bottom drawer

We’ve been cooking more and more Chinese food over the last few years – partly because all members of the family love it, and partly because we have a growing number of great Asian shops in Colchester, due partly to the influx of far Eastern students to the University of Essex, as well as the growing ‘settled’ Asian community, so it’s easy to find ingredients and tempting to spend longer than intended browsing the shelves of unfamiliar packages, picking up odd things on spec. Some of these have been well-used and become store cupboard staples, while others have, admittedly, languished – if anyone has a good way to use dried lotus seeds, please let me know. Growing up I never ate any Chinese food – my background is half Japanese, and to my mother Chinese food was something like the enemy as a result, while my father’s famously omnivorous appetite gets as far east as India before, puzzlingly, running out of enthusiasm. I can’t help thinking that the lack of good Chin...

One of the most important festivals for the Indian subcontinent took place over the last four days. Makar Sakranti comes in a whole variety of regional names and variants, known as Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Uttarayan in Gujarat, and many variants besides. The importance of the day is that the sun moves into Capricorn, and starts to move northwards in the sky, so while Hindus have mapped their system of deities onto the date, making it a time to honour Surya, the sun god, I can't help thinking it must be a far more ancient moment marked in the calendar - the turn of the year. One of the most curious things about the tropical solar calendar - how the sun moves relative to the earth, measured from equinox to equinox - is that it gradually shifts out of sync with the (also solar) sidereal calendar  measured by how the sun moves relative to the stars. So once upon a time, the turn of the year at the solstice and the turn of the sun northwards into Capricorn, coincided - in 272...

Last week started with Bodhi Day on Monday - the day when Buddha ( Gautama Siddhartha ) reached enlightenment after meditating under the bodhi tree  for 49 days. This came after many years of asceticism, including severely limiting how much he ate, so much that he was emaciated, and when he decided that the 'Middle Way' between extreme self-indulgence and self-mortification was the path to enlightenment. It is said that he ended his se⁹ven years of asceticism by accepting  milk-rice from a farmer's wife, Sujarta , when he started meditating under the Bodhi tree, and in some versions that this gave him the strength to achieve enlightenment. So it seemed clear we should be breaking our fast with milk-rice too. But what was, or is, milk-rice, and what is the history of this food? This took a bunch of reading up on, and as always I'd be glad to be put right. With a wide range of subcontinental variants on cooking rice in milk, broadly speaking it seemed that most interpret ...

My friends and family know that what I really love more than anything is food and cooking. The holiday period was a time to cook away at all sorts of meals for different occasions, plus I was given three cookbooks for Christmas. Two of these were Claudia Roden's classics - her Book of Middle Eastern Food and the Book of Jewish Food - which, as well as being full of wonderful recipes to try - are also cultural histories of those food traditions, interpreting centuries of change, trade, repression, poverty and wealth through spices, techniques, food combinations and food stories. I read these books a long time ago, when my parents got them, and I was so glad to have my own copies and to immerse myself again in Roden's wonderful scholarship, and her love for how food reflects and shapes culture. Reading about the foods associated with important moments in the year - festivals, anniversaries, seasons - I made mental notes to try out some of these recipes at the appropriate moments....

Its quite surreal to leave a job over Teams. After 3.5 years, I left the Greater Cambridge Planning Service at Christmas, which was quite a wrench as well as the right thing to do. When I joined the service as part of the inaugural cohort of the brilliant Public Practice initiative I had no idea where that journey would take me, how long I'd feel driven to stay in the team, and the opportunities it would give me to contribute to the public good. What have I learnt from this stint in the public sector? A few moments stand out to me. Passing through a new neighbourhood, which the developers call Great Kneighton but which everyone else calls Trumpington, at school-leaving time and finding the streets filled with kids of all ages freewheeling around on their bikes, not a moving car to be seen. This shouldn't feel unusual but, for a new-build district in this country, is unheard of. And later, at the Clay Farm Community Centre at the centre of the district, speaking to a number of p...