Recently in Tom's Big Dinners by Tom Douglas Category

Sometimes, in this house, baking is not just for the bigger members of the family and, along with the Flapjacks and Shortbread, there's even a tin marked with Little Missy's name. It's currently filled with these twice-baked Banana Spelt Biscotti, which I love because they are easily made, contain no sugar and it's up to you about the kind of flour you use. These, along with LM's favourite rice cakes, are perfect afternoon snacks - and easily portable - but she is quite happy to munch on them at any stage, and especially loves a small smear of marmite on the biscotti when we're at home.

I first came across these first in New Zealand, when LM loved the Teething Biscotti, made by her Kiwi Nana from a recipe from Nicola Galloway's Cooking For Your Child. Back home, I used up some spelt flour from the storecupboard, although you could, of course, use plain flour or, as Nicola suggests, rice flour. I also added a pinch of ground cinnamon as we're all needing warming spices for this continuing wintery weather. She recommends giving them to babies aged from nine months but, as with any dietary directions, judge by your own child's abilities to deal with food.

As I only needed the egg yokes for this recipe, I used the whites to make the batch of Macaroons that you can see behind the biscotti in the picture. I'm not entirely happy with that recipe so I won't share it here but, unless you have a trustworthy Macaroon recipe, you could use the spare egg whites for meringues and they also freeze well. The biscotti, however, do sit around happily in an airtight box for a couple of weeks or you could store them into the freezer if you want to use them to relieve teething pains.

It's that time of the year again. The Irish Blog Awards longlist has been issued and it's great to see Bibliocook getting a mention in the Best Food/Drink Blog section, again this year sponsored by Bord Bia. Last year's awards took place in the International Airport Hotel in Cork so off I, plus Little Missy bump, toddled for that night's festivities, even if we had to go home a little earlier than the rest of the partygoers!

This year the Blog Awards are taking place on Saturday 27 of March in Galway's Radisson Blu hotel and, judging by the list of nominees, there will be plenty of competition on the night. Here is the list of nominees in my category - there's plenty of old favourites and newcomers to feast your eyes on - and you can see the rest of the categories and nominated blogs here.

Best Food/Drink Blog: Longlist 2010 - Sponsored by Bord Bia

• The Good Mood Food Blog
• Cheap Eats
• The Daily Spud
• I Can Has Cook?
• Good Things Come to Those Who Wait (tables) | Well Done Fillet
• Therese Brady
• Ice Cream Ireland
• foodyblog
• Robert Francis Wine
• The Look and Taste Show
• Curious Wines
• Val’s Kitchen
• Chilli and Chocolate
• Italian Foodies
• Ballymaloe Cookery School
• Blake Creedon’s Wine Cork
• The Grapes of Sloth
• English Mum
• Dispatches from the Deise: Lemon Meringue Pie
• Bubble Brothers
• Michael Kelly
• Ummera
• Bibliocook
• Tea and Wheaten Bread
• The Beer Nut
• The Green Apron
• Lola-Lu’s Kitchen
• O’Briens Wine, Beer & Spirits Blog
• Not Junk Food
• Lily's Blog
• Well Done Fillet

I swore I wouldn't get sucked in. Ah, the promises I make to myself!

This whole social networking thing can be like a black hole, whole chunks of the morning - work time for me while Little Missy sleeps - disappearing while I catch up on Kieran Murphy's ice cream tweets and check out A Taste of Ballyhoura Country's Facebook page. But, for a freelance journalist working from a cottage in the middle of nowhere, North Cork, this is as close to an office watercooler as I'm going to get.

So, for those of you interested in a little more interaction, you can also catch up with Bibliocook over on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe see you over there too!

If ever your grandmother knew how slow cooking turned beef cheeks meltingly tender, could tell her Rhode Island Reds from Marans or was able to grow, harvest, preserve and cook her own runner beans, you'll nod knowingly at Forgotten Skills of Cooking and enjoy leafing through the pages. If you weren't lucky enough to have that kind of paragon of virtue in your life, think of Darina Allen's latest book as a kind of virtual granny in book form.

Alongside reams of information on the kind of old fashioned kitchen and housekeeping techniques that were in danger of being lost, Allen has crammed more than 700 recipes into 600 pages of close-packed text. If you've ever had a yearning to take up chicken rearing, cider making, fish smoking or foraging for seaweed, you'll find all that here, and more. Much, much more.

From foraging to poultry, dairy to preserving, this is the kind of book that you pick up for one recipe and get lost for days. It's particularly strong on baking with plenty of recipes for puddings (Summer Fruit Jelly, Figgy Toffee Pudding), cakes (Lemon Cornmeal Cake, Barmbrack) and biscuits (Gingernuts, Shortbread Biscuits) and a whole bread chapter that is no less than a call to arms in defence of our daily bread.

