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The Mallow Food Festival may be over, but the local focus on food continues. This year's Mitchelstown Food Festival will take place this coming weekend, Friday 28, Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 August and the theme is, very appropriately after last year's pig-meat debacle, Bringing Home the Bacon.

Events over the festival weekend include a workshop on Irish Pork from Farm to Fork on Friday, an open air barbecue on Lower Cork Street Saturday evening and a producers' market, with local and national food products, at the Coolnanave Business Park on the main Dublin road (across from the Firgrove Hotel) on Sunday.

The workshop looks particularly interesting. It's taking place at the Firgrove Hotel, from 2pm to 5pm, and will be hosted by Eddie O'Neill, the local Teagasc Artisan Food Specialist. A flyer that I recently received (and promptly lost!) had more details about the participants, including producers from all aspects of the pork industry.

There's more information online at www.mitchelstownfoodfestival.com, via email (mitchelstownfood@gmail.com) or telephone (085 8003095).

Despite the weather, there was a good turn out at the Mallow Food Festival on Sunday, plenty of people around to eat at the stalls that lined the main street. Our pick of the lot was the fresh fish and chips from West Cork, fish caught that morning and battered as we watched, decent chips and homemade tartare sauce for dipping. The Husband declared it the best fish 'n' chips that he had eaten since we were last in New Zealand, it being practically a national dish there.

An unhappy baby, sodden Husband and damp guests (the Husband's cousin and her husband were staying with us for the weekend) made our trip a short one. I still managed to grab a bag of (slightly muddy!) borlotti beans, some Old Millbank Smokehouse smoked trout, a jar of homemade pesto from a Mallow Farmers' Market stalwart, a couple of Green Saffron spice blends and, most exciting of all, a bag of some very fine coffee from a new local boutique coffee roasters called Badger & Dodo.

I only drink coffee at breakfast but, especially after Little Missy decides on a middle-of-the-night-waking, it is an essential part of the day. Owner Brock Lewin recommended the Ethiopian Harrar for use in stove-top moka pot and ground it specially - I'm already addicted to sniffing the bag and hope to progress on to opening it soon, having been promised plenty of blueberry flavours!

Well done to all involved in organising this year's Mallow Food Festival - fingers crossed for better weather next year.

...Mallow Food Festival on tomorrow, Sunday 23 August, from 12pm to 3.30pm. See you there!

Growing up in a household where Punjabi rotia and English casseroles each had their own places, Vicky Bhogal revels in placing ingredients from different cultures side by side. In the introduction to Flavour, she talks about making the most of imported as well as local foods, explaining her own democratic approach to ingredients. She revels in comforting risotto as much the tartness of tamarind, the garam masala of her Indian childhood used as much as Italian peccorino.

Some of the combinations may seem, on first glance, to be a little outlandish but Vicky explains the reasons behind each dish in a brief recipe introduction and there are many inspiring ideas: rainbow trout are crusted in oatmeal and served with a poppy seed and ginger butter sauce; spiced plums and star anise combined with duck risotto; steak rubbed with piri piri and cocoa. She keeps her recipes balanced and in proportion, concentrating on just three flavours and noting where you can substitute ingredients with similar flavour profiles.

Flavour is a bright, well-illustrated book, full of colourful sketches and jam-packed full of ideas. When Vicky is not expanding her simple and unusual recipes, giving a selection of alternatives or substitutions, she's exploring the lineage of the ingredients with references to Sanskrit literature, Jewish custom and ancient Greek texts.

Punchy and exciting, Flavour is the kind of cookbook that will really inspire you in the kitchen.

Must try: Crumbled Lincolnshire Sausage, Cranberry and Lemon Pasta; Grilled Sardines with Beetroot, Pink Grapefruit and Parsley; and, especially yummy, a fantastic recipe for Foil-Baked Feta

Last year, on a trip to London, I picked up a spork - a light plastic utensil which features a spoon at one end, fork at the other and serrated knife edge on the fork side - in a kitchenware shop and I've rarely been without it since. The last quarter of 2008 was taken up with train trips to Dublin as I worked on the Foodtalk documentary series and, food on the train being what it is - or isn't - my spork was invaluable.

