nutty beetroot, nashi pear and carrot salad

nutty beetroot, nashi pear and carrot salad

Salads don't have to be boring. I feel a spot of singing coming on; "all things bright and beautiful"! This rather sums up both how gorgeous and vibrant this salad looks and rather sums up how it tastes too.

roasted vegetable frittata

roasted vegetable frittata

There is an advert on the telly at the moment for a well-known food brand. It irritates me for a number of reasons, not least because it is twee and patronising. (That the company in question have hash tagged it with #cosy, probably says it all.)

dragons' eggs (or chinese tea eggs)

chinese tea eggs

My family was divided as to what the strange, mottled boiled eggs that were sold at various corner grocers shops and hawker stalls in Kuala Lumpur were called. My mother and little brother were convinced that they these were tiny dinosaur eggs. My father and I were equally satisfied that they were dragons' eggs.

malaysian chicken satay

malaysian chicken satay

Campbell Road in downtown Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s was where the best hawker food was. It was where my father and I indulged in our passion for noodles and satay. At 10 cents a stick, you would order batches of five or six sticks at a time or 10 or 12 if feeling a bit hungrier, which would satisfy us until the next week when we could fill our boots again.

what's in season: may

springtime nasturtiums

May has got off to a bit of a grey start - the sky over London is a murky shade of gunmetal. Although when I step out into my garden, or walk along the lane to the main road, there are spots of colour everywhere, from bluebells and nasturtiums that have seeded unexpectedly and survived the wet, mild winter.