Forgotten Skills of Cooking is a book that just might change your life. And, even if it doesn't go that far, it certainly will enhance it.

Forgotten Skills of Cooking by Darina Allen is published by Kyle Cathie

SilverCircle.ie: Interview: Darina Allen - Reclaiming forgotten skills plus a recipe for Emer Fitzgerald's Braised Lamb Neck Moussaka.

Watch Jamie Oliver's passionate speach for TED, an American non profit organisation focusing on spreading good ideas, about the power of food and the importance of teaching children what to cook and how to cook it. Today America, tomorrow - or, perhaps, tonight - Ireland.

Despite the current cold snap and impossibility of actually doing anything about it, I've been looking at the raised beds in the garden and trying to plan for the summer to come. Last year we went on an inspirational (and very affordable) two-day gardening course at Glebe Gardens with Jean Perry, learned lots - and really enjoyed the flapjacks!

This year Jean is running an extended series of gardening courses including The No Dig Vegetable Plot, Vegetables for Small Gardens and Herb Gardening for Use in Cooking and First Aid for around €60 per day, including a delicious vegetarian lunch.

You can find out more about the courses on the Glebe Gardens website, follow Jean in the garden on her blog at The Glebe Journal and read her advice on tackling garden pests the organic way in this article I wrote for SilverCircle.ie.

Pancake Tuesday came early at the cottage this year. I always love to have friends come over to eat pancakes but with the Husband getting home from work late and a Little Missy who is decidedly not at her delightful best in the evenings, lunchtimes are a much better time to entertain. Sunday became our Pancake Tuesday so we were able to invite our three Rockmills Neighbours and, as one of the Husband's English Engineer friends was staying with us for the weekend, he - as well as doing a lot of washing up! - also got fed.

This year I made a break from the old routine (ie Spinach and Ricotta Pancake Bake) and, inspired by Julia Child's Gâteau de Crêpes à la Florentine from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, made a Gâteau de Galettes avec Poireaux aux Champignons or Buckwheat Pancake Cake with Leeks and Mushrooms (reads so much better in French!).

Although it may look like there are a lot of steps in the recipe below, it is easy to break it down over a couple of days. For instance, for dinner on Sunday I made the pancake batter and tomato sauce the previous Friday afternoon while Little Missy hung out at my ankles. On Saturday, child on my hip, I cooked the pancakes while the Husband and English Engineer went to the pub to watch the rugby match. During LM's nap on Sunday morning, I made the Béchamel and fillings, assembling the entire thing a couple of hours before our guests were due to arrive and landed it into the oven at 1pm for a 1.30pm lunch. (The washing up was all done, of course, by the Husband and English Engineer!)

This is a very filling main course so I just made a zesty Carrot and White Cabbage Salad and Beetroot Yoghurt Salad to accompany the gâteau. For desert? What else but plain pancakes, cooked to order and served with the traditional lemon and caster sugar. Enjoy your own Pancake Tuesday!

Never mind flowers and forget about going out for dinner, with Valentine's Day tomorrow, get baking for your sweetheart with this Chocolate Caramel Shortbread.

This recipe makes plenty to devour - and share - but it's so good that your biggest problem will be not eating the entire thing today. Perfect with a cup of tea and a love mug!

PS If you have to buy a Valentine's gift, then some first class Irish-made chocolates will go down a treat: my pick are Benoit Lorge's truffles, definitely the best chocolates available in Ireland.

Last night I was at the launch of the Good Food Ireland Week Cork in, naturally enough, the English Market. An array of Good Food Ireland producers had teamed up with restaurant, hotel and café members to showcase their products and there was a multi-course feast lined up on the Farmgate Café balcony overlooking the fountain.

There was a scrum around Kinsale's Fishy Fishy who were first in the firing line with their delectable fish pies and langoustines in lemon cream sauce but there was plenty more to eat and savour: perfect Mini Benedicts with quails' eggs on Gubbeen ham from Liberty Grill; pig's tongue in cheek on slivers of tart apple from Ballymaloe House; on home turf, the Farmgate Café had a hearty warming venison stew using some of Jack McCarthy's superb venison; sweet treats from Urru favourites Mella's Fudge, Lorge Chocolates and Seymour's shortbread; and, for anyone with a few corners left to fill, Declan Ryan from Arbutus Bread and Jeffa Gill of Durrus Cheese offered samples of their own wares.

The whole event, which was packed with a loudly appreciative audience from the 7pm start to the finish of the food, was highlighting the fact that more than 30 Cork restaurants, hotels, cafés and bars are offering a plate of Irish artisan food and glass of wine for just €15 until Friday 12 Febuary. Selected hotels in Cork, including Hayfield Manor and Ballyvolane House, are offering three nights accomodation for the price of two this week. If you're heading towards Ballyvolane House, it is also a superb place for dinner and make sure to check out their Lismore restaurant O'Brien Chop House, recently awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand for good, affordable food.

