I'm old enough to remember a time when olive oil in Ireland was something you put in your ear. You bought it in a chemist's in a tiny bottle and it was purely medicinal. Some years ago I introduced an Italian friend of mine to Ireland - Enzo Mantova - and he has since introduced his olive oil here. One of the first things he did was take home a sample of every olive oil he could find that was already on the Irish market. Back at his factory he got his lab technicians to analyse them spectro-graphically. Most were exactly as you would expect: blends of olive and other vegetable oils. Mentioning no names here - for fear of men in wigs - one oil regularly found in tiny medicinal bottles, defied analysis. Its spectographic fingerprint was unmatchable to any known combination of oils.

Today every supermarket stocks a good range of olive oils, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish and some labelled mysteriously 'produce of the EU.' In real terms olive oil is cheaper now than it has ever been - a decent extra virgin oil can be bought for about £3 a litre, cheap enough to use it on a daily basis.

Olive oil has many wonderful properties, but it's not great for deep frying since it burns at a lower temperature than other vegetable oils. In these cholesterol conscious times it can replace butter on vegetables, butter for shallow frying, lard for basting and is essential on a salad. But it also has the property of absorbing flavours, and this makes it ideal for preserving herbs.

If you've ever grown and dried basil for later use you'll certainly have been disappointed with the loss of flavour. A good way around this is to put fresh basil - or any other herb - into a jar and cover it with olive oil. Make sure no air bubbles get trapped between the leaves or mould will form. The basil retains more of its flavour, and as a bonus, when it's finished, you've got basil flavoured oil as a treat. You can use this property of flavour absorption to good effect with chillies. I find them difficult to dose when whole; but if you break them up a bit and cover them in a jar with olive oil after about three weeks you can use the oil - by now fiery red - to flavour your food. Dosing it becomes a simple matter of counting teaspoonsful.

In countries where olive oil is a staple it is also used for preserving things. Once covered in oil and safe from the air just about anything can be preserved: sardines, salt-cured sausages, cheese, herbs, mushrooms, aubergines and courgettes - these last two normally sliced julienne style and pickled first.

Lastly a personal favourite, tapinade. Take a jar of stoned olives and whizz them in a blender with some olive oil, optionally a little chilli, and there you have it - a simple and tasty dip. Versatile stuff, olive oil, you can even put it in your ear.