SO MANY menus nowadays are utterly predictable, chicken, farmed salmon, steak and maybe lamb. Sometimes there is duck but it’s rare enough to be offered any wild food or game.

THE food world, and particularly those of us who love spices, are all a twitter on hearing the news that Indian cook and actress Madhur Jaffrey has just written another cook book.

I’VE NEVER met Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, yet she has long been a hero of mine. Debo, as she is known to her friends, now a feisty 90, was the youngest Mitford sister.

I’M SITTING with my back to a stone wall on Inis Meáin — on Ireland’s western seaboard — watching islander Padraic McDonagh hand threshing rye in the time honoured way.

NATIONAL Organic Food Week, now in its sixth year continues to gather momentum. The raison d’être for the week-long campaign from Monday, September 13 to Sunday, September 19 is to raise awareness about organic food and where to buy and enjoy it.

SLOW FOOD has brought me to many remote places around the globe in search of ancient cultures and indigenous foods. Recently I found myself in Sápmi (Samiland) in northern Sweden – the land of the midnight sun; it was bright almost all night.

MY goodness, it’s the end of the world as I know it. Last week, my two-and-a-half year old granddaughter Amelia Peggy came along clutching an iPhone and told me she wanted to show me how to make a cake.

A FEW months ago I wrote about a new young chef called Stevie Parle who is making waves on the London food scene.

THE British Guild of Food Writers was founded on April 12, 1984, when a small group of food writers met over a superb lunch, amongst them Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Arabella Boxer and Michael Smith.

WHILE there are lots of delicious Irish currants and berries around, let’s have a “jam session”.