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We love to cook. We love to eat. We love to spend lazy days with our friends and family, enjoying good food and good conversation.

Keep the Table Laughing came to life over a dining room table cluttered with coffee mugs, plates of home-made biscuits, and packets of Tim Tams carefully hidden from the children. We swapped recipes and books, traded celebrity gossip and dissected the latest news on politics, religion and world events. Discussion eventually turned to the piles of cookbooks we each owned. Glossy hardback books by gourmet celebrity chefs were at the height of their popularity, and between us we owned eight of them. On closer examination, we discovered that although we had read them from cover to cover, and often salivated over the pictures, we had actually cooked a grand total of seven recipes from these books.

It wasn't that the recipes were bad - they were delicious. If you had a day or two to prepare, were an already proficient cook and lived near a large market that sold twenty different variations of each type of vegetable, they were fine. But this didn't really work for us, nor did it for most people we knew: working people who rarely thought about dinner until they were in the train on their way home; parents who needed to race into the supermarket between picking the kids up from school and dropping them at footy training; uni students who missed mum's cooking, but had sixty dollars to last the week, and forty of those were already allocated to beer and socialising.

So we started. First we compiled recipes. Then we compared notes. More and more often we found that each recipe triggered a memory - of a time and a place where we had eaten or made it, of something funny someone had once said or done. Suddenly we had the idea that simply providing the Average Cook with our recipes was only doing half the job. We wanted to give them something for their minds to enjoy, as well as their stomachs.

Sharing food with friends naturally leads to sharing conversation, and sharing part of ourselves. That is what we have tried to do with Keep the Table Laughing. We hope you enjoy it.