Getting Out of the Bubble

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...

Put down the fortune cookies, throw out the beef in black bean sauce - this is the real food of China as I know it. One of the things I loved the most about China was the food. The first words I learnt to say revolved around ordering my dinner in little restaurants, and travelling in China was always accompanied by new dishes and enticing smells. Of everything I learnt about China as a country, one of the things I learnt the best was how it has such a huge mix of different cuisines and how it's really impossible to define Chinese food by one dish or one style, but what shocked me the most about the food in China was how little it resembled any of the Chinese food I had eaten in the UK. There weren't any prawn crackers, the food wasn't covered in sticky sauces, and even the food that had the names of foods I recognised didn't taste anything like what I'd eaten and enjoyed at home. It was nothing like the local Chinese takeaway, no, it was a million times better. Si...

Whenever I travel anywhere the main focus of the trip is pretty much always food. I think that you can tell so much about a place and it’s culture by it’s food, and it doesn’t hurt that I’m a bit of a glutton at heart!  So, what did New York’s food tell me about the city? New York’s food is incredibly diverse, and for the historic gateway to the United States this shouldn’t be a surprise. One of the incredible things about the influx of immigrants that the US has historically seen is that their food is able to absorb all the different cultures that hit American soil.  At a time where immigration is a bit of a hot topic, and not always viewed in the best light, New York’s food shows how the city really is a melting pot and how this can produce something amazing for everyone to enjoy.  Going to New York I didn’t go with a list of tourist spots I wanted to hit, I went with a list of food I wanted to eat – and this wasn’t a short list! I was a woman with a mis...

One of the many perks of working in the travel industry is having access to industry rates on flights, hotels, tours, and pretty much everything you would ever want or need for travel. Since starting at Flight Centre I have made the most of every opportunity for cut-price travel, but so far the most money saving trip was our team trip to Paris where transport expenses were absolutely free - all the joys of a weekend trip to one of the most iconic cities in the world without the cost of getting there and back! A pretty good deal by anyone's standards! The free part of our trip was a return ticket on the Eurostar, originally it was intended as a day trip but a colleague and I decided to go all out and do the full weekend, and when hotels are as cheap as they are with agent rates why would you?! It was definitely a whiz-stop tour of Paris but I'd never been before and, for me, it was the perfect introduction to the city. Would I recommend this is how everyone does 48 hours i...

I think it has now been universally accepted that 2016 was a bit of a rubbish year; we lost many much loved celebrities, politics around the world has gone a bit mental and there seem to have been more terrorist attacks in 2016 than in any other year I can remember; but while the wider world may have been having a bit of a tough time, I feel like I had a pretty good year overall. A good year, represented by a cow selfie When we're in the middle of a less than ideal time it can be easy to look back and wallow on all those things that may not have gone exactly to plan, but look a little deeper and I'm sure that for most of us there was much more good in this year than there was bad. For me, 2016 has yet again been a year of change, which can be stressful and uncertain but in the end when I look back at my year I can't think of anything that I regret or wish that I had done differently. I started 2016 with the decision to come back to the UK after two years of ...