Breakfast on the early morning Mallow-Dublin train was made easy by making sure there was some tortilla left over from last night's dinner to pack and eat en route but it was on the homeward leg, normally in the late afternoon, that the spork really came into its own. Short on time, I often ran into Fallon & Byrne or Avoca to choose from a selection of hummus, crackers, cheese, bread and pâté with, perhaps, a few cherry tomatoes thrown in for good measure.

After my usual last minute scramble to make the train, I relaxed, ensconced in my train seat, and - to the amusment of my fellow passengers - happily cut, scooped, spread and (s)forked up my supper. At that stage in the year, pregnant with Little Missy, I just couldn't wait until I got home for food or stomach the limp train sandwiches.

Since LM has started on solids, the spork is back in use again. For the last week, while we were housesitting for friends in East Cork, it let me prep her lunch on the move. Bananas, nectarines, pears or, on one day, much to Little Missy's distain, a kiwi fruit were brought along in a little bowl, peeled, chopped, mashed and fed to the child while we were out and about. While we were able to enjoy lunch in the Ballymaloe House Café (yum), Stephen Pearce Emporium (yum) or Aherne's of Youghal (hmm), LM chowed down on her own food, making it a positive experience for us as well as the other diners!

The only places I've seen these sporks in Ireland are in the shops at Ballymaloe House and the Ballmaloe Cooking School (priced about €2.95) but I think that they should be easy to find in outdoor shops and you can see them online at http://www.light-my-fire.se/230-147-spork.htm. Well worth picking up - for children of all ages.

When we were in college, the Brother's Housemate came from a catering household. His mother used to make hundreds of superb Christmas cakes and puddings each year, cook for parties and events and, most importantly to us, make the best Caramel Squares known to students.

Living on an unbroken biscuit diet of Cadbury's Chocolate Fingers - our habitual study food (oh, the excitement when a white chocolate variety came on the market) - these were manna from heaven. Every time the Brother's Housemate was able to sneak or was given (we never knew, never asked) a box of them, we would descend on his house like a plague of biscuit-seeking locusts.

Although I'll never be able to make Caramel Squares quite as good - the circumstances will never lend themselves in exactly the same way - this recipe gets me pretty close. Very good to donate to any students you know, if you can bear to part with a few. The recipe is basically the same as the one for Tan Slice, which is handy to know if you discover at the last minute that you don't have any chocolate for the topping in the house.

I wrote last week about the smoked trout from Old Millbank Smokehouse in Buttevant. If you're interested in picking some up, Geraldine will have her stall at the Mallow Food Festival on Sunday 23 August with plenty of trout, salmon and some of her fantastic pates and fishcakes. Many of my favourite traders will also be there, including Arun Kapil's Green Saffron, wafting gorgeous smells of curry down the street, Gudrun Shinick's Fermoy Natural Cheese, the Baking Emporium (make sure you pick up a pack of their fantastic spelt cheese crackers) and skin care products that are good enough to eat from Shirley's Herbal Care. There will also be baking from Nibbles Food Emporium, tasty snacks from Allan's Crepes and Tom's Sushi alongside a selection of ethnic foods from the Caribbean (The Joy Store), Lithuania (Vias) and Thailand (Thai Lanna).

I had a great day working (and meeting people) at last year's festival: this time round I'm going to take the opportunity to land Little Missy in her sling and introduce to the sights, smells and sounds of yet another market. Fingers crossed for another sunny festival Sunday!

The Mallow Food Festival takes place on Sunday 23 August.

When we had the Mallow Farmers' Market taking place outside Urru last summer, I never missed the chance to pick up a pack of Old Millbank Smokehouse hot smoked trout from Geraldine Bass. Saturday mornings in work were always busy so I had to watch for a gap between customers to make a dive out of the shop before all the good stuff was gone. Geraldine would also have her smoked salmon and, for a real treat, some very fine smoked salmon pâté but I always made a beeline for the trout, a much underrated ingredient and one that I'd pick any day over smoked salmon.

