"Just wanted to let you know of a café I happened upon last weekend. It is the Glebe Café, in Baltimore, West Cork, and it is one to rave about. The produce comes straight from their garden on to the plate and it is just spectacular. The website is www.glebegardens.com. I think they are only open at weekends right now but I think they start a weekly thing in the summer. I had Organic Beef Stew....yummy simple great food, it just excited me so much that I had to tell someone."

Last June, while the new Husband and I were honeymooning in West Cork (along with eight of his family, six English Engineers and an Irish terrier called Bridie) we visited the Glebe Gardens and loved it. Unfortunately the café wasn't opened while we were there - although the Husband did meet the owner of the house and almost secured me a job while talking to him about me doing the course at Ballymaloe - but all the ingredients were present in the garden, just waiting to be used. Great to hear that it's doing well - I'll have to plan a trip back to the West this summer!

Nominated in the Asian Cooking section is Fuchsia Dunlop for Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook - I'm just reading Shark's Fin & Sichuan Pepper, her enthralling memoir of cooking and eating in China. Fuchsia is also up for a Newspaper Feature Writing award, as is David Leite of Leite's Culinaria. Other of my favourite authors up for awards are Mark Bittman aka the New York Times writer that brought No-Knead bread to the world (How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food), Alice Medrich for Pure Desert (we're big fans of her Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies around here), Anne Willan (The Country Cooking of France), 2005 Savour NZ presenter Patricia Wells (Vegetable Harvest) and - one of the most entertaining food books from last year - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (I still have plans to try out her recipe for homemade mozzarella!). The awards will be announced on Sunday 8 June.

Wanting to put this cookbook to the test (sometimes, when piles of cookbooks start stacking on the stairs, next to the bed, all over the kitchen counter and on the dining table, the Husband asks why I don't spend less time reading cookbooks and more time actually using them) I decided to make some dough on Sunday morning for a Sunday night pizza fest. It took minutes in the KitchenAid, although I had to add a lot of extra flour - perhaps something to do flour stored in American kitchens being much drier than in Irish cottages at the end of a long, damp winter. After a couple of hours on a warm window sill, the dough was landed into the fridge and sat there all afternoon, firming up enough to handle.

When we got home that evening it was raining too much to pull out the barbeque so I dragged out my big, heavy cast-iron frying pan and heated it up while the Husband mixed some of Craig's Herbed Grill Oil. The pan is not quite big enough to cook 12-inch pizzas so, instead of two 12-inch pizzas we made three 10-ish-inch rounds out of the dough - next time I'd make four thinner ones. As everything came together faster than expected - Craig did warn me, I just hadn't read that piece! - there was a bit of juggling with temperatures on the pan, topping ingredients on the counter and finishing off under the grill but, much faster than expected, we finally had a selection of decent pizzas to sit down to.

I discovered that basil pesto and marinated feta, combined with Craig's Herb Oil, makes for an overly greasy pizza but goat's cheese, roasted red pepper and Caramelised Onions are a winning combination. Hegarty's Cheddar, with thinly sliced salami (Gubbeen, for preference) and Tomato Chilli Jam also worked out well. Next time I may even be organised enough to try a few of Greg's own ideas for toppings - spinach, pesto, mushrooms and feta sounds good, as does sausage, pepperoni, artichoke hearts and peppers. The book also includes a selection of salads (I've already got my eye on Baby Lettuce with a Citrus Peppercorn Dressing) and deserts (Cinnamon Churros, grilled pizza style) to accompany the pizzas, alongside recipes for the Italian-style flatbreads called piadinas - something to try out for next Sunday, perhaps.

Grilled Pizzas & Piadinas by Craig Priebe is published by DK Publishing

I bought a small, three-level seed sprouter last summer but it was much too warm in our Dublin flat so my first attempts weren't very successful. Now, on a bright windowsill in my unheated cottage, it's really coming into its own. It's on the window behind the sink which makes it easier to remember to rinse the sprouts twice a day - it's not so good when you forget although the smell will help you remember.

