My mum’s kitchen was where my love of cooking began. The spice cupboard beside the white 1980s cooker smelled dark and musty, and was filled equally with freshly bought spice jars and recycled ones with fading labels and grubby finger marks from dark, bubbling casseroles gone by. Bags of dried oregano, carefully carried home from summer holidays in Greece and Turkey, sat alongside the jar of birthday candles that came out twice a year, and the plastic bags of spices from the Asian market, tightly rolled up and sealed with a plastic clip. In her attempt to hide sweets from my brother and…

For the past few years, I have been making an annual pilgrimage to New York to appear on the Today show, NBC’s flagship breakfast television show. As their token Irish cook on St Patrick’s Day, I’ve been on hand to serve up some of our best traditional fare. I do so among hosts dressed entirely in green, on air mentions of “St Patty’s day” and some of the finest stereotypical Irish American accents you could shake a shillelagh at. That being said, it is an honour to be asked. Every year I feel immense pride and pressure in equal measure to deliver something that is true to our culinary heritage.

One of my favourite experiences making food shows was filming the series Grandma’s Boy across Italy in 2014. It was an 8 week shoot that had me travel from the North to the South of the country, cooking with Italian grandmothers and discovering the secrets to their regional home cooking. I learnt there and then, just how passionate Italians are about food. Rules like no cream in carbonara, no oil in your pasta water, no Parmesan daintily sprinkled over a dish with seafood and for god’s sake don’t even mention pineapple on pizza. All of this was communicated to me with…