WILL THIS chilly weather ever end? Anyhow, let’s cheer ourselves up with a big pot of bubbling stew.

DURING these recessionary times we’re racking our brains to come up with thrifty ways of having fun and improving our quality of life without breaking the bank.

CLOSE to a hundred people crammed into our local village hall recently for the inaugural meeting of GIY (Grow It Yourself) Shanagarry, east Cork.

I’M CONTINUALLY surprised by how thrown waiting staff in many restaurants seem to be if one asks about the provenance of the food. They immediately seem to go on the defensive and it can take three or four attempts to find out the source of a piece of meat, fish or cheese.

LOVE is in the air and there are a few things more alluring than the smell of something delicious cooking in the oven. Doesn’t matter how sexy you are, they soon get fed up with burnt burgers and greasy chips.

COMING up to Christmas lots of newly published cookbooks arrived on my desk. There were so many that I simply couldn’t manage to mull over each one.

SIMPLICITY, even in winter, is everything and nothing hits the spot quite like a hearty bowl of thick, chunky vegetable soup. You can even throw in a few fat lardons of bacon or generous cubes of chorizo to add extra oomph. How delicious does that sound?

FOOD fads come and go, but the craving for Italian food endures; a few, really simple pasta recipes are a must in everyone’s repertoire and where better to seek them out than in Giuliano Hazan’s books.

ON January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, the French enjoy 50 million Galette des Rois to celebrate the Festival of Kings. The flaky pastry cake has a soft filling of delicious frangipane. Inside is hidden a Feve. Originally it was a broad bean, but nowadays it is more likely to be a tiny porcelain or hard plastic figure.

IT’S A very busy time in the kitchen so don’t forget a big hug for the cook. By now most people will have planned their menu for the festive season. Let’s hope the lesson learned from the excesses of the Celtic Tiger era will mean that fewer people will totter out of the supermarket with trolleys piled high as though the shops were never to open again.