Main Meals

Crispy on the outside, steamy, fragrant and light – if a plate full of Nem Ran or Vietnamese deep fried spring rolls aren’t enough to get you salivating, then I don’t know what is.  On my first trip to Vietnam, I was lucky enough to spend a day on a private food discovery with one …

Baked feta is the pimped up, flavour-bomb, OMG can I have some more dish that you didn’t know you needed in your life.  Look, I’m a huge fan of feta, crumbled onto a salad, tucked into a veggie burger – it’s an oft under-championed workhorse of the cheese world, steadily jazzing up our mealtimes like …

You know you’ve joined the big boys when you start knocking up your own ravioli.  Any person with a kitchen and some motor function can fry an egg, but not nearly as many will even try to make their own ravioli at home. Don’t be afraid – making ravioli isn’t actually that difficult. With a …

Nasty women have been doing great things since time began.  Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Emmeline Pankhurst, Rosa Parks – history is filled with problematic women who left great legacies behind.  Now I don’t want to be too tongue in cheek, but the same could be said of the prostitutes who blessed us with …

How do you make pasta? It’s such a common question, particularly now when it’s becoming increasingly difficult (read: pretty much impossible) to find pasta on the shelves.  I’m going to start by saying one thing.  Making pasta is bafflingly easy.  Before I started making my own pasta, I thought that it was something of a …

A good beef ragu is a beautiful thing – the meeting point of tender, melt in your mouth beef and a rich sauce that is so much more than the sum of its parts.  Layers and layers of flavour built through careful preparation of the ingredients and the most important ingredient of all… time.  Beef …

Ahhhhh pho. That moment when you hold a bowl of just-made pho in your hands, the scent of the garnishes you’ve just put into the beefy broth coming together to exude a steam laden with fragrant aroma – you take a deep breath, ready to plunge in and start eating.  Eating Vietnamese beef pho could …

Do you ever have a dish that instantly transports you back to a certain place and time? Hippy Essaouira was one of my favourite places in Morocco – we ate sun-drenched meals of freshly-caught fish right next to the harbour, gulls flapping as lazily as the course of our days. My love affair with fish …

There are countries that just know how to do salad right.  Prime example? Way back, when our sorry asses in the UK we were still thinking that iceberg lettuce and a slice of unripe tomato constituted a salad, other, more palate-aware countries like Indonesia were dishing up tasty salads like gado gado.  Which would you …

It’s not often that I make bold and sweeping statements in life but I know that these tacos will bring you joy.  How could you resist a little sigh of pleasure as you bite into a warm, pillowy taco filled with spicy sausage offset by slices of creamy, cooling avocado and crisp and fresh radish? …