a sheep? Barbecued rosemary lamb, loin of lamb stuffed with apricots and pine nuts, Lancashire hot pot, Indian spiced lamb.

You'll go to sleep hungry.