As well as being great fun, cooking your own food can save a fortune. Having friends round for dinner can be far cheaper than eating out, whilst ready meals are a rip off as well as being unhealthy.

There are literally thousands of great cookery websites where you can find recipes for just about anything. One of the very best is the BBC Food recipe website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/

The Telegraph also has a very good recipes section on its website:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/

Cooking by Numbers suggests recipes based on what ingredients you've got in the house:

http://www.cookingbynumbers.com/

The Resourceful Cook is a meal planning website that helps people save mone by avoiding waste and being able to select meals that suit their budget as closely as possible:

http://resourcefulcook.com

The Frugal Cook has a lot of good advice on cooking economically:

http://thefrugalcook.blogspot.com/

Foodbuzz is a food blogging site which has had over 140,000 recipes posted to it:

http://www.foodbuzz.com/recipes

Reactive Cooking has hundreds of great recipes, based on the idea of using up what you've got in the fridge:

http://www.reactivecooking.com/

101 Cookbooks is a recipe site by someone who has more than a hundred cookbooks, and it shows:

http://www.101cookbooks.com/

My Daddy Cooks uses has videos showing how he does it, rather than just recipes:

http://www.mydaddycooks.com/

The Independent has a list of the "50 best food websites". It's a very mixed bunch, but some of them look very good:

http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/the-50-best-food-websites-2313883.html

The Observer recently ran a good feature listing fifty of the best simple recipes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/22/simple-recipes-nobu-ivy-cod-fishcakes

Favourite Cookbooks

I had wondered about adding this, as they're not exactly cheap, but here's a list of our favourite cookbooks, ones that we've never regretted buying:

• Leith's Cookery Bible, Pru Leith (you can get this hugely reduced at the discount book stall at Spitalfields market on Sundays if you live in or near London)

• Moro, Sam & Sam Clark

• Tamarind & Saffron, Claudia Roden

• The River Cafe Cook Book (the first one), Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.