Month: February 2021

Saturday 6 February: Japan 🇯🇵 : Miso Soup and Chicken Katsu Don

Japan… The first time that I went there was on a business trip for my organisation’s annual conference. On my first evening, sluggish with jetlag, a Japanese colleague took me from the hotel to the central train station in Tokyo for a light supper in a small restaurant: two simple bowls of food, fish and chicken, both beamingly fresh, especially the fish.  I was transported… That first visit to Tokyo was a wonder of fresh fish in all kinds of ways, but also walking along streets with garish plastic food in plastic bowls.

Years later, in early September 2018, I spent two weeks on a J Pass, travelling around southern Japan by train. The food was always memorable even if it involved dealing with a few not so discreet racist comments or attitudes along the way. Chicken, fish of all kinds, and lotus root and other unusual vegetables.

A quiet delight was staying on the coast not far out of Tokyo and finding a Japanese bakery that did takeaway coffee and pastries filled with sweet red beans in one and sweetly salty seaweed in another. I had breakfast on a bench looking over the sea full of surfers in wet suits.

So for a first course, I opt for that most basic starter, a miso soup with tofu and seaweed.  For seconds, a chicken katsudon: chicken in a soy sauce and breadcrumbs mix on top of a bed of rice. My Googled recipes get the thumbs up from my friend E’s Japanese wife, though they also involve a few queries at my local Japanese / Korean supermarket. I walk out not entirely convinced that I have got the right type of dashi stock…

The miso involves vegetable broth in which I cook some sliced chard, and spring onion with some yellow miso paste, dried seaweed and silken tofu worked in.

The chicken comes from Just One Cookbook. I take some thinly sliced chicken breast, season them with salt and pepper, coat them with flour, beaten egg and some ready-made panko breadcrumbs that I should have scrunched up beforehand.  I then fry until golden brown and remove.  I then take some red onion and a marvellously gooey sauce made of the sludgy dashi, sake, mirin, Japanese soy and sugar, cooking until the onions are soft.  Finally, I add the chicken back in and then beaten egg, whisking vigorously before laying the whole thing on top of a bed of rice and adding some curly parsley (in the absence of mitsuba).

I serve the whole lot with some chilled sake. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  The soup should be soft but turns out rather salty, probably because I used the wrong type of stock, indeed too salty to be pleasant.  It is better the next day when I add much more water.  The seaweed is lovely though and the other ingredients rather lost.

The chicken looks like a mess and I see that I had added too little beaten egg at the end, but tastes delicious: crunchy and chewy.  What little there is of the egg is lovely and helps bind the rice. The sauce might be rich but is delightful and sweet. The addition of parsley really cranks it up as does the subtle kick provided by Japanese ichuban pepper. The rice completes the lot, gently absorbing the rich sauce and holding it all together.

And the sake is terrific.

All in all, not worthy of a Japanese chef, but a mighty delicious meal. 

After my travels in the East, I feel sad to be retreating to more Western forms of cooking and am not greatly looking forward to a Russian meal.

Sunday 7 February: Russia 🇷🇺 : борщ/ borscht

Again I Google the options and it comes down to a solid choice between kotlety: meat patties, and borscht: beetroot soup. I opt for the latter and find a recipe again by the great Felicity Cloake in The Guardian. It is true that the recipe is not 100% Russian and probably closer to Polish barszcz, but who cares?

Despite being nervous about the stains from peeling and using raw beetroot, I go ahead, wearing a pair of latex gloves.  I start by frying onion in some melted butter, add diced beetroot, carrot and celery, and sliced leek all with some allspice berries and bay leaves until soft before adding chopped potato and a whopping 1.5 litres of beef stock, simmering for 15 minutes and then adding chopped cabbage, crushed garlic and more diced beetroot. Finally I add some cider vinegar, sugar, pepper and a good pinch of salt.

In these latter stages, I depart from the recipe because the green cabbage looks too much for my deep red soup and the cooked soup is too lumpy.  So I gently plunge in a blender and give the whole lot a bit of pureeing, until I have a mixture that is half smooth, half chunky bits of beetroot, carrot and celery. 

I serve the whole lot with some sour cream and chopped dill. And some chilled vodka. For purely medicinal purposes.

The effect?  Even before plunging my spoon in, I marvel at the wonderful colour: not just the beautiful redness of the soup but the white cream and the green dill.

