The Yorkshire Chef’s Cookbook is published by the good people at the Leeds Guide.  It’s a collection of recipes from some of the region’s best chefs.

There’s some great stuff here – a smokey duck breast dish from The Fourth Floor Restaurant at Harvey Nichols, some venison from the brilliant Butcher’s Arms at Hepworth, roast belly pork from Kendell’s Bistro and Thai Edge’s red curry with scallops and tiger prawns.

It’s easy to take the quality of Yorkshire’s restaurants for granted, particularly those in and around Leeds.  It should be no surprise that the region has the highest concentration of Michelin starred restaurants in Britain, outside of London, with many, many more pushing that boundary very hard indeed.

Anything that promotes the richness and creativity of our region’ chef’s has got to be ‘a good thing’ in the broadest sense, and anything that gives me the chance to have a go myself at home is also most definitely in that category too.  On those terms, The Yorkshire Chef’s Cookbook is a huge success.

At £3.99, it’s a steal.

And where can you get it? At all good book shops in Leeds, of course, but also at the brilliant La Bottega Milanese on Call Lane, where you’ll be able to get a first rate cup of coffee along with your book.  Alex’s coffee is infinitely better than the poor  effort you’ll get in Waterstones…

An American craft beer classic, Sierra Nevada’s flagship beer is nothing short of an absolute joy.

Fruity, spicy, lightly carbonated, with a lovely deep amber colour and a complex character awash with citrus notes and a deep, toasted flavour in the background.

It might be available everywhere, but it’s a great beer and a classic of its style.

I’m slightly embarrassed that I haven’t written about it sooner…

The Corn Exchange in Leeds underwent a huge refurbishment a couple of years ago.  The plan was to renovate the building, a Victorian trading hall and one of the most striking spaces in the North, and turn it into a massive food hall, with independent food retailers filling the units and a big ‘anchor’ restaurant in the basement.

A great idea, a little ambitious, but a good plan none the less.

Then the recession happened.

The whole building stood empty for a while until Leeds uber-chef Anthony Flinn opened in the basement area and life started to creep back into the old place.

But the Corn Exchange is huge, and not even the mighty Anthony’s can fill it.

It seems to have been a struggle to entice tenants into the building, and the purely food vision has been watered down with the reintroduction of a couple of clothes stores, but it’s good to see traders setting up and giving the space a little more buzz.

The latest tenants, Primo’s, opened earlier this month.

Primo’s sell hot dogs.  Proper, nostalgic Americana-style hot dogs.

There are a couple of bagels on the menu, too, but the hot dogs are the point, and they’re delicious.  Absolutely outstanding.

My hot dog was a Classic Chicago, enthusiastically introduced to me as “a connoisseurs hot dog”.  High quality sausage, good bread, fresh salad and some very good dill pickle, piled high and seasoned with celery salt, mustard and a deceptively lively pickled chilli.

Finished in three bites.  Well, four, but I was in polite company and had to set an example.

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Everybody knows that cooking professionally is hard.

The hours are long, the work is stressful.  Kitchens are hot, inhospitable and downright dangerous places to work.  It’s relentless work, with wave after wave of possible problems and things that could – and do – go wrong.

But to some people, cooking is in their blood.  It’s part of who they are.  They just have to do it.

Jason Sheehan has lived this life inside out.  In Cooking Dirty, Sheehan recounts his experiences in countless kitchens, all different, all bound by common ties.

He started cooking in professional kitchens as a teenager, initiated into the trade in a local Italian restaurant, running the dishwasher and prepping endless trays of pizza dough.  His first night ends with his chef quietly observing “you’re still here”.  Enigmatically, neither a statement or a question, no surprise or admiration, just a simple phrase.

“You’re still here.”

By this point there is nowhere else Sheehan could be.  He’d caught it.  He was in love with the power and the excitement of working in a kitchen.

Sheehan lurches from job to job, rolling up in a restaurant, asking to see the manager, embellishing experience here and there, getting work and fitting in as the ‘fucking new guy’ time after time.  The pattern is always the same.

Cooking, drugs, booze, battles, horror, adrenaline, elation, food.  more kitchen pirates this way…