Compiled by MARIE-CLAIRE DIGBY

Food and fashion

Good Food Ireland brings its artisan food producers’ marquee to the Summer Festival at Kildare Village Outlet – very weekend from today until August 19th

the buzz

Top food tweets . . .

Duncan Blair @duncanblr: VIP customers in today on 1hour stopover, whizzed here off private jet. Came especially for @oflynnssausages @dungarvanbrewco

FoodRepublic.com@foodrepublic: What happens when chefs play pranks? Interns run for the left-handed sauté pan

Kerrygold_Ireland @KerrygoldIRL: As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists. Fantastic quote from Prof food policy expert Joan Gussow

Bran new idea

Monini, a name more readily associated with olive oil, has introduced rice bran oil to its range. The Italian company says that food cooked in rice bran oil absorbs up to 20 per cent less oil, and it has a very high smoking point, too. It is now on sale in Dunnes and Superquinn and costs €3.99 for 500mls, with an additional €1 off with a coupon on the neck of the bottle, until the end of August.

And now for a nice cuppa . . .

The first thing to know about Bubble Tea is that it’s not a cuppa as you might know it, but rather a mix of white, green or black tea with fruit juices or milk, and chewy tapioca pearls, sucked through a large straw. You’d think tapioca in a glass would be a hard sell, but the drink, which originated in Taiwan and is now popular throughout Asia, earned a cult following when it was launched in the UK last year, and it’s now available in Dublin. Ivano Cafolla, Ronan Murphy and Karl Mulvee have opened Bubblicity Bubble Tea in the George’s Street Arcade in Dublin 2. Popular flavours include chilled coconut vanilla milk tea and green jasmine tea with iced mango and passionfruit.

Cooking and sport

There are plenty of cookery classes and camps aimed at keeping children occupied during the long summer holidays, but few are as diverse as the FoodActive programme, a mixture of cooking and sport, run by Garth and Mark McColgan and Paul Quinlan at St Conleth's College in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. The cooking element of this camp is top-notch – nothing is dumbed down, and the ingredients used are first-class (you'll get to taste your child's work every evening when they bring it home, and you might be surprised how sophisticated the dishes are). "We are going to get into the nitty-gritty of a couple of Heston Blumenthal recipes this year to enhance their scientific understanding of the components of some foods we eat," says chef and teacher Garth. The life lessons of healthy eating and an active existence are at its core, but it's fun too. The cost is €250 for one week, €450 for two, and after-camp supervision is available up to 5.15pm. Camps run every week until July 27th. See foodactive.ie.

Chinese cook book extravaganza

It is a bumper summer for the release of Chinese cookery books. First off the presses was Gok Wan with his excellent Gok Cooks Chinese (Michael Joseph, £20), a tie-in with his Channel 4 TV series. The fashion stylish cooks his family’s recipes – they used to run a Chinese restaurant – and manages to make Chinese food look easy and quick to prepare, as well as healthy.

Fuchsia Dunlop, perhaps the western world’s most knowledgeable exponent of Chinese cuisine, delves into the home cooking of southern China in Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (Bloomsbury, £25).

There’s a lot of anticipation in advance of the publication on July 19th of Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure: 100 recipes from our journey by Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang (BBC Books, £25). The old-school Hom and the cool, stylish Huang embark on a culinary and cultural journey in the land of their forefathers for a BBC TV series that should make fascinating viewing.