Each vacumn pack cost €5 for a whole smoked trout and with, one of those in the fridge, we always had something good for dinner. We baked it with pasta, broccoli and cream for cold day comfort food, mashed into cream cheese to spread on rye bread, and used in many sunny day salads, my favourite of which is the Smoked Trout and Lemon Pasta variation below.

Even though the Mallow Farmers' Market may be no more, fortunately Geraldine sells her wares at the Killavullen Farmers' Market and you can also pick up Old Millbank Smokehouse products at Mahon Point Farmers' Market. If you can't get your hands on any smoked trout, then you could use another smoked fish instead. Mackerel is a good, inexpensive substitute.

From Burdass-Reared Wold's lamb to Ampleforth Abbey Apple Tart Tatin, Andrew Pern's Black Pudding and Foie Gras is as firmly rooted in the food of Yorkshire as his Michelin-stared establishment is embedded in the village of Harome. Andrew's Star Inn is a 14th century country pub in North Yorkshire which opened 13 years ago. He laughs as he recalls that it all started with just three people - himself in the kitchen, his wife Jacquie working front of house and her mother behind the bar. Now they run a total of seven interlinked businesses in Harome, including self catering cottages, a deli and a butcher's shop, employing some 120 people.

Andrew is not one to do things by halves and he brought the same level of dedication to Black Pudding and Foie Gras, his first cookbook. He describes the handsome chocolate-coloured velvet-bound book as a "labour of love", adding that it is self-published because "we decided to do the whole thing ourselves." That included having someone decipher his scrawl: he wrote the original draft in longhand with a HB pencil. The book was named after his signature dish, which he started cooking 12 years ago at the Star, a well-judged combination of North Country staple with French luxury. It is this rich man/poor man juxtaposition that has made the place stand out - and Michelin come calling. The Star Inn is one of the few pubs in the UK to be awarded a star, and this despite a Michelin inspector telling Andrew that the Star had to choose between being a pub or a restaurant.

Black Pudding and Foie Gras picked up its own gong in July when Andrew took the silver medal for best chef book at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. The book is a culinary memoir, a love letter to Yorkshire producers and a showcase for many of the dishes that he cooks at The Star Inn. Andrew writes of the childhood influences that made cooking a way of life for him: new foods eaten on trips abroad; rabbit shooting and wild mushroom hunting on his dad's farm; the combination of flaccid Fray Bentos meat pies and Robert Carrier cookbooks that started him off on a career in kitchens. His real passion, however, is reserved for the ranks of suppliers that he relies on. Andrew's local network includes Sand Hutton Asparagus, fish from Alan Hodgson of Hartlepool, Ampleforth College Orchard and their own butchers, Pern's of Helmsley - a loving litany of names and places that reveals his deep attachment to the region. With accounts of cider-making merriment, anniversary parties which the whole village attends and the Star Inn cricket team, it is evident that the Perns are very much part of the community.

And then there are the recipes. While they read very much like an multi-faceted entry on a restaurant menu, they can each be broken down into their constituent parts for the not-quite-as-ambitious home cook. At first glance, a dish like Soused Hartlepool Halibut with Pink Peppercorns and Pickled Shallots, Crushed Pink Fir Apple Potato Salad, Dill Vodka is not something that you're likely to whip up of an evening at home but soused fish can be prepared a day in advance, the zesty potato salad is an easy addition to any meal and having a bottle of dill vodka in the freezer to accompany any fish dish sounds like a good idea.

I was particularly taken by Andrew's use of homemade liqueurs. The last chapter in the book, Drinks Cabinet, will encourage any reader to start making their own Rhubarb Schnapps, Gooseberry Gin and Damson Vodka. Other recipes which stand out include a traditional Baked Ginger Parkin with Rhubarb Ripple Ice Cream, Hot Spiced Treacle; Risotto of Felixkirk Organic Beetroot with a Deep-Fried Blue Wensleydale Beignet, Wild Garlic Pesto; and the pure theatre of Whiskey in a Jar. Lots of ideas to enjoy and plenty of dishes to try.

