Until recently, I had a weird fear of yeast-based baking. I imagined it to be a long, laborious and risky sort of process. How wrong I was! Sure, the kneading takes a while, but it’s a therapeutic way to spend ten or fifteen minutes while I fantasise about some day owning a KMix with a dough hook.

I’ve made Imen’s lovely pizza dough countless times since April, with consistently tasty results, and finding some Toonsbridge mozzarella – Ireland’s only buffalo mozzarella – at Saturday’s market was all I needed to make it again. Except, when it came to it, Himself ended up doing the honours while I faffed about in the garden. Is it weird that I talk to my pea plants?

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Does anyone else miss Cafe Bar Deli? It’s so sad to see its former home on Georges Street locked up and empty these days. Many’s the pizza-and-red-wine Friday evening catch-up with friends I had there over the past decade – the food and service were always reliable and it was an affordable option even in my temping days. The menu included some lovely salads, too, my particular favourite being a beetroot, goat’s cheese and bacon combo.

Alas, himself is beetroot-averse, so I don’t get to eat the stuff all that often. But, with the house to myself on Saturday, and fridgeful of fresh food from the market, I decided to have a go at recreating the CBD salad for myself. All the ingredients below were purchased at the market (even the rapeseed oil), with the exception of the beetroot, which hailed from my parents’ polytunnel, and the thyme, which came from my back garden.

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Oftentimes, it can be tricky to get through a wedding day here without a serious dose of the munchies. The few hours between the ceremony and reception are the undoing of many, especially if pints are involved! A tea-and-snack pitstop was just the thing this past Friday after my cousin M’s nuptials, and seventeen of us sat round my parents’ kitchen table to fuel up before hitting the road for the reception.

I decided – at about nine o’clock on Thursday evening, when I should have been packing – to bake something to add to the table. These cheddar and sage scones were a cinch to pull together, even while breaking in my new shoes for the big day.

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