Bibliocook: All About Food

A cup of hot coffee with milk at Café Mai, 79 Le Van Huu Street, Hanoi. Dark, strong and very sweet - there's a layer of condensed milk at the bottom of the cup - Vietnamese coffee is just the thing to get you going in the morning, and for the rest of the day.

The coffee often comes sitting in a bowl of warm water to keep it hot and with a glass of water for dilution purposes: I prefer to drink it straight, leaving the syrupy milk sitting at the bottom until the coffee is gone, then using the teaspoon to eat it from the cup.

It's a one-stop breakfast, available everywhere, and normally drunk while Little Missy inspects the kitchens, courtesy of an adoring waiting staff! I've not had the chance to eat so many meals with two hands for the last 10 months.

On a cold, wet, miserable day, there's nothing better than coming home to a big bowl of piping hot, homemade soup. Pick from Chicken Noodle, Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato or White Bean and Cabbage Soups and make a meal of it with Caroline Hennessy's recipes for pots of pleasure on SilverCircle.ie.

...to blue skies and lakeside walks, to fabulous food (we've been truly spoiled by the Husband's Mother!) and rich, dark coffees, to post-swim fish and chips and bowlfuls of fresh, seasonal fruit, to Little Missy figuring out how to pick the fresh peas from a homegrown pod and lazy bach days.

It gets more and more difficult to leave New Zealand each time but at least we're not heading home just yet. Next stop - via a brief stop tonight in Kuala Lumpur - Vietnam! I've heard there's more food to eat over there.

Flowers on a feijoa tree at Stafford Lane Estate when we visited on a wine tour of the Nelson area. Feijoas are very popular in New Zealand, I loved them when we were living here, but it's the wrong time of year for the fruit. You can, however, get a little of the tropical flavour from the fleshy petals of the flower.

Evilly dark long blacks, with steamed milk on the side at the Alpine Lodge Café . My coffee of choice when we're in NZ. This is an especially good example of the genre - just look at that crema.

Avocados growing on the trees in the Husband's Mother's veggie garden behind the house. Even better than bananas for convenient baby (and mama!) feeding.

Op shop bargains. When we lived here, there was little in my kitchen that didn't come from one or other of the charity shops nearby. Since we've been living back in Ireland, I've carried home a variety of finds, including bundles of bone-handled knives, battered baking tins, cute little salt pigs and hand-embroidered tablecloths. This time I was rather restrained but I still couldn't resist an old potato masher (the Husband killed ours while making his superlative mashed potatoes before we left home) and this dainty little tray cloth. Well behaved? I think so...

Sometimes the only way to get the true flavour of summer is to wriggle your feet in the grass!

Nicola Galloway may be based in Nelson, New Zealand, but this no-nonsense, practical cookbook will appeal to parents in any hemisphere. From first tastes and flavors to school lunches and dinnertimes, there are plenty of ideas here for feeding children of every age group as well as recipes you can adapt for the entire family.

A trained chef and nutritionist, Galloway focuses on healthy eating but not at the expense of taste and ease of preparation. This book is packed with simple recipes - rather than spending money on the big brand versions, why not make your own rusks, muesli or Chocolate Hazelnut Spread? - along with ideas for adding iron (dried fruit) to baby porridge, protein (ground oats) to pancakes and vitamin and mineral-rich spirulina to smoothies.

Plenty of tips on using ingredients like spices, ground nuts and kelp are scattered in bite-sized chunks throughout the text. The recipes are sandwiched between a chapter on nutrition and a collection of useful appendices, including a meal planner and food introduction table.

While this book will be of most interest to parents, there are few people that won't learn a little about eating well from reading it.

Cooking for Your Child by Nicola Galloway is published by Craig Potton Publishing and is available online - more details from www.nicolagalloway.com

Must Try: Cashew Banana Chew, Pinwheel Scones, Grilled Chicken with Yellow Rice Pilaf

Without television, radio or mobile reception, heading off to the Husband's family bach, or holiday home, at Lake Rotoiti always entails packing lots of books. The use of the Husband's Mother's library card is always very much appreciated and gives me a chance to pick up a few cookbooks from the great selection available (did I ever mention that I love NZ libraries?). Between occasional walks and trips down to the small village of St Arnaud for coffee at the Alpine Lodge café - fresh baked muffins (favourite: raspberry, pecan and chocolate) and scones every morning, great looking brunches and lunches, with long blacks worth walking miles for - there is plenty of time for reading.

I like to dig out one of the old fashioned lean-back deck chairs (it comes complete with a woggly sunshade which can either keep the sun out of your eyes or alternatively decide to land down on top of your sunglasses), pile up my bounty at the side and just indulge, sand flies and Little Missy willing. This is what is on the pile at the moment.

