I LOVE vegetables and fresh salads and could certainly live on them without feeling even remotely deprived. Having said that I am totally not a vegetarian — I love good meat and fish. However I am not interested and I certainly don’t feel comfortable eating either meat or fish that has been reared in cramped, inhumane conditions all for the sake of providing cheap food.

THERE’S a butcher shop on Moxon Street, in London, called The Ginger Pig.

I LOVE the sound of seagulls calling, squalling, squabbling and chasing each other for fun or a wriggly fish — it reminds me of holidays in Tramore as a child, ice-cream cones, sand buckets, little fishing nets, and picnics by the Metal Man.

TWO terrific cookbooks written by two crazily busy mums came my way this week.

This weekend I’m heading to Sandbrook in Co Carlow to celebrate International Slow Food Grandmother’s Day.

MY NEW book Irish Traditional Cooking was launched in New York over St Patrick’s Weekend.

WE’VE just hatched out a clutch of fluffy chicks in time for Easter.

IN THE weeks preceding St Patrick’s Day we get a myriad of enquiries from food and travel writers from all over the world who are honing their copy for the March 17 edition.

MUCH has changed on the Irish food scene since I started the Ballymaloe Cookery School in September 1983.

WOW, I just long to return to Bangkok and not just for a few days en route to another destination in Asia.