Getting Out of the Bubble

I am the bad cook in my family. When I was younger jokes were always made about the time that I confused teaspoon and tablespoons when putting baking powder in the pancake mix (I was 8!!) and it kind of stuck. It might be partially because my family has so many good cooks in it. My mum is the queen of making the most simple dishes taste incredible and inventive cooking. She's the mum who cooked soufflés for us as babies and always made killer school lunches and weeknight dinners, despite working full time. She's also the kind of person who hates eating at restaurants very often because she thinks that her food is better (and a lot of the time it is). My dad is fantastic at the gluttons food, he makes all those comforting meals that are firm favourites and make me drool; roasts, casseroles, curries, decadent desserts...the list goes on. He grows his own chillis and "gigantoes" (giant tomatoes) and bakes bread a couple times a week. My sister was always the s

Have I told you about the time...I learnt martial arts? If I said that I did martial arts in China I don't think people would be that surprised. After all, who doesn't think of Kung Fu or Chinese martial arts when they think of China?! But my anomaly was that, of all the highly trained kung fu masters in China, I learnt from a white guy. Jake is one of the most interesting people I met in China. He and his lovely wife, Becky, were some of our colleagues at Aston in Yinchuan and had come over from the US for a bit of adventure. Jake had a fascination with Asian culture and threw himself into the cultural experience. I really respect the way that he would practice his Mandarin with everyone and anyone while I stammered and hid behind my Chinese boyfriend. Jake also was really passionate about martial arts and was even developing his own style which I believe was a mix between MMA and wing chun (correct me if I'm wrong Jake!). Jake kindly offered anyone who wanted to l

I love the ritual of Chinese New Year. I love how it is a time for reflection and cleansing (both physically and metaphorically) for the year ahead. I love how families get together over vast meals steeped in tradition. And yet, in China, I never actually celebrated Chinese New Year. I can now look back and say that when I spent my two years in China I was young and naïve about all the amazing things I could have experienced and enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy and experience a lot. A hell of a lot. But there were still so many things that I now look back on a wish that I had made the most of. I wish that I had taken up my ex’s mum when she offered to show me around the Chinese kitchen and show me how to cook (this will always go down as one of my biggest regrets, I would now kill for a few days in the kitchen in China with someone who could teach me to do all those things that you can’t really learn over the internet. But I also wish that I’d experienced Chinese New

You may have seen over the last year or so that my life has become a minor infatuation with Chinese cooking. I'd always loved Chinese food but, except for a short cooking class in Chengdu, I'd never really dabbled in making Chinese food. All of that changed this year when I decided to do a dinner party of 10 of my nearest friends. After that evening I was overwhelmed at what a big job cooking a Chinese feast really is, but also realised that I had found something that I genuinely loved to do. For a few months I kept cooking at home and working my way through Fuchsia Dunlop's amazing cook book " Every Grain of Rice ", but I still couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that I wanted to do something with all this cooking I was experimenting with. I liked cooking it for myself but that was nothing compared to cooking for other people. The idea of starting a supper club kept popping into my head, but it all seemed a bit self-indulgent and ridiculous. Friends

If there is one Chinese dish that sends me into tailspin of nostalgia for my time in China then it is niúròu miàn (牛肉面), or beef noodles. I have so many memories attached to this one simple dish, and it seems to be something that I have eaten all over China. Niúròu miàn was one of the first dishes that I could spot on a menu, and it very quickly became my fail-safe option when eating out. Even when I came back to the UK, my first mission for finding the real Chinese food was hunting down an authentic bowl of niúròu miàn, which I did find! Even if the prices made me want to cry - on New Years Eve I paid £7 for a bowl of niúròu miàn, compare that to the 70p bowls in China and you'll see why I was horrified. But you'll also notice that I did pay my £7, however grudgingly, because niúròu miàn is really that good! I hope that in this love letter to a bowl of noodles I can show you why. Read to the end for my favourite niúròu miàn restaurant in London. When you order niúròu

Everyone knows that I love eating Chinese food, but recently it has become a bit of an infatuation to master cooking Chinese food. So I decided that I would host a Chinese feast with some of my favourite dishes for a group of my closest friends. One might think it would be a good idea to learn how to cook various dishes and then host a dinner party, but that’s just not how I roll. I made up my mind to jump in at the deep end and just figure it all out as I went along. Very quickly I realised that cooking for so many people wasn’t going to be easy, especially when the basic concept of a Chinese meal is many small dishes for everyone to pick over. To be honest, I hadn’t expected that everyone I invited would be free, but it just so happened that almost everyone was free so I was faced with cooking a full on Chinese meal for 10 people. Now, you may say that I could have just scaled everything back and not done a full Chinese feast, but where’s the fun in that? Never one to s