Andrew is to be commended for shining an affectionate light on an area that he has very definitely put on the map for anyone interested in good food. Black Pudding and Foie Gras will undoubtedly serve to whet many more appetites for his cooking at The Star Inn.

Black Pudding and Foie Gras by Andrew Pern is published by Face. RRP £39.99.

I've always liked to bake. As soon as I was old enough to co-ordinate reading recipes and using a wooden spoon, I was anxious for any cake-making excuse - and most of them involved copious amounts of chocolate. Over the years there have been many good chocolate cakes, from my early attempts using chocolate-flavoured cake covering and marg to (when I started paying for my own shopping!) butter and 70% dark chocolate. This cake, however, although it may not look like much, stands head and shoulders above the rest.

I discovered it in the Green and Black's cookbook when we were in New Zealand. We had a friend who was coeliac so I was always on the look out for cakes that were suitable for her and this was a good one. Deep and dark and deliciously decadent, this was a gluten-free cake that didn't try to pretend it needed some kind of flour substitute. Neither did it need the eggs to be seperated and the whites whisked, something which - at the time I had no electric mixer or whisk - turned me off many a recipe.

This is a very quick cake to make: just melt, whisk, mix and bake. It can be served as it is with good vanilla ice cream or topped with a cloud of softly whipped cream and dusted with cocoa or grating of cacao. You can, of course, leave out the orange rind and spices but I love these flavours with the chocolate.

The third part of The Wine Geese radio documentary is on Lyric FM tomorrow morning at 8.30am. In this show, Tomas Clancy meets the far-seeing Francis Mahoney, devotee of Pinot Noir and the man who pioneered it in California 35 years ago. You can read more about Mahoney here and the programme will be online after broadcast on the Lyric FM Features page.

At the moment, just in case you missed it last week, you can listen to part two of the series on that page, with Jim Concannon of the Livermore Valley in Southern California and Jim Barrett, the man whose Chateau Montelena chardonay topped the blind tastings in the 1976 Judgement of Paris. That tasting - fictionalised and filmed as 2007's Bottle Shock - put Californian wine firmly on the map.

When I was small, picking blackcurrants was a big job. My Nana had several large, old bushes in the orchard under her apple trees. Every year, little fingers were pressed into service to strip the bushes of their black bounty so that she could make, or supervise the making, of the pots and pots of blackcurrant jam that were to see the household through the winter.

Although I tried a couple of blackcurrants every year, at the time I didn't much like them as they seemed too bitter to my childish taste. The jam was another matter, however. When we would call to see Nana and Grandad after school, a doorstep of bread, slathered with butter and spread with inky goodness kept us fed till suppertime.

When we bought the cottage, I was delighted to discover a threesome of blackcurrant bushes out in the back garden. We missed the harvest the first year, still living in Dublin and only at the cottage over the weekend. Last year we were in France so the blackbirds beat us to the berries so I was determined to get my share this year. Last weekend I started picking, getting well over half a kilo from the first of the bushes.

Observed with interest by Little Missy, sitting happily outside in her chair, I used Sarah Raven's technique of picking and pruning at the same time. As I cut the fruiting branches, I stripped them of the blackcurrants but rain and grumpiness from LM sent me indoors before I could finish the job. And it seems that the blackbirds noticed. When I went back outside on Wednesday, to my annoyance the remaining berries had been plucked by beak.

Fortunately I had stashed the weekend's pickings in the freezer and, although there's not enough for jam this year, I do have enough for three of these cakes, much to the Husband's delight. This is easiest made in the food processor as you can whizz up the whole almonds in the bowl first before using it to process the rest of the mixture. You could use blanched almonds but I love the brown speckled effect from the unblanched nuts and the cake is extra moist as a result.