I started off using the seeds that I bought at the same time as the sprouter - broccoli (a bit weedy), fenugreek (spicy addition to salads), mustard (peppery, really good in sandwiches) and red clover, which is all a bit anonymous. Getting more adventurous, I recently moved on to the contents of the store cupboard. Mung beans - the bean sprouts we all know - have been a success, especially in their crunchy and juicy early stages but the quinoa never really grew properly and the wheatberries were much too much like grass to be palatable. I suppose that's why wheatgrass is normally used for producing juice. My absolute favourite - so far - are the sprouted lentils. I've been switching between the simple brown and crunchier Puy lentils, both which are great mixed with the stronger-flavoured mustard and fenugreek sprouts in salads and stuffed into sandwiches, pitta breads and wraps. With this tiny garden, I'm much better with successive planting - hopefully we can make it work better outdoors this year!

If you're interested in reading more, there's some very useful information about sprouting in the recent Guardian Grow-Your-Own Guide and the ever-useful Nigel Slater gives a few ideas about how to use them here.

I've written about Heidi, her site and her cookbook, Super Natural Cooking, here before. Both the blog and the book are things I keep turning to, again and again, for sweet and savoury inspiration, especially after I pick up something new from the health shop. With the addition of some dark chocolate chips - I wanted to balance the bitterness of the cacao nibs - these turned into Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies, rich and nutty from the buckwheat, crunchy with cacao nibs and sweetened by the chocolate. The flavour of the buckwheat is particularly pronounced on the day that you bake the cookies, mellowing nicely in the days that follow - making these great to fill the going-to-work tin.

I have a suspicion that these cookies will also be great sandwiched with vanilla ice cream, and I've a tub of Murphy's awaiting attention in the freezer at this very moment. I didn't get a score this week from the Polish Colleague but the Mallow Workmate said that they were her favourite of all the things I've brought to work so far (8/10).

Webwatch
www.bibliocook.com
Read about the culinary adventures of former entertainment journalist turned Ballymaloe-trained cook and food writer, Caroline Hennessy.
Published: Sat 19 April 2008 - The Irish Times - Magazine

Now, it seems, I read the ingredient list - but forget to look at the method. When I looked at this recipe (originally for a Date and Peach Slice) I figured that I'd just use apricots instead of peaches but I neglected to notice the direction to prepare a 9 inch square tin. Do I have a 9 inch square tin? Not at all. That's why this week's slice ended up turning into a cake (I did have an 8 inch round tin) which, try as you may, is rather difficult to cut into enough evenly shaped pieces for morning coffee to get you through the week!

That said, it was a fantastically moist and well-flavoured cake, flecked with a mixture of reconstituted and dried fruit and well worth the trouble. Next time, I think I'll try to double the mixture to fit in my swiss-roll tin. The score from the Polish Colleague? 7/10 this time.

Terra Madre Ireland 2008 - 4 to 7 September, in Waterford City. Slow food workshops, debates, tours and tastings, all based around the theme of sustainable food production. Sign up on the website for a news letter that will keep you up-to-date with all the goings-on.

Although I didn't really follow the recipe, I have to admit that it was not entirely my fault - this time. I had the honey - but the Husband had stuck a buttery knife, complete with toast crumbs, into the jar (luckily that transgression was balanced by the gift of the book!) - so that was substituted with maple syrup, which I couldn't even taste in the eventual result. One of my recently-purchased packets of flaked almonds went a-missing so instead I used a not-too-bad combination of flaked almonds and toasted pistachios. The eventual result - Nutty Chocolate Squares - didn't go to waste, they had their fans, especially when there was nothing else on offer, but only scored 6/10 from the Polish Colleague. His scale is, apparently based on flapjacks at 10/10. Here is the original recipe - I think this may be one to try again, but with honey this time.

Although I was rather underwhelmed with my experience at the first Taste of Dublin, the teething problems - portion size, rain shelter, muck underfoot - seem to have been ironed out and, for the event's Cork debut, the organisers have chosen the historic surroundings of the Cork City Gaol (or Jail, depending on where you grew up!) for the weekend of Friday 27 to Sunday 29 June. The restaurant line up includes Jacobs on the Mall, Seamus O'Connell's Ivory Tower, the very familiar Ballymaloe House, and Mallow's representative - Longueville House. We're planning on a family day out - time to book those tickets!