And when I do taste?  Oh man, that is one lovely soup… The beetroot is magnificent, so wonderfully fresh yet warming. The lovely mix of the pureed soup and the chunks of beetroot. The dill works fabulously as a counterpoint, with the sour cream adding depth. And the carrot, celery and potato are all there in the background, adding a bit of heft.

It is stupendous. It is healthy. It is delicate. It is perfect for a snowy winter evening. It makes me yearn to go to Russia. 

And it is even better for lunch and dinner during the rest of the week.

Monday 8 February: United States 🇺🇸 : Burger and fries

The first time that I lived in Washington, DC, it was as an EU diplomat. I remember another diplomat saying to me “The problem with DC is that it has no middle”. He meant that it was extremes of poverty – in the Southeast quadrant – and wealth – in the Northwest.

To my mind, he was more accurate about the food than the people.  And not just in DC.  In my first stint in the US, I managed to visit all 50 states. I discovered the amazing beauty of the country and – despite all the prejudices that people might have from recent events – the kindness of the people.

But it has to be said that the food was rarely average.  I had some fantastic meals – often, it must be confessed paid for by others on expense accounts – oysters, steaks, seared tuna, grilled fish and the like. I have a great fondness for Low Country/ Louisianan cooking: shrimp n’ grits, jumbo, creole sausage and the like. Then there were the ethnic foods: Mexican, Salvadoreno, and the like.  I used to live ten minutes from a Salvadorian restaurant that served lomo saltado: steak, peppers and chips in gravy.  Bliss.  I enjoyed Jewish and Yiddish cooking: whitefish sandwiches wrapped with gherkins and crisps in a local deli.

But I also had some really dire food: meat cooked so hard it was dry, overboiled vegetables, a Philly steak that nearly gave me a heart attack, and worst of all the chefs mostly in ski resorts or upmarket destinations who got it into their heads to do fusion cooking: ahi tuna in a ginger-agave glaze and the like. The worst meal I remember eating was in a hotel restaurant in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania – it was either that or a takeaway from KFC – a lunk of watery ham in a sickly raisin sauce.

But obviously it is the burger and fries that mostly captures American cooking, usually served with coleslaw. On the one hand, it is incredibly basic and simple. On the other, try to make it in isolation and you risk a chaotic mess as happened to me the first few times I tried last summer, frustrated at having to wait an hour for one from my local bistro.  Why? Because like Chinese cooking, so many ingredients have to come together at once and the cooking has to be pretty much to-the-second on both the burger and the fries.

The burger bun needs to be just toasted and quickly spread with the relish: so simple on the surface yet so difficult to get right.  Tomato sauce on its own will not do: too bland to hold it all together.  Other concoctions that I tried similarly came out wrong, though a mix of one part ketchup, one part American mustard and two parts mayo will do as a quick fix. I end up with a recipe from Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking by Lidia Bastianich which I cook over Christmas and reheat in the microwave.

The lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese and gherkin need to be cut and lined up. Any coleslaw or salad lined up.

The chips should be peeled, thinly sliced, and double cooked and served at exactly the same time as burger, which itself is right to the second. It can only be cooked when the pan is steamingly hot, instantly searing its base, cooking for two to three minutes, flipping and cooking for two or so more. Here, the timing is tricky as it is difficult to see exactly what is going on without disturbing the burger.  I have been told that for a medium-rare burger, you should watch the red line in the middle of the burger and cook until very thin. In practice, I cook about 20 seconds more and find it to be just right. In theory, you should put the cheese slice on top for the last minute to melt it, but I opt for a quick softening in the microwave.

And then all assembled on the plate as quick as you can. An exercise in the virtues of mass production and spatial layout that would make Henry Ford beam.

And eaten. 

Without shame. With aplomb. With your fingers.

Washed down with a cold and iced Coke or watery Budweiser.

The effect?

It is a symphony of nothing. It is perfect.

It is nothing to linger over. It sits with you.

It is sinful. It is indulgent. It is… gone.  Already.

A small perfect moment of burger juices, bun, cheese, relish, gherkin and frankly who cares about the lettuce, tomato and onion?  They are there somewhere. Slightly removing the total guilt trip.

The fries are overdone and yet also perfect, dipped in a good dollop of ketchup.

It is a dish that you want to make sit on the naughty chair in the naughty corner, while quietly winking at it to keep doing the same thing.