Seventeen gooseberries does not a summer make. I have a pair of bushes that were planted out next to the blackcurrant bushes last summer - one that should produce green berries, the other red. But this year, between the two of them, I could only hunt down a total of seventeen gooseberries. I think that they may be too sheltered where they are. There is a ditch behind them and the sycamores growing there tend, despite much cutting back, to hang over the fruit bushes. Come this winter, it may be time to move them to our developing mini-orchard at the back of the garden. The apple and pear trees wouldn't give too much shelter at this stage.

So what did I do with my scanty harvest? To make the most of it, I took a tip from Jane Grigson and stewed them for a little time with a bit of butter and a drop of water. We were out of elderflower cordial or I would have used that instead of the water. When the berries had broken down a little, I added some sugar, crushed them with the back of a fork, then swirled the cooled mixture through some natural yoghurt for a simple (cream-less) fruit fool. Don't sweeten the character out of the gooseberries. You want something tart and well flavoured. In fact, if you have the red gooseberries, I find they are so sweet that you may not need any sugar. They didn't actually make it into the photo, getting eaten by the Little Sister and I as we peered around the bushes, looking for more.

While nice in small amounts - and good for making the most of the few berries that you may be able to gather - this recipe would also be well worth trying if you had more than the seventeen gooseberries in your garden.

Last summer, when we had the Mallow Farmers' Market running outside Urru, we saw a lot of Patrick Frankel, a local organic vegetable grower. When he started coming to the market he had just started producing vegetables on his family farm near Doneraile and customers were delighted with the early fruit of his labours: spring onions, yellow and green courgettes, an assortment of tomatoes, new potatoes, peas and, my favourite, mangetout. I bumped into him a few times at the Killavullen Farmers' Market, always making sure to stock up on the mangetout - great shredded and tossed raw into salads or briefly steamed and served as a side - but hadn't seen him around for a while so I was delighted to see that the North Cork Organic Group had organised a farm visit.

The NCOG take their meetings out and about during the summer months. In June there was a visit to the Secret Garden Centre near Kanturk which we unfortunately missed. August's outing - the Sunnyside Fruit Farm in Rathcormac - is already up on the calender. After getting a total of 17 gooseberries off two bushes this year I need to pick owner John Howard's brains for some soft fruit- growing tips.

Although we had plenty of sunshine and showers last Sunday, luckily the rain stayed away for our walk. The four acres Patrick cultivates are situated on his family farm so alongside two busy polytunnels and many neat rows of outdoor vegetables are his father's working Percheron horses, a collection of pigs - one of which, much to the delight of the children on the walk, was nursing a couple of tiny piglets - a fabulous old walled garden, and, in the stables, a magnificant black Percheron stallion. He grows garlic in the walled garden alongside the old apple trees and a variety of other fruit and, in a one-for-everyone-in-the-audience-stylee, we were all allowed to pull a bulb to take home. Wet garlic - yum!

While admiring the neat rows of vegetables, the appreciative audience picked up tips on avoiding carrot fly infestation (Patrick uses a ground cover material to keep down weeds which doesn't give the flies anywhere to lay their eggs) and found out where he sourced the movable electric fence that keeps his hens away from the growing area. We've found our hens (now, sadly, down to two) happily digging up seedlings and making a nuisance of themselves around the raised beds, especially after an afternoon's weeding. The fence that Patrick uses might also give us a chance of keeping the rabbits away from targeting the few cabbage, kale and bean plants that are left.

Patrick, who is making tentative noises about a future vegetable box scheme for the area, is currently selling at the Coal Quay Market in Cork every Saturday. Watch out for the mangetout...

Here's a desert that's perfect eaten outside in the late evening sunshine - or to cheer up a rainy day. There's no real need for quantities as the amounts depend on how many people you are trying to make the strawberries stretch between, how big the glasses are and how greedy your audience!

Chop up the fruit before dinner and toss with the sugar so that the juices start to run then assemble the sundaes just before eating so that the biscuits don't get soggy. With each mouthful of sweet fruit, fragrant juice, cool yoghurt and almond crunch you could be almost forgiven for thinking that it's summertime.