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe - fascinating, but chilling reading. This is full of gloomy stories about pollution, collapsing fish stocks and global warming. Apparently there's some hopeful pointers on what fish we should be eating to come but I haven't got there yet. Educational but depressing. www.tarasgrescoe.com

Cooking for Your Child by Nicola Galloway - this book by Nelson-based Nicola was introduced to me by the Husband's Mother a few years ago. I immediately loved her no-nonsense attitude to feeding kids and bought a copy for the Writer, which - after the arrival of LM - I have had on extended loan. After borrowing it from the library this trip I decided it was definitely time to buy my own copy. LM enjoys her (Nana-made) banana teething rusks, banana scrambled eggs are up for dinner tonight and I'm liking recipes that can be used for grown ups as well as smallies. www.nicolagalloway.com

Frugal Food by Delia Smith - For me, Delia's star has been forever tarnished by her appalling How to Cheat at Cooking but I did want to take a look at Frugal Food as it is an updated version of her 1970s book. I have to say that it is a little underwhelming, nothing very new or interesting to find here. www.deliaonline.com

Taste Favourites - Taste is a great food magazine that I always pick up when I visit NZ. An intelligent blend of the aspirational and achievable, every copy I look at has me reaching for my notebook to scribble down ideas and ingredient combinations. Having said that, this cookbook, with 70 recipes from the magazine, just isn't as much fun as the monthly publication. Now that my Cuisine subscription has lapsed, maybe it's time to change magazines for a while.www.taste.co.nz

While in New Zealand, staying with the Husband's parents, our nearest café is actually a boutique winery called Fossil Ridge. We pass the small vineyard on our daily walk (sometimes several times a day as the Husband tries to balance lots of eating his mother's fabulous food with regular competitive brother-in-law weigh-ins!) and the walk does occasionally get a little interrupted. An attractive wooden building, set amidst olive groves and overlooking a pond covered with water lilies, the cellar door is a relaxed setting to enjoy a selection of platters and light lunches to accompany its wines. The pond also plays host to a number of ducks, which are endlessly fascinating to a Little Missy who, if she hasn't fallen asleep in the pushchair on the walk there, is often determined to make her presence felt.

We haven't yet tried much of the savoury side of the menu - too well fed at home, we are! - but we're becoming regulars for coffee, which is served with delectable little homemade cookies. Their lemon shortbread is worth checking out and they also make a crunchy Macadamia Caramel Square with locally grown nuts. Each year we visit, we also make a date to try out their wines. For NZ$7, you get to choose four out of their six wines for your tasting plate, accompanied by a few olives and walnuts (although, as the Husband pointed out, both the number of olives and quality of nuts has depreciated since our last visit in 2007).

Although it was their Pinot Noir that we fell for last time round, their latest Pinot vintage, from 2007, didn't do anything for me. I am, however, a long-time fan of their zesty, slightly honeyed Riesling (2007) and the 2008 Gewürztraminer was a spicy, aromatic mouthful.

Small enough for the personal touch and with just enough wines to taste without confusion, Fossil Ridge is well worth dropping into if you are nearby. Although tempted to try and squeeze a couple of bottles into my luggage, it might be more reasonable to track them down in Ireland. A good excuse for another visit, perhaps...

Darina Allen's latest book focuses on kitchen skills and traditions - such as making yoghurt, keeping hens and baking bread - that have been lost in recent times. She talks to Caroline Hennessy for EveryMonday.ie about how the increasing interest in self-sufficiency can help us weather the recession.

Pavlova and barbeques, hokey pokey ice cream and long blacks: we've abandoned the cold and damp of an Irish December for Christmas in New Zealand! The Husband, Little Missy and I left Cork last Saturday and eventually arrived in Nelson on Tuesday. This way LM gets to spend her first Christmas with her Kiwi family and we all get to enjoy some proper summer weather (we are, however, hoping to bring the sunshine home with us...)

This time we travelled with Malaysia Airlines, who, we discovered, are brilliant at dealing with children, overnighting in Kuala Lumpur on the way. Travelling with an eight-month-old baby is a little more challenging than travelling solo, to say the least, but at least we're two to deal with one, rather than the other way round. It would have been quite useful if the one out of the two doing the packing had managed to travel a little lighter but small baby = many nappies, changes of clothes, sleeping bags, small toys and books for distraction - and that's just the carry on luggage.

One of the other advantages of coming over with Malaysia Airlines is the food. Take the Malaysian offering for meals and you won't go far wrong, with dishes like nasi lemak and beef rendang on offer. LM didn't fare as well in the dining department, both flights having only two basic Heinz baby foods but I was able to bring a good amount of food, both homemade and jarred, through security in Cork, Heathrow and KL airports without any problem.

Little Missy was great on the plane from Ireland but I wouldn't like to have been the hapless inhabitants of the room next door during that night in KL as she disregarded the eight hours time difference and stuck resolutely to her normal sleep time, which turned out to be 4.30am in Malaysia! Still, it was worth it for the break from travelling, not to mention the mugs of teh tarik, trays of roti telur and, one of my all time favourites, spicy laksa johor that we got a chance to devour while there.

Now, with Christmas almost upon us and a family wedding fast approaching, we're planted here for most of the next month. Plenty of time to soak up the sunshine, enjoy vineyard and brewpub visits, savour the fantastic food both at home - the Husband's mother is a fantastic cook - and around Nelson, and introduce LM to all her family in the southern hemisphere. Merry Christmas to all!

