Sweet and savoury dreams - guaranteed

It will come as a huge shock to anyone who knows me but I acquired another cookbook today. But I hasten to add it was entirely an accident! I had entered the bookshop solely to flick through travel guides. I wanted an Eyewitness Top 10 guide of New York and to do a bit of research on a possible European city weekend destination later this year. M and I want to visit a new city for a little trip and not relive an old favourite. If we were reliving an old favourite then Paris is probably number one on the list now we've done Venice. I have been toying with Prague but am slightly alarmed by the fondness that stag parties have embraced Prague with and don't really want the place full of drunken English men in novelty t-shirts, beer dispensing baseball caps and football shorts. No thank you! But it seems very harsh to write off Prague with my anti stag thoughts, it does look very interesting and I have an Olive guide that always make selecting good places to visit, eat at and sleep at much easier. I've also been hankering after Moscow or St Petersburg! Again I've never been and they both look stunning cities. It may be a bit nippy but that's just the perfect excuse to swath myself in furriness and exotic scarves and wear a fabulous hat! Which sounds perfectly okay to me!
I wasn't able to find exactly the guides I was looking for and will have to resort to Play.com but as I was leaving another book called out to me. It was Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes written by Anna Del Conte. If I needed any persuasion, and frankly I didn't, Nigella has written on the cover 'Anyone who loves food - reading about it, cooking it, eating it - should have this book'. Well clearly Anna has written the book for me and it would be dreadfully rude not to have it. So I did! It is definitely going to become a classic. I would have liked pictures as we need a bit of gastro porn to get the taste buds tingling and mouth watering! But pictures or no pictures it's a fabulous book, let's hope I can find some room for it. If it wasn't so heavy (even though it's paperback, it's very dense) I could slip in my bag and read it in New York. So instead it will go by my bed, to guarantee me both sweet and savoury dreams!