I’ll be giving a lecture over a dinner inspired by my books at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, on Wednesday 25th March. It’s part of their China China China!!! season.
For details, click here.
Thanks to Andi Sapey for the photograph.
I’ll be speaking at various events in China next month as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. One of the highlights will be a lunch at one of my favourite Chengdu restaurants, Yu’s Family Kitchen (there is a chapter about Chef Yu Bo and his cooking in Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper). Click on the links for each city for more information.
These are my plans so far:
Friday 6th March 7:30pm Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, talk
Saturday 7th March 1pm Talk over a sumptuous lunch at my friend Yu Bo’s restaurant, yu jia chu fang
Sunday 9th March 7.30pm: Savoring Sichuan, talk
Tuesday 11th March 8pm: Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A discussion on memoir writing with Fuchsia Dunlop and MC Marika de Vienne
Friday 13th March 12.30pm: Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, talk
Saturday 14th March 2pm (at The Yin Yang Centre): Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, talk
Yu Bo's vegetarian appetisers, 2004
The sixteenth-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is best known for his striking paintings of human figures made up of fruits and vegetables. And as part of this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, (theme:vegetables), to my surprise I found myself trying to make similar pictures – but with real vegetables! This after-dinner experiment was the brilliant idea of the cultural historian Carolin Young and the artist Charles Foster-Hall, who had brought along basketsful of produce, wooden boards and frames, and hundreds of cocktail sticks for holding the fruits and vegetables in place.
Here is the result of a collective attempt by my Turkish friend Aylin, another emerging vegetable artist called Kathryn and me to make an edible portrait of the food historian Sami Zubaida (the photo was taken the following morning):
And below is a photo of the team of artists, with our model. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a striking likeness. One other symposiast said he thought it was ‘like a Lucian Freud in its merciless realism’.
I’ll talking at the Abergavenny Food Festival on 20th September. Tom Parker-Bowles will be interviewing me. I’m guessing this means that he has forgiven me for what I inflicted on him when we last met… He was interviewing me on the TV programme Market Kitchen, and I took along a jar of one of my favourite breakfast and midnight-feast staples, fermented beancurd. I forgot to warn Tom that fermented beancurd is best appreciated in very small quantities, so, while we were being filmed, he picked up a whole cube of the stuff in his chopsticks, put it into his mouth – and, horrified, immediately spat it out across the room! I was extremely apologetic afterwards, naturally. I just hope I didn’t put him off fermented beancurd for life.
