Recipe For Disaster series

These are the memories I share with my lucky, lucky friends over dinner. If my friends lose their appetites, well, they also broaden their horizons.

My mother was a woman filled with natural enthusiasm for many things in life, but she did detest cooking. It was depressing, therefore, that she spent so much of her life - "trapped," she would put it - in the kitchen. On the bright side, it was the only warm room in the house in the eight-month-long Irish winter. (We had no central heating, but for a peat briquette fire in the front room, and that was lit only when night fell.)

Some of my most vivid memories of childhood are centred in that kitchen. It was cramped, untidy, and the scene of great dramas.

I have grown up, in my turn, to be an enthusiastic (but bad) cook.