More information and a list of participating venues are available on www.goodfoodireland.ie. If the quality of food on offer last night is anything to go by, customers are in for a treat. Don't forget - the offer closes on Friday!

And goodbye to all our new friends at the noodle stalls lined up on the roadside just around the corner from where we were staying.

A few mornings of breakfasts there and we were regulars. With a choice of Pho Ga (chicken noodle soup), Pho Tofu (noodle soup with, yes, tofu) or Banh Cuon (rolled rice pancakes) from the three ladies cooking at the stalls and a bar for coffee just across the road, this was good eating.

Little Missy also enjoyed herself, getting whisked away by the drinks lady - that's her, on the left - to sit at the corner and be cooed at, clucked over and her mother queried whether she had dressed the child warmly enough!

Breakfasts back in Ireland just aren't the same.

A cup of hot coffee with milk at Café Mai, 79 Le Van Huu Street, Hanoi. Dark, strong and very sweet - there's a layer of condensed milk at the bottom of the cup - Vietnamese coffee is just the thing to get you going in the morning, and for the rest of the day.

The coffee often comes sitting in a bowl of warm water to keep it hot and with a glass of water for dilution purposes: I prefer to drink it straight, leaving the syrupy milk sitting at the bottom until the coffee is gone, then using the teaspoon to eat it from the cup.

It's a one-stop breakfast, available everywhere, and normally drunk while Little Missy inspects the kitchens, courtesy of an adoring waiting staff! I've not had the chance to eat so many meals with two hands for the last 10 months.

On a cold, wet, miserable day, there's nothing better than coming home to a big bowl of piping hot, homemade soup. Pick from Chicken Noodle, Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato or White Bean and Cabbage Soups and make a meal of it with Caroline Hennessy's recipes for pots of pleasure on SilverCircle.ie.

...to blue skies and lakeside walks, to fabulous food (we've been truly spoiled by the Husband's Mother!) and rich, dark coffees, to post-swim fish and chips and bowlfuls of fresh, seasonal fruit, to Little Missy figuring out how to pick the fresh peas from a homegrown pod and lazy bach days.

It gets more and more difficult to leave New Zealand each time but at least we're not heading home just yet. Next stop - via a brief stop tonight in Kuala Lumpur - Vietnam! I've heard there's more food to eat over there.

Flowers on a feijoa tree at Stafford Lane Estate when we visited on a wine tour of the Nelson area. Feijoas are very popular in New Zealand, I loved them when we were living here, but it's the wrong time of year for the fruit. You can, however, get a little of the tropical flavour from the fleshy petals of the flower.

Evilly dark long blacks, with steamed milk on the side at the Alpine Lodge Café . My coffee of choice when we're in NZ. This is an especially good example of the genre - just look at that crema.

Avocados growing on the trees in the Husband's Mother's veggie garden behind the house. Even better than bananas for convenient baby (and mama!) feeding.

Op shop bargains. When we lived here, there was little in my kitchen that didn't come from one or other of the charity shops nearby. Since we've been living back in Ireland, I've carried home a variety of finds, including bundles of bone-handled knives, battered baking tins, cute little salt pigs and hand-embroidered tablecloths. This time I was rather restrained but I still couldn't resist an old potato masher (the Husband killed ours while making his superlative mashed potatoes before we left home) and this dainty little tray cloth. Well behaved? I think so...

Sometimes the only way to get the true flavour of summer is to wriggle your feet in the grass!

Nicola Galloway may be based in Nelson, New Zealand, but this no-nonsense, practical cookbook will appeal to parents in any hemisphere. From first tastes and flavors to school lunches and dinnertimes, there are plenty of ideas here for feeding children of every age group as well as recipes you can adapt for the entire family.

A trained chef and nutritionist, Galloway focuses on healthy eating but not at the expense of taste and ease of preparation. This book is packed with simple recipes - rather than spending money on the big brand versions, why not make your own rusks, muesli or Chocolate Hazelnut Spread? - along with ideas for adding iron (dried fruit) to baby porridge, protein (ground oats) to pancakes and vitamin and mineral-rich spirulina to smoothies.

Plenty of tips on using ingredients like spices, ground nuts and kelp are scattered in bite-sized chunks throughout the text. The recipes are sandwiched between a chapter on nutrition and a collection of useful appendices, including a meal planner and food introduction table.

While this book will be of most interest to parents, there are few people that won't learn a little about eating well from reading it.

Cooking for Your Child by Nicola Galloway is published by Craig Potton Publishing and is available online - more details from www.nicolagalloway.com

Must Try: Cashew Banana Chew, Pinwheel Scones, Grilled Chicken with Yellow Rice Pilaf