Charles Finch

I've never been good at cooking anything more complex than corn flakes, but in the past few months I've started to learn with a friend. So far our greatest triumph has been a batch of Guinness cupcakes, but we've also made meringues, homemade pasta and sauce, oatmeal cookies, beignets with cafe au lait (inspired by my fantastically fun trip to New Orleans with a friend from England), mulled wine, and most speculatively, hot cider with buttered rum and cinnamon.

Part of what triggered this urge to cook for me was what has become one of my favorite websites: FX Cuisine, an endlessly entertaining roster of recipes shot step-by-step in beautiful, high-res photographs. If you like to cook, or even if you just like food, I would recommend spending about fifteen hours looking through every nook and cranny of the site, but for starters check out two of the recipes that most intrigue me, Swiss Apple Pasta and Scandinavian Sour Cream Apple Pie. They're both a little bit daunting, but I vow to try them anyway.

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Watch this space in the next week or so for a contest, my first one! There should be a couple of good prizes.