The Truffler: BBC Good Food Show; Sausage Appreciation Week; Royal Smithfield Show

The usual suspects (Jamie, Antony, Gary, Ainsley, Rick, Raymond and Gordon, and others not known by their first name alone) are the jolly blokey celeb chefs billed as the star attractions of this year's BBC Good Food Show( www.bbcgoodfood show.co.uk/ 0870 9020555 for tickets and demo bookings) in Birmingham from 27 November to 1 December. If it's new blood you're after, however, look out for the Aussies – Neil Perry, Bill Granger and David Thompson will all be there. Also at the NEC will be 500 exhibitors, plus a Food Lovers' Fair, and speciality producers featured in Rick Stein's Food Heroes book and TV series.

* British Sausage Appreciation Week, which ends tomorrow, is always amply covered in the press thanks to its phnar phnar potential. Organised by the British Sausage Appreciation Society (6,000 members, not all of them butchers), it is a cheery front for the Meat & Livestock Commission, which exists to promote British meat (www.meatmatters.com if you want to know more). Look out too for Ladies in Pigs (I kid you not) who are holding sausage tastings around the country this weekend. For novelty value try Bombay Bangers – Indian-spiced sausages made in Bath from British pork – at the two Café Spice Namaste restaurants in London.

* You'd have to have a hardcore interest in food to visit the Royal Smithfield Show, the biggest farming exhibition in the country, at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre from November 24 to 27. Livestock competitions for cattle and sheep might interest amateurs, though the machinery awards perhaps not. However, the farmers' market outside Earls Court on the Sunday the show begins, from 10am-3pm, should have plenty of welly, and is a good chance for townies to get up close and personal with producers.

* I don't wish to tempt with an alternative to Mark Hix's recipes (see page 54). But just supposing you weren't intending to cook salt beef imminently, but did want a distinctively spiced casserole made with the finest organic meat, and one of the best ready meals you'll ever eat. Graig Farm Organics has introduced tagines made with lamb and beef from organic farms in mid-Wales. The packs (biodegradable) tell you the breed and the name of the farm the meat is from. They're available frozen by mail-order (www.graig farm.co.uk or 01597 851655), from Graig Farm's own shop in Wales, or from stores including Fresh & Wild in London, Organic Experience in Swanage and Beanstalk in Ilkley.

* The image of south-east Asian food is somewhat stuck in a stir-fry and green-curry groove. But Sri Owen, this country's fount of wisdom about the region's cooking, shows how much richer it can be. One of the most appealing sections of the impressively knowledgeable and intelligently interpreted sweep of recipes in her latest book, New Wave Asian, is that devoted to slow-cooked dishes. Burmese chicken curry with limes and tomatoes is one I can't wait to try. Two vegetarian dishes stand out: roast vegetable salad with pumpkin, peppers, sweetcorn and aubergine, served with egg noodles, and her own invention, smoked tofu and asparagus soufflé. New Wave Asian is published by Quadrille at the hefty price of £25, but should earn its keep in an adventurous kitchen.

* Even more magisterial, David Thompson's Thai Food (Pavilion, £25) is a glorious and serious bible of the kingdom's cooking. Australian-born Thompson, whose London restaurant Nahm is in the Halkin Hotel, is probably the world's foremost authority on the subject, and his scholarly and handsome book will stand the test of time as a reference as well as an inspiration for cooks.

* Fellow Australian chef Bill Granger's approach to food is gloriously simple and unfussy, but dropping the apostrophe from his latest book, Bills Food (Murdoch books, £14.99) is taking minimalism too far. Punctuation forgiven, though, for such a fantastically approachable collection of really appetising recipes: spicy roast pumpkin, feta and olive salad, honey roast duck breast with orange salad, buttermilk cake with raspberry syrup, to pick three for a dinner party. All done with that sun-bleached, life's-a-breeze Australian style.

* What's wrong with using a book of recipes to encourage children to cook and read at the same time? We're told they're growing up without learning to boil an egg, as their parents watch celebrity chefs on the telly while they eat a microwaved meal. So the way forward is ...? Not, I think, the play button "to set kids off on an engaging 'fast-track guide to cooking' as they listen to an instructional CD". Especially when its called The Kids 'R' Cooking, and there's only one recipe – chocolate cheesecake, mince pies, lasagne – on each £6.99 CD. Mary Contini and Pru Irvine's brilliant Easy Peasy cookbooks published by Ebury Press are a much better bet.

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