Podcast review of ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’
There was a lovely review of my latest book last week, as part of a podcast from Ithaca, New York. The review comes some way into…
Tea in bed
I’m ill in bed today with the rotten cold that seems to be sweeping through London. And it’s at times like these that I can’t live…
Stinky to sublime
Ask any Chinese chef in England what they think of British pork, and they will almost invariably reply that it has a xing wei (è…¥ 味…
More Beijing duck please
It’s rare to find real Peking duck in London. This is not surprising, partly because the London Chinese restaurant business has traditionally been in the hands…
Chicken with chillies – or chillies with chicken?
I promise I’ll blog about something other than chillies one of these days, but in the meantime… One of the most popular dishes on the menu…
Red hot peppers
Chillies again! At the Abergavenny Food Festival a couple of weeks ago I bought some of the hottest chillies known to man – Dorset Nagas, the…
Not what it seems
Last night, I finally made it to Gourmet San (or ‘The Old Place’ as it’s known in Chinese) on the Bethnal Green Road in East London,…
50 Best Cookbooks
Nice to see that the Independent newspaper in Britain has included Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as ‘Land of Plenty’) in its list of the…
Arcimboldo revisited
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…
Last of the line
The other day I went out fishing in a lake in Zhejiang. At the edge of the lake I met an old man and his wife…