The big challenge for many a busy mum and dad nowadays is to feed the family with wholesome nourishing food on a diminishing budget. Of course it is possible, but it takes more time, energy and determination to ferret out fresh local food in season.

HALLOWEEN was a spooky time when I was child, we heard all about the banshee. People told ghost stories and we ate barmbrack and colcannon. It was all about fortune telling and divination.

THE whole wide world, it seems, loves sausages.

THIS weekend I was in Camelot – bet you thought it was an imaginary place. In real life Camelot is in beautiful, verdant Somerset.

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.