Send Index Category to Sidebar?

Sorry I haven’t found an answer to this… I want to have my sidebar show the 10 most recent post titles/URL’s, but only for the category the user is currently viewing. I see that coffee2code has a nice plugin to show post titles in a certain category. What I don’t know how to do is tell sidebar.php which category index.php is viewing. The category only seems known inside The Loop. Is there some way to pass the current category to the sidebar?

Thanks
Michelle