meemalee

Saturday evening, I'm at a family wedding, full of cake and gazing happily at the flickering tealights dotted around on my table. My 10 year old niece comes up to me and opens her hand and says, "What are these, Daw Daw ?" Her palm is full of star anise taken from the table centrepieces. I say to her, "Smell one" and she does, and she says it smells spicy and faintly sweet. I then take one pod and wave it through a flame and say, "Smell it again", and her eyes light up and she says it smells wonderful. I tell her that it's a spice used in Asian cookery and she runs off to gather more, and then insists I give them all the same treatment. As I singe the anise pods one by one, she gets one of the wedding favours, a gauzy reticule full of sugared almonds, up-ends the sweets inside, and replaces them with the charred anise. She then reties the satin ribbon carefully and sniffs the newly-stuffed little pouch appreciatively. That scent of charred star ani...

A new series of Gordon's Great Escapes hosted by Gordon Ramsay starts tonight (Monday 9 May) on Channel 4. In the last series, Ramsay explored India, but this time round he's taking on four countries. The focus is South East Asia, and so he's travelling to Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand to taste and to have a go at cooking the local cuisines. I'm delighted to say that some of my own recipes are being featured on the Channel 4 website which accompanies Ramsay's new series. Gordon's first stop is Cambodia, so here's my recipe for Amok Trei or Fish Amok - a Cambodian aka Khmer fish curry. Amok is a coconut curry steamed gently in banana leaves (the Thais call their version "haw mok") and is considered by many to be the national dish of Cambodia. It's usually made with fish, but chicken, tofu and even snails are also used as the main protein. The curry base of amok is a deeply fragrant paste known as kroeung , and it comprises a mix of...