meemalee

Seared Pork Patties on a Bed of Noodles, Herbs and Salad with Pickled Vegetables I've made another cookery video with the folks from VoucherCodes  (the first one was for ohn no khao swe - Burmese Coconut Chicken Noodles). This time around, the theme is Affordable Alfresco - perfect for the lovely summer we're having right now, so I decided to adapt one of the salad dishes from my book Noodle!. This dish originates from Hanoi - its full name is Bun Cha Ha Noi. Bun refers to the noodles* and Cha refers to the meat patties. Apparently Bun Cha is the second most popular dish in Vietnam after their national dish of pho. You can see why this might be the case as it delivers a lot of punch - sweet and smoky meat over piquant herbs and salad wrapped up with soft, cooling noodles. You'll also be interested to know that it's super-quick to make and the ingredients are all easy to find - you can use entirely British produce. What's more, out of all th...

Tiny thief The first time I tried haggis was 15 years ago when one of my brothers married a Scottish lass up in Edinburgh. If I recall correctly, it was used to stuff a chicken galantine, and I was hugely relieved that it wasn't as offensive as I'd been led to believe. Several years later, I found myself at their house for a Burns Night supper where my sister-in-law began proceedings by reciting a Robert Burns poem, which to this day, my husband refers to as " when Gayle sang to a haggis ". Great Chieftain of the Pudding Race Haggis was relatively difficult to come by down South however - at least, you wouldn't see it in your local butchers or supermarket. I remember when I first saw a MacSween's a few years ago and was delighted that the "real deal" had made it to England. Now of course, you can get a whole selection - I picked up this lot from my Morrisons, including a vegetarian haggis for my mother-in-law which is presumably m...

I've just been in Japan for a fortnight and I really didn't want to leave. But when I was on the plane back to Blighty, I decided to count my blessings, one of which is a little Vietnamese cafe near my office called City Caphe . Open only at lunchtimes, I've got through many a long morning at my desk by day-dreaming about City Caphe's food. The day-dreaming continues as I wait in their queue which stretches out the door - it's a dratted constant, but it's worth standing there, even in the rain. Sometimes I press my nose against the window, Charlie Bucket-like, to stare at the gorgeous steaming dishes that others are already enjoying. The queue continues to wind inside, but rather charmingly, they have a selection of books for the hungry punters to pass the time. I'm not a bread person, but even I adore City Caphe's banh mi, and their summer rolls are the best I've had ( apart from my own ) - packed with prawns and herbs, though there's a tofu ve...

I've never been a fan of spring rolls. I'm fairly sure this is as a result of early exposure at school dinners to a comestible dubbed a pancake roll - a huge, solid, brown rectangle dripping with grease and flabby beansprouts. But summer rolls are an entirely different matter. Fresh, light, stuffed with herbs and lettuce and other stuff so deliciously good for you that it's practically a salad, without the hair-shirt. A traditional Vietnamese snack, summer rolls aka gỏi cuốn need at least one specialist ingredient (the rice paper wrappers), but it's worth schlepping out and stocking up. Classic fillings are thin rice noodles, lettuce, pork and prawns. You can leave out the pork to make it meat-free or substitute fried tofu. I like to use diced roast pork belly (ok, so the claim to health food becomes wobbly here) or sometimes chunks of roast duck. You could use leftovers from a roast. Lettuce-wise, you want to use butter, Boston or Bibb - the round, velvety type - as...

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...

I have been desperate for a Vietnamese place to pop up near me for aeons. I work in Holborn and there are more Japanese joints than you could shake a stick at, but no sign of Vinafood save Pho on St John Street, which is just that little bit too far for me to make a lunch hour trip. So when the Grubworm informed me that Potemkin at the end of Leather Lane had turned into Cafe VN , I was almost shaking with excitement (yes, I'm a food nerd). I don't know how I'd missed this, as he himself calls me Foodie Central and I traipse down Leather Lane at least twice a week. We organised a meet-up with several others for that Friday and I waited. And then on Thursday, overwhelmed with pho cravings, I stopped waiting and ran down to Cafe VN by myself. Actually ran, and I never run. First impression was that I'd wandered into a trendy staff canteen. Everything was bright, shiny, plasticky white and green, and faintly painful-looking as if to encourage you not to linger. And to...

The other day, my husband and I went to a preview screening of my new film All Tomorrow's Parties . I say "my film", of course what I actually mean is a film to which I've been lucky enough to contribute. This is how it describes itself: "ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES - THE FILM FEATURING: Belle And Sebastian / Sonic Youth / Battles / Portishead / Daniel Johnston / David Cross / Animal Collective / The Boredoms / Mogwai / Slint / The Dirty Three / The Gossip / GZA / Iggy Pop / A Hawk And A Hacksaw / Saul Williams / Shellac / Patti Smith / John Cooper Clark / The Mars Volta ... Coming November 2009 from Warp Films [who made This is England ], produced by Luke Morris / Warp X In an out-of-season holiday camp on the coast of England, alternative music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties serves up a heady combination of alternative music, crazy golf and chalet-living; all curated by a single band or artist. This post-punk DIY bricolage uses material generated by the...