It takes me back to good times in the US: to smashing crabs on the Eastern Shore, to eating massive steaks in Iowa, to a lunchtime visit to Chez Panisse in Berkley, California, to a Manhattan steak joint dressed like a bordello where I was already done with the steak and fries before a cheesecake arrived that was so big that I had to concede defeat after a few mouthfuls. It takes me back to long lost friends and long done road trips, to the majesty of the red rocks of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, to driving through the Californian sequoia in the thick of night with two friends, to arriving in Anchorage, Alaska, just before midnight and driving for four hours through empty roads, pine trees all round, my friend asleep in the passenger seat, to driving round Georgia and the Carolinas in a blue convertible with my parents, my mother gamely sitting in the back as the wind rushed through her hair.

Wednesday 10 February: Canada 🇨🇦 : Poutine

Canada… I’ve travelled around quite a bit of it – or at least the Eastern part – including one absurd episode where I had to exit the US by car to renew my American work visa at the American Embassy in Ottawa, reassuring a resolutely unconvinced Canadian border guard that I had every intention and likelihood of exiting his country as quickly as possible.

And yet, ask me to describe the food and it largely defeats me, beyond maple syrup and… poutine… It is the only Canadian dish that I can at all remember eating and even there, I might have had it in New Hampshire or Vermont…

But poutine it has to be, and the sheer simplicity also commends it: fat fries, gravy, cheese curds. The only problem being that cheddar cheese curds are kind of hard to come by… so my recipe – taken from www.seasonsandsuppers.ca – recommends substituting a ball of mozzarella.

The recipe calls for a gravy made from a mix of beef and chicken stocks, 2 parts beef to one part chicken, thickened with some flour and cornflour and then seasoned with fresh pepper to taste. Once the chips are ready, you ladle over the gravy, mixing it with the chips, and then toss in some strips of the curds/ mozzarella.

I add some parsley at the end and give the gravy quite a bit of pepper to the point where it is closer to a sauce au poivre.

The effect?  Without the authentic cheddar cheese curds, it is not as I remember it: a thick cheesy crust melting over the chips and gravy and imparting a smart tang. And it is utterly wrong: the parsley the only remotely healthy thing in it.

So why do I find myself scooping it all up?  Why do I want more?  The stringiness of the cheese, the peppery and sinful thick gravy, the soggy chips. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but please a second serving just to check on how wrong it is… Just to be sure.

I have sinned. Spank me. It was worth it.

Saturday 30 January: Vietnam 🇻🇳 : Cha Gio and Phó – Fried Spring Rolls and Soup

My 1996 trip to South East Asia ended by crossing into Vietnam, staying a day in the gorgeous city of Hue before ending in Hanoi. Time flies and it shames me that I have not been back since. The food was simple and wonderful.

Luckily, living in Belgium and due to the fact that Vietnam was part of French-colonised Indo-China, I am well-served with decent Vietnamese restaurants. An occasional indulgence is to have fried spring rolls served with lettuce to make me feel slightly more virtuous.

And of course, Vietnam is well known for its fabulous noodle soups: phó. 

So I decide to have a go at both, even though it quickly becomes clear that the soup will require a lot of preparation.  Not only that, the recipe that I follow – found at Recipe Tin Eats – calls for huge quantities of beef to make the base stock: over 3.5 kilos in all and a mixture of marrow, meaty bones and brisket.

Still, I am cooking on a Saturday so I have time, letting the beef stew in boiling water with star anise, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, onion and ginger for the best part of four hours – filling the house with the delicious smell of the star anise in particular – straining the whole lot (but reserving the brisket) then at the last minute throwing in some cooked noodles, slivers of brisket and some slices of beef tenderloin, letting it cook for a few minutes and then throwing in sliced red chillies, coriander, and beansprouts.

The spring roll – found at The Woks of Life – is time consuming in its own way, combining hydrated thin rice noodles, grated carrot, chopped wood ear mushroom, pork, shallots, ginger, garlic and a mix of egg white, vegetable oil, fish sauce, salt, white pepper and sugar. I arrange them all in small logs, ready for the tricky bit, wrapping them in rice paper wrappers dipped in warm water until ready to roll.

