One of my greatest fears when someone asks me to cook with them is the prospect of blunt knives in their kitchen. I hate being asked to finely slice an onion or trim a piece of meat with a large dull-edged kitchen knife. Ugh. I believe I've once successfully nagged a friend into getting some decently sharp knives.

Have you ever met one of those people who looks ascance at you when you suggest having an ice-cream in winter? "But it's 8 degrees and raining!" they exclaim. So bloody what? Of courrrrrrrrrrse you should eat it all year round. So here we are at the winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere) and I decided to do a flavour that straddles ideas of cold and wishes for warmer weather.

Like a gift from the heavens, a PR person offered me frozen pizzas to sample. I'm not the ideal candidate, but with my Duncan's Degustations series underway, how could I resist the opportunity to add to my spectrum of likely-ick experiences? Little did I know I'd end up with a freezer full of Dr Oetker's odd pizzas.

You might already have read about my travails with kitchen scales. It's time to write a bit more, this time testing out a model submitted to me for review. The Soehnle Cuisina proves to be worthy of interest if you're in the market for new scales, though not outdoing my favourite IKEA scales for accuracy.

How hard is it to make a set of consumer digital kitchen scales that are reliable? Too hard, it seems.

In this article I write a little about some scales I tried and wonder what my readers have found to be reliable. There's also a list of the criteria I use in trying to choose good digital kitchen scales.

For lovers of food knowledge, the Larousse Gastronomique is an indispensable book... and I recently slaved over a feature for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf about the new edition and the history of the various versions. Meanwhile, co-editor Mark has prepared a Year-end Countdown with a pile of interesting books you might like to know about, starting with baking and Christmas.