I've always been a fan of porridge. It's one of those things that seems to fit in perfectly with a cold morning at the cottage: a steaming bowlful, topped with some stewed fruit and a dollop of natural yoghurt is just the thing to set myself and Little Missy up for the day. She eats the regular sort, which I grind up with my immersion blender (always useful but now indispensable) before cooking, but I've gotten hooked on Flahavan's Pinhead Oatmeal this winter.

It takes a little longer to cook than the rolled oats but when you're up around 6am, time is not exactly in short supply! I use cook mine with half milk, half water (LM gets expressed breast milk, or a little regular milk, plus water in her ground up oats), pop it on the cooker at a low setting and it cooks away by itself, with a couple of stirs from me between getting showered and dressed.

When I'm with it enough to soak the oats overnight it does shorten the cooking time a little but if I was super-organised what I'd do is cook a whole pot in advance, as recommended in Super Natural Cooking and the New York Times (steel-cut oats in America = pinhead oatmeal in Ireland) and reheat as necessary. And then there are porridge toppings. Stewed pear and allspice are popular here, as are apple and dried apricot compote or poached cinnamon plums, always with natural yoghurt and, for the members of the family with more than two teeth, a sprinkling of toasted nuts or seeds.

Porridge makes the best breakfast, being cheap, nutritious, easy - and local. If you pick up a bag of Flahavan's progress oatlets (I've always loved that progress bit!) you're also picking up a bit of history: the family-run business has been based in Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, for the last 200 years.

If you're a porridge fan - or like your oatmeal in other dishes - you might be interested in the recently launched Flahavan's All-Ireland Porridge-Making Challenge. They have two categories: one is to make the perfect dish of porridge and the the other is to create a recipe using something from Flahavan's porridge oat range. The closing date is 31 January 2010 so you have all Christmas to come up with a few good ideas. There's more information below and you'll find the full terms and conditions on the Flahavan's website, along with some recipes from Kevin Dundon.

I love good olive oil and I especially love Colletta Olivieri Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which is imported direct from Italy by producer Lino Olivieri. This week he will be taking delivery of the delicious olio nuovo, new season olive oil, from his family's farm in Puglia so if you're looking for a Christmas present for someone who likes their food, then get your hands on this - it's €40 for a 5 litre can or €25 for the 3 litre can and Lino will courier it anywhere in the country for a very reasonable cost.

Our can lives in a cool place behind the kitchen door, easily accessible so that I can regularly decant it into the dark wine bottle that sits, easily accessible, on the counter. The oil being so fresh, it has a lovely peppery kick which is especially noticable when you eat it with fresh bread or drizzle it over garlic-rubbed toast.

You can read more about the oil below or on the Olivieri olive oil website. Lino Olivieri can be contacted by email (lino.olivieri@gmail.com) or mobile (086 8681803).

Nigel, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love your appetite-stimulating writing, your easy recipes, your ability to always show me something interesting to do with kitchen constants like cauliflower, onions or lentils. I love your weekly column in the Observer and I love the Observer Food Monthly magazine (which, while living in NZ, I had sent out to me by my long-suffering mother!). I love your books, right from the copy of Real Fast Food that I got when in college, through entertaining from Real Food and Appetite while in my first job, The Kitchen Diaries that I recommended to many of my customers in Urru, bookclub choice Toast and, now, to Tender.

Ah, Tender. Not only am a fan of Nigel's but I'm a sucker for ingredient-categorised books like this. Tender, as the title says, is a tale of a cook and his vegetable patch, of growing food in the city and what happens to the produce when it makes it into the kitchen. Nigel has a long, thin, London terrace garden that, with a lot of love and some help from friends (Monty Don being an especially good friend to have in this kind of situation), has been transformed into "a romantic mingling of vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers." It's also productive, with vegetables like chard, courgettes and tomatoes all playing starring roles both inside and outside the house.

Each section has information on growing a particular vegetable, different varieties to try in the garden, a selection of recipes and - this is what Nigel is particularly good at doing - lots of ideas, both for ingredients that go well with it and different ways to cook/serve it. This will join Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book and the Garden Cookbook by Sarah Raven in the line of well-thumbed books that live on the kitchen mantelpiece for dealing with vegetable gluts. And it's not over yet. Volume II, his guide to the fruit garden, is due in May 2010. Another one to watch for.

Must Try: A Soup of Cauliflower and Cheese, Chocolate Beetroot Cake with Crème Fraîche and Poppy Seeds, Chickpeas with Pumpkin, Lemongrass and Coriander

Tender: v. 1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch by Nigel Slater is published by Fourth Estate.

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Christmas is the time for long, leisurely brunches with family and friends. Make it easy with dishes that you can prepare in advance and whip into the oven just before your guests arrive. Caroline Hennessy, writing for EveryMonday.ie, gives you a few easy ideas that won't have you losing your Christmas cheer. Click here for recipes for Christmas Muffins (pictured on the right), Potato, Smoked Salmon and Cream Cheese Frittata and Buttermilk Pancakes with Cranberry Orange Sauce.