I have very few cookbooks, and even fewer once I have had one of my regular clearouts of review copies, carting boxes of them off to the charity shop. There is a bookcase of trusty tomes I consult on a regular basis but only a handful I ever actually cook from.

I would dearly love the time to make other people's recipes, but I always seem to be eating a recipe that I am currently working on for the column and so rarely get the chance to tuck into another cook's offerings. When I was recently asked to name my favourite recipe from someone else's cookbook I think I said something like 'chance would be a fine thing'.

Yet many of OFM's best mates did come up with their favourite recipes for us, and a very interesting collection it is too. We have published it for you this month, a collection of the recipes that have proved themselves to be the most loved among our best-known writers, chefs and other food-friendly people. My own favourite is Simon Hopkinson's seductive way with rabbit.

When I was in New York last year I found myself in the basement of Trump Tower at about six in the evening. The massive Whole Foods store there that seems to sprawl under Central Park had the longest till queues I have seen since Stella McCartney's collection arrived at H&M. Hundreds of New Yorkers clutching their spelt, spirulina and shots of wheatgrass. While our own wholefood shops are slowly dragging themselves into the 21st century American John Mackey is converting dowdy old London-department store into a US-style wholefood superstore. As a long-time frequenter of wholefood shops I can't wait for this new-wave mega grocery store. And perhaps this one won't insist on putting my lovely organic shopping in someone's second-hand plastic carrier bag.

· Nigel Slater is The Observer's cookery writer Nigel Slater