I am sure that there is a clever way to do this and that one learns the feel of when rice paper wrappers are just moist enough to roll, but I never quite got the hang of it in 20 attempts with my rice paper either too stiff or too soggy.  And my rushed technique would have left a true chef covering their eyes. I ended up with a bunch of misshapen stuffed condoms, desperately squeezing them as they dried.  After leaving in the fridge for an hour, which did little for their appearance, I then fry them three at a time until golden (and in my haste, forget that I should double fry). I watch them bubble into even more grotesque shapes. And then serve up with some – sorry! – commercial dipping sauce.

The effect? Let’s start with the soup. Honestly, a bit of a let down after all the effort and expense – easily the most expensive recipe I have cooked. The beef broth and beef slivers are dominated by the fresh ingredients, hardly noticeable underneath, especially the red chillies. It is beautifully fresh, but a bit underwhelming…

The fried stuffed condoms? Actually rather nice… Gloriously crunchy with a fabulously moist inside, the pork juices really coming out with the soft noodles and vegetables, though the mushroom does not really emerge.  Oily and indulgent… and appropriate for a mid-winter night in this horrible time.

Sunday 31^st January: China 🇨🇳 : Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-Fragrant Aubergines

After crazy experimentation, a return to some kind of familiarity, even though I have never been to China.

As with France, Italy and India, how do you represent a country with as wide and varied a culinary repertoire as China?  Impossible so I settle for two dishes from Sichuan: Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-fragrant Aubergines, which, while hardly representative of the whole country, are both delicious and give some sense of the ingredients and cooking approach.

I take them from two books from Fuchsia Dunlop: Every Grain of Rice, and The Food of Sichuan, wonderful explorations of cookery even if many of the recipes are off limits until I can find the relevant key ingredients. I have cooked them before and loved them. Both are relatively simple to cook once you have done the prep.

The aubergines are chopped into thin batons and left to salt before being deep fried until “slightly golden”. Then the wok is emptied of aubergines and oil and chilli bean sauce added, sizzled and then finely chopped ginger and garlic, chicken stock, sugar and then the fried aubergines, before thickening the sauce with some potato flour or cornflour, adding some Chinkiang vinegar and spring onion greens.

Bite-sized chunks of chicken breast are marinated in a sauce of light soy, Shaoxing wine and potato flour (or in my case, cornflour).  A chilli oil is made by frying dried chillies with Sichuan pepper. The recipe calls for 10 chillies but I have learnt to tone it down a bit. Then the chicken is stir-fried until just brown before adding ginger, garlic and spring onion slices, before adding a sauce of light and dark soy, Chinkiang vinegar, sesame oil and a potato flour-water paste and finally adding roasted peanuts.

An hour or so of prep followed by ten minutes of furious movement. Served up with rice.

The effect? The tender chicken pieces. The Sichuan pepper. The soft fruity aubergines. The ginger, the garlic, the spring onions all making their appearance on the palate. The crunchiness of the chopped peanuts. The luscious chilli bean sauce. And more and more, the lingering kick of the chillies and pepper, making my lips tingle and my brow sweat, especially after swallowing a chilli.

It is magnificent.

But it also makes me sad. Because Chinese food should not be eaten on your own, but shared with friends around a joyous table. It makes me pine for happy lunches with work colleagues at the Sichuan Pavilion in Washington, DC: the Asian aubergines bright purple and coming with Thai basil, the chilli fish, the mapo tofu, the pork belly, the tea-smoked duck… It makes me pine for sadly absent friends usually sat around my dinner table on several dishes but now outlawed until this bloody evil virus has been kicked senseless.

Monday 1^st February: Korea 🇰🇷 : Beef Bibimpap

Korea has been on my mind for a while. I was supposed to spend 48 hours in Seoul on an EU-Korea dialogue only for the trip to be cancelled less than an hour before I was due to leave for the airport. My naïve plans for 2020 involved a late summer fortnight on my bike in the South Korean countryside.

A rare joy in the good times was going out with friends to a Korean restaurant just off the Place St Boniface in Brussels and having a hot stone bowl of beef bibimpap, cooking and mixing as you eat, the rice burning to the bottom of the bowl like Swiss cheese fondue.

So I Google for an appropriate recipe and again find a feasible one at The Woks of Life. It involves blanching some fresh beansprouts and watercress separately and seasoning them with salt and sesame oil. Then stir frying some julienned carrots until tender but slightly crunchy. Then frying minced beef until brown and mixing in some soy sauce. Finally, frying an egg.

