The Dingle Food Fair always takes place on the first weekend in October, often managing to steal a smidgeon of the mellow warmth of September in its wake. This year with our Indian summer in full swing on Europe’s most Western spit of land, the Dingle Peninsula, the festival promises to be an exciting and vibrant celebration of the most delicious and innovative Irish foods.

From little acorns... Iberian ham blinis sprout, to tempt our autumnal palates. Our friends at the Hacienda Zorita Wine Hotel & Spa whip up a mean blini.

Their head chef, Raúl Losada shares his recipe, using ingredients from their organic farm. You might want to improvise with local ham and cheese..!

A hearty salad with colour and flavour galore. What better way to welcome back the Summer?

Our friends, James and Kate Mackenzie, know how to tempt palates. At the Pipe and Glass Inn in Beverley, East Yorkshire, they've won awards for their food and hospitality. We asked them to serve up a salad worthy of a British summer.

'Salt beef is a good old-fashioned meat, but very under-used. We use the brisket which is brined and then boiled for hours; treat it as you would a joint of gammon. Using the brisket with its nice fat content gives the beef a moist and tasty texture. The salad of salt beef uses green beans, radish, Lincolnshire poacher and quail eggs. A simple and colourful dish which could be a starter or a main course.'

Here's a delicious-sounding recipe from our friends Roy and Goretti - one a Scottish chef, one a Catalan whisky expert - who run the 12th-century La Rectoria de Sant Miquel de Pineda in the wooded hills of La Garrotxa, Spain.

"One of the characteristic themes of Catalan cooking is 'mar i muntanya', the combination of ingredients from the sea and the land," they say. "Our guests love this... Bon profit! (Good appetite), as we say in Catalonia."

Installment number three from our owners' recipes series comes from Maureen Sheda. Maureen fell in love with Italy during her European travels in the seventies, and moved there permanently.

She married Italian Roberto and together they discovered La Torretta in Casperia. Roberto, an architect, breathed new life into the 15th-century palazzo and they now run a cookery school and successful B&B. They hold wine and olive oil tastings in the medieval hilltop village, too, and have been members of the Slow Food Movement since it began.

Here's the second delicious installment from our owners' recipes series - home-cooked ham, from Giulia Savini from Locanda della Valle Nuova.

The Locanda is a 185-acre family-run farm that produces organic meat, vegetables and wine; it appears in our Italy guide, and in Go Slow Italy.

Giulia says: "At the beginning of the year everywhere in the Italian countryside we prepare our hams, salamis and sausages. This is my recipe for a great home-made cold cut. I usually use loin, not leg, as it gives good results; it's not very thick so the brine penetrates the meat evenly and it's easy to cut. Of course, the best results are achieved if you use very good quality organic pork."

We're kicking off our owners' recipes series with this simple dish from Rosanna at La Traversina. Her warmth and welcome are legendary, and her garden in Piedmont in the summer is brimful with 230 varieties of roses. They grow much of their own fruit and veg, too, and cultivate giant tomatoes.