roast butternut squash salad with pomegranate and tahini dressing

roast butternut squash salad with pomegranate and tahini dressing

A spicy, sweet and sour roasted squash salad topped with tangy cheese, crunchy hazelnuts and beautiful jewel-like pomegranate seeds. It is simple yet sumptuous and the perfect autumn salad.

Goat's cheese and blackberry salad with blackberry vinaigrette

Goat's cheese and blackberry salad with blackberry vinaigrette

I live a simpler life these days. Part of it is a case of cutting my coat according to my cloth. Part is wanting to live a more sustainable life. I suppose my priorities have changed and these days I just don't feel a sense of envy for the things I don't have (mainly my lack of designer shoes!).

fresh coconut and coriander chutney

coconut and coriander chutney

One of my favourite chutneys or relishes is this one to accompany curries or dosas. Fresh and nutty, it zings with flavour. It is also rather good stuffed into wraps or sandwiches. Although quite often it doesn't even make it that far as I will eat the lot with a spoon! Unlike some chutneys, this doesn't require any cooking as all the ingredients are raw and it should be eaten soon after preparing, not that that is any hardship.

a perfect spring pasta supper: spaghetti with leeks, parma ham and hazelnuts

spaghetti with leeks, parma ham and hazelnuts

Have you ever seen a recipe on a website, or while flicking through a cookbook or magazine and thought, I must cook that? And have you, despite modern technology, mobile internet, digital cameras and other technical fol-de-rols, failed to make a note of it, instead relying on your memory and an ability to substitute those ingredients you haven't got or that are hard to come by? So what happened? Did it turn out as expected, or like me, did it turn out that you had substituted every ingredient such that the recipe was unrecognisable and sadly just not terribly exciting.

indonesian seafood sate lilit

Indonesian seafood sate lilit

A fabulous sate (satay) from Bali which can be made with a variety of different meats; I love the minced seafood version. What makes it different from the myriad of other sates from Indonesia (and satays from Malaysia) is that firstly it contains coconut and secondly it is not typically served with a peanut sauce.

homemade peanut butter

peanut butter

A few weeks ago a friend came to stay for the weekend. Normally I try to have a few things in that I know that my guests will like. But horror of horror when we toddled home after a night of gentle carousing, I only had half of the components for his favourite midnight snack – a Marmite and peanut butter sarnie.”

labneh cheese balls

From left to right : labneh rolled in sumac, in crushed nuts (a mixture of toasted sesame seeds and peanuts), and in Aleppo pepper.

Have you ever thought about making your own cheese, but worried that you don't have the right gear; that it's too difficult or technical?

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.

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.

a little time travel: kamut kisir

kamut kisir

The myths behind the whole grain, Khorasan Wheat (Kamut), are the food equivalent of an Indiana Jones-type boys own story; rediscovered in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh, the ancient grains were sent to the US and replanted by a farmer in Montana. The truth is sadly more prosaic. But what is indisputable is that khorasan wheat had fallen out of use over centuries, very largely because yields are relatively low and farmers started to develop higher yielding grains.

in memory of my father: seafood laksa lemak (malaysian spicy coconut noodle soup)

seafood laksa lemak (malaysian spicy coconut noodle soup)

If you are regular reader of this blog, you will know that I often talk about my father, Henry, a larger-than-life character who taught me so much about how to eat and enjoy food, although not about how to cook. (Frankly Henry's cooking skills generally served as a warning to others).

pearled spelt salad with kale and lemon-tahini dressing

pearled spelt salad with kale and lemon-tahini dressing

Out shopping and I'm caught in a dilemma. Do I choose dark, sleek and elegant, or bright, frilly and frivolous? No I am not shopping for [whisper]  unmentionables, but one of my favourite winter vegetables. Do I choose calvo nero or frilly kale? These are the kind of important decisions that I like to make.

nasi goreng (malaysian fried rice)

nasi goreng

It's not often that I turn from mild-mannered cook by day into my foodie crime-fighting alter-ego; righting food wrongs with a wave of my magic feather boa. I am not saying that the feather boa actually works, but I prefer it to a cape and too-tight knickers; to each super hero(ine) their own fashion-sense. It seems to work for me.

a story of a Goth, a grandmother and baklava, with a sting in the tale!

honey nut baklava

I am thinking about Christmas baking and alternatives to the usual spiced cakes. I want to make some baklava, filo pastry stuffed with spiced nuts and drenched in a honey syryp, which reminded me of my first ever baklava experience and possibly the most disastrous "meet the family" episodes of my life.

a zesty plum and allspice crumble (puts a spring in my step!)

zesty plum and allspice nut crumble

So I am bouncing energetically around the kitchen singing "There is nothing like a plum" to the tune of South Pacific's "There is nothing like a dame" while my plum compote is simmering away on the stove. This is my version of multi-tasking and is guaranteed to raise my spirits, even if my adopted cat tries to put her paws over her ears, before stalking off disgruntled to find quieter shores.

But if life can be improved for a few lovelorn, jolly jack tars by day-dreaming of gorgeous girls, I am pretty sure that curvaceous juicy purple plums cooked down with aromatic allspice can do an awful lot for my beating heart too. 

There is simply nothing like a plum.

roasted butternut squash salad with spiced plums, hazelnuts and blue cheese

roasted butternut squash salad

A few years ago I bought a rather trashy but adorable pink leather slouch bag. What I loved most about it was that the bag was covered with enormous pink fish scale sequins that dangled, clattered and caught the light in a rather flashy way. (I have never made any claims to taste except in things concerning food . . . )

sweet and sour marinated roasted courgettes with goats’ cheese, basil and toasted pine nuts

sweet and sour marinated roasted courgettes with
goats’ cheese, basil and toasted pine nuts

I am always looking for new ways of cooking up an abundance of courgettes and this summer I have loved this salad of sweet and sour marinated roast courgettes, goats' cheese and toasted pine nuts.

It has worked beautifully with roast chicken, and rather good with grilled fish too (although I would omit the cheese).

Definitely the perfect way to celebrate that end-of-summer glut.

mouthwatering velvet chicken and summer vegetable stir fry

velvet chicken

If you have ever wondered why the stir-fried chicken at your local Chinese restaurant is so much more moist and succulent than the version you make at home, the chances are that there is a really simple reason. It's a Chinese cooking technique beautifully known as "velveting".

poached cherry, roasted balsamic red onions and goat's cheese salad with cherry vinaigrette

poached cherry and goat's cheese salad with cherry vinaigrette

When it comes to recipes, I am something of a tinkerer. I find something I like and then wonder to myself whether there was something I might have missed. Could the recipe be improved?

In itself, this is not a problem. Unless you are like me; you write a food blog and have set yourself the challenge of getting out of a culinary rut (number one in my culinary New Year's resolutions). I had assumed that no-one would want to read the same old, same old, with my minor tweaks and fol-de-rols.There are also times when frankly I had tinkered too far and the food was only fit for the compost heap. (But let that be our little secret.)

thai-style noodle salad with crispy garlic pork

thai-style noodle salad with crispy garlic pork

Another lucky dip day, when I turn spring cleaning the freezer into a food adventure. What do we have today? Er . . . well . . . um . . . it looks like meat. I'm not sure what it is. All my well intentioned plans and new year's resolutions to start labelling what I put in the freezer have gone awry again - clearly the freezer-proof pen that I had used to label the container wasn't actually proof against my hot sticky fingers. The neatly printed label is now merely a smear of black ink. Perhaps I could market it as art - take a photograph and suddenly it's all a bit William Eggleston. Or not!