Then you arrange the whole lot on a bed of rice together with some kimchi, a “good dollop” of gochujang sauce and a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. And then you mix the whole lot with gay abandon. OK, I made the last bit up.

The effect? A confession: I did not fry the egg as I am not wild about fried or boiled eggs. Nevertheless: the whole thing is a gloriously mad mixture of flavours and textures: the beef mince, the crunch of the beansprouts and the carrot, the rather weak watercress, all jazzed up by the kimchi and gochujang sauce.

It is like nothing else and yet it is quite delicious. It even feels vaguely healthy. In truth, it is the gochujang sauce and kimchi that really make it work, binding it all together in a tingly spicy rice mix, but never mind: it is good food.

Friday 22 January: India 🇮🇳 : North Indian Lamb Curry with Basmati Pilaf with Dill and Cardamom

Two recipes from two great cookery writers: Anjum Anand and the legendary Madhur Jaffrey.  As ever on a Friday evening, I start rather late after my evening walk and pay the price.

Fry some cardamom and bay leaf before adding chopped onion and browning it (which always takes 2-3 times as long as the recipe says it will. Add chopped lamb, fry, followed by a ginger-garlic paste and mix of turmeric, coriander powder and garam masala. Then add chopped tomatoes, bring to a boil and simmer until the masala is cooked through and the harsh taste has gone (which again takes forever).  Add water, bring to a boil and cook for 35-45 minutes until the lamb is tender, before adding some fresh coriander.

For the rice, again fry some cardamom and bay leaf but this time with cinnamon. Again fry chopped onions until brown. Then add basmati rice and chopped dill, stir and then add chicken stock, bringing to a boil. Cover and cook on very low heat for 25 minutes.

By the time I serve up, it is well past 11 o’clock at night. 

The result? A gentle, soft lamb in a mild sauce, giving that delicious flavour that can only be cooked lamb.  The freshness of the coriander. Again, those joyous moments where you feel a moist cardamom pod in your mouth. The rice is great, but in truth the dill is a bit dominant.

Still, it is quietly fabulous and I want more, even if it did take an eternity.

Saturday 23 January: Bangladesh 🇧🇩 : Chingri Malai – Bengali Prawn Curry

For Bangladesh, again a bit of Googling and several recommendations that Chingri Malai is the most representative national dish, albeit one initially associated with Malay fishermen.  I find a number of recipes but settle for one from www.gastronomicbong.com

I marinate some unpeeled large prawns in salt and turmeric before frying very briefly until the shells change colour.  I remove and replace with bay leaves, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves, sauté very briefly in oil and then throw in some chopped garlic and chopped onions until translucent. I then add a little crushed ginger and garlic, chopped tomato and salt and cook until ‘soft and muchy’ (sic) before adding chilli, more turmeric and some water and cook the resulting masala.  So far, so very similar to the lamb curry.

Then the twist: coconut milk and sugar, briefly cooked before adding the prawns for about 5 minutes.  I am supposed to add a small bit of ghee, but overlook. I serve the whole lot with simple basmati rice.

The result?  Delicious… The juicy softness of the prawns. The lovely sweet coconut sauce. The masala is quiet but rich, with the odd delicious hint of the cardamom and the lingering kick of the chilli powder.

The whole thing is such a quiet and comforting symphony of flavours, each having their moment without overpowering the others.  Again, I want more. More! MORE!

With no one to tell me what a pig I am, I take the prawns, shell and all, crunching the body and legs as if I were eating soft shell crabs and sucking the heads with their taste of rock pools.

Utterly fabulous.

Sunday 24 January: Myanmar 🇲🇲 : See-Pyan – Burmese chicken curry

This is a beautifully simple Asian curry stew that I had already tried once before, taken from Madhur Jaffrey’s classic “Ultimate Curry Bible”.

Marinate a skinned and chopped whole chicken in curry powder, garam masala, and salt. Make a paste of garlic, ginger, onions, cayenne pepper and paprika. Fry the paste in oil until dark and reduced.  Add the chicken until lightly browned and then add chopped tomatoes, a stick of lemongrass, and some fish sauce. Then cover with water, cover and cook gently for 25 minutes before boiling off the sauce.

I serve this with another lovely and simple dish: Meera Sodha’s cinnamon and clove pilau from her book “Made in India”.

