The latest issue of SBS Feast magazine - February 2012, is out featuring as always a diverse range of truly interesting (no, make that mouthwatering) foods. More than that, there are profiles, insights, tips and pictures that might have you booking either a trip to that country, or a dinner if it is a local restaurant like Dimitra Melios's Stalactites in Melbourne.

Cabramatta, Croatia, Korea, plus of course Chinese New Year and all the celebrations that inevitably involve food and family and friends, the core of these evocative magazines.

by Sally Hammond

Oooh, I do like a new magazine. And especially if it is a food one. And double-especially if it looks and smells good. Yes, that's right. I said smells good.

I don't mean it has to have a scatch-n-sniff option (although that would be a selling-point) but I am sick of magazines that have a strong smell about them. It must be something to do with the dyes or inks or paper or processing (you can tell I am a cook not a publisher) that they use, but I find some an instant turn-off.

No so the lovely SBS Feast magazine, whose first issue hit the streets (and very soon thereafter my shopping basket) this month. What's more it is a slightly different size and shape and (another GOOD point) it opens easily - wide-open so I know it's going to be a friend to me in the kitchen when I inevitably want to cook one of the irresistible recipes.

Like Turkish ice-cream on page 81. Or Peruvian papas a la huacncaina on page 58, which are made so eye-catching in the full-page photograph by purplish sapphire potato wedges.

You know you're going to have to go and find this magazine, because it's just stuffed with some of the loveliest dishes from around the world - raggmunk (p54) from Sweden, which looks as though it tastes much better than the name, or deep-fried whole snapper with ginger and lime fish sauce (is that only my mouth that's watering?) on page 68.

As if that wasn't enough, one of my favourite food-bloggers, Clotilde Dusoulier from Chocolate & Zucchini invites us all on a picnic in Paris (P 106).

OK, after all this I know I sound like a gushing account-obsessed PR for SBS, but I'm not. I'm just a food-lover and magazine-ophile who genuinely sees this as one of the brightest new lights in Australian food reading.

Find it, buy it, and see if you don't agree with me!

SBS Feast, rrp $6.50.