If - like me! - you didn't make it up early enough to catch The Wine Geese, the first part of the series is online here (I can't seem to find it on the Lyric podcasts page) and there's more information about the documentary on the Lyric FM website here. Well worth a listen.

And, staying on the wine theme, there's a competition over at GreatFood.ie to win a trip to Bordeaux, staying at Château Magnol, the home vineyard of Barton & Guestier. When you listen to The Wine Geese, you'll hear more about the Barton family and their ties to Ireland from Lillian Barton.

Soundsdoable, the independent production company behind Foodtalk, the documentary series that I presented for Newstalk earlier this year, has a new series starting on RTÉ Lyric FM this Saturday. The Wine Geese is presented by Sunday Business Post wine correspondent Tomas Clancy and it looks at the role of the Irish in the world of wine.

While Ireland may never take a place amongst the serious wine-producing regions of the world, the Irish diaspora have played a disproportionately large part in international wine production and development. The Wine Geese is the name given to emigrant Irish families - and their descendants - who became involved in the wine trade in the countries where they settled. Names such as Hennessy and Lynch will be familiar to many from areas of Old World wine production. However, Irish emigrants also work in some of the principal wine-growing regions of the New World, including North America, Chile and New Zealand, and they often stand out for their innovative approach.

For the first episode, Tomas travels to Fountainstown, Co Cork, to meet Ted Murphy, wine historian and author of A Kingdom of Wine. He proceeds onwards to the vineyards of Léoville-Barton, to talk with the dynamic Lillian Barton, descendant of the great wine business genius, Thomas Barton, whose family still run the company that bears their name. The picture to the right is of his grave in France, with the château's vines in the background.

I was lucky enough to transcribe some of the interviews that Tomas did in France and America before the arrival of Little Missy and I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished product. The first programme in the four-part series will be broadcast on Saturday 11 July at 8.30am, with a second outing at 5.30am on Sunday 12 July.

Five days in the Lake District didn't give me as many opportunities to try local food as I would have liked but I did manage to eat vicariously after picking up Jane Grigson's authoritative English Food in a second hand book shop in Cockermouth. Reading it with the help of an English map helped me to properly place its regional references so, after a few days, I was getting much better at understanding where dishes like Dartmouth Pie, Cumbrian Tatie Pot and Grasmere Gingerbread came from.

The map was making frequent appearances anyway as we had to navigate our way from the ferry at Holyhead to the north-western part of the Lake District for a wedding. The English Engineer was marrying the English Geologist (friends from the Husband's Cambridge days) on Saturday so our little family of three made the long - it took us 6 hours - drive on Friday afternoon, another of the times when I've been very thankful for being able to breastfeed Little Missy rather than trying to manage bottles while travelling.

The high point, food wise, of our five days was definitely the wedding hog roast. Served in a large marquee pitched in a field belonging to the bride's brother, this feast was far from rustic. Immaculately trained waiting staff were on silver service duty with platters of tender roast pork and crispy crackling, dishes of salad (a colourful heirloom tomato one and a French and dried bean salad) and minty new potatoes. There were seconds for everyone before we finished with slices of a cinnamon-scented Dutch Apple Cake, bowls ofstrawberries to pass around, the whole pudding finished off with streams of rich, yellow cream from the jugs proffered by the waitresses (why do the English pour cream while the Irish whip it?).

Dinner at our table was regularly interrupted by small people making their needs felt as there were four children under 18 months between eight of us. Fortunately the couple who were getting married, with their own 11-month-old to deal with, had set up a chill-out kids' room off the marquee for just this situation. No one could have gone hungry at this wedding with facilities to warm food for the smallies available so close by.

While camping with Little Missy at Dalegarth Campsite on the shores of Buttermere Lake we did get to try some local lamb chops (big enough to count as mutton chops although still lamb-sweet), freshly made Cumberland sausages, Buttermere Ayrshire Ice Cream and, of course, the sugar fix for walkers that is Kendal Mint Cake. Just enough of a taste to encourage me back - at least I have English Food to help me plan our next visit!