The Food Stories

A few years back I moved to Leeds, West Yorkshire, and was in search for people to live with