It was a long dark winter in Ballydavid I realised I'd been there too long, I'd been an earth mother too long, I'd been in the kitchen too long. With hindsight I can see that writing a cookbook isn't the ideal way of getting out of the kitchen, and that West Kerry isn't the ideal place to write a Mexican cookbook, and at the end of the day I wasn't the ideal person to do that either. So after spending a few months stressing about the scarcity of iguana meat and tamarinds in Garveys Supervalue I abandonned the recipes and concentrated on the paintings..... I was in a kind of fever dream, painting memories of the tropics while the rain beat down incessantly turning the village to a sea of mud and our roof blew off again. 

My salsa became legend among passing surfers but I never did slice an iguana.