How to: Homemade Soy Milk

Ok I'm going to tell you straight out that it's too much effort.

This involves soaking the soy beans overnight, removing the skins, blitzing them, boiling them for thirty minutes and then straining them.  In China we have these soy milk makers where all you have to do is put the soaked soy beans in and then it does all of that otherwise superfluous manual labor and in half an hour you've got your soy milk.

Rendang Chicken

This is my first proper curry from scratch.  I spent my Saturday evening making the curry paste, frying it in the pan, watching it reduce with the coconut milk and then leaving it to stew for two hours, stirring every now and then. And that was one of the best Saturday evenings I've had in a while.

Panettone French Toast with Bitter Marmalade Sauce

Now, a panettone should last for over a week - maybe weeks, so you should be fine with your current panettones leftover from Christmas just as they are.  However, if you were given a very mediocre Chinese-made panettone like us, don't throw it away but make something beautiful out of it instead.

This illustrates simplicity.  Except for the plate.  I should've looked through my mother's kitchen cabinets a bit more for something a bit more monotonous. But the recipe is delightfully simple as this luxurious breakfast will altogether take you about ten minutes to make.

BA's Best Banana Bread

This is a banana bread I made awhile back.  We have a fruit bowl and work and at the end of the week there are always a couple of sad brown bananas, abandoned and left for the bin.  One Friday I had decided to rescue them and bring them back to life in the form of a delicious banana bread.

Mien Tay (Battersea, London)

There seems to have been a surge of Vietnamese restaurants in London,  and as with most Ethnic establishments in this city, they seem to fall into two categories: you've got the trendy restaurants with chic logos graphically designed with modern fonts and a menu that's been heavily smacked with Western flavors, and you've got the Asian take-away-esque ones.  Places like Mien Tay, where it's bare and charmingly tacky, where it's just this down to earth Vietnamese family-run restaurant.

I went to their Battersea branch.  And as with all of their restaurants in London, there's something very authentic and endearing about its shabby interior.  Densely-packed incongruous furniture dotted with pots of plastic plants.  A theme of white and jade-green and... all a bit alarm-bell-ringing until you sit down and eat.

Late Autumn this year, they celebrated their 6th anniversary with 6 new dishes.  Yes, 6 years is quite some time especially as they've in this time managed to open up 3 or 4 branches not just in London.  The focus is on Southern Vietnamese cuisine made with authenticity and they've had rave reviews.

So of the new dishes there is a deep-fried monkfish which is pleasant.  The batter crisp, the flesh not overcooked.  There is a whole grilled squid that was on the bland and (extremely) chewy side, which, however, was the only disappointing part of the evening, as then there are some bright cheerful salads.  There is a fabulous pomelo salad with chicken and prawns that's got those lovely bitter and sharp citrus notes flowing through; and a kohlrabi salad with squid, where fortunately the squid is tender, the kohrabi crunchy and it's altogether coated with a fresh and zingy dressing.