The result? Despite boiling off the sauce for considerably longer than in the book, the sauce is still rather watery, not so much a sauce as a stew. But it is marvellous nonetheless: wonderfully subtle and delicate, with that lovely salty kick from the fish sauce, and the freshness of the infused lemongrass. The chicken is beautifully soft and chewy and again, without anyone to reprove me, I can shamelessly lick and chew around the bones. 

It is a glorious Asian experience: chicken pieces in a subtle and slightly oily sauce and all coupled with the equally subtle pleasure of the clove and cinnamon-infused basmati rice. And the knowledge that it would be even better reheated over the next days – and was, the sauce firmer, the chicken softer and having absorbed more of the sauce, splendid with the rice.

It makes me dream of temples and hot Asian nights.

Monday 25 January: Thailand 🇹🇭 : Tord mun pla and paad thai: fish cakes and Pad Thai

As with France, Italy and India, this was a hard choice: how to represent a country that has added so much to the global cooking repertoire? The dish that made me fall in love with Thai cooking was a bowl of tom yam served on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chang Mai in Easter 1996: it was a revelation: the lemongrass, the prawns, the spices, all slurped out of a metal bowl on an old train.

I also think of smashing Thai green chicken and aubergine curries, of red peanut curries or yellow massaman.

But sometimes you just have to go for a cooking experience that makes you nervous.  I have often eaten Thai fish cakes as a starter and loved their strange spongy, spicy texture: the flecks of chilli. 

But to cook them? 

And to cook Pad Thai, that seemingly super-simple Thai concoction of noodles, peanuts, coriander and prawns?  Tempting fate.

So I have a go, Googling the fish cakes and taking a recipe for Pad Thai from Ken Hom’s “Ken Hom cooks Thai”.

And indeed the paste for the fish cakes is tricky: whirring together white fish fillets with red curry paste, coriander fish sauce, lime juice and egg until my food processor almost breaks, and then stiffening them up with some cornflour (in the absence of rice flour) before scooping them up and forming them into patties for frying.

The Pad Thai is simpler in theory but involves a lot of prep, shelling and deveining prawns, cooking thick noodles, chopping garlic and Thai chillies, slicing shallots, beating eggs and then preparing a mix of soy sauce, lime juice and fish sauce with sugar and freshly ground pepper. And then there is the garnish of lime, coriander, spring onions, chopped roast peanuts and chilli flakes.  All a lot of things to come together at once.

So with the cooking of noodles, the frying of prawns, followed by the garlic, chillies and shallots, and then the frying of the noodles with beansprouts, the egg and the mix of sauces, it is all a bit chaotic, and then I have to fry the splodges of fish cake mix.  

The effect?  The noodles a bit dry and garlicky from sitting too long after cooking. No sense of the fried shallots, chilli, and garlic, lost somewhere in the eggy noodles, the whole thing helped only by the prawn, peanuts, coriander and lime juice. But when I reheat for lunch the next day, the whole thing comes together: the noodles improve, the prawns perk up and the citrusy-peanuty-coriandery covering gives it that glorious Thai freshness.

And my ugly fish cakes? Quite delicious. Perhaps not as spongey as the professional version but still very nice, lingering on the mouth with a slight spiciness and working well with my dipping sauce.

Wednesday 27 January: Laos 🇱🇦 : Pork Larb

Larb is a dish cooked in a number of countries, but my research tells me that it holds a special place in the hearts of Laotians. I find an extremely simple recipe: toast then grind some rice grains. Stir fry some minced pork then add the rice powder, some lime juice, fish sauce and sugar. Fry for another minute before adding chopped shallots, spring onion, red chilli, mint and coriander. Then serve with – ideally sticky – rice and lettuce.

That’s it. Super easy to prepare and yet delicious.The smell of fried pork and the fresh veg with a kick of lime and chilli. Utterly simple. Utterly delicious. The salty pork in its juices. The fresh green vitality from the mint, coriander, lime and lettuce. The soft sliced shallots. The quiet balance of the rice. The delicate hints of the red chilli without being overpowering. My lips tingle delightfully without knowing quite why. Yum, yum, yum.

It is the delicate taste of Asia: fresh ingredients all well prepared and quickly heated. It takes me back to a wonderful trip through Laos in 1996 in the days when there were few tourists and we were exotic creatures enchanting the local children. It takes me back to a great stay in Luang Prabang, the former capital, and the wonderful smell of burning charcoal.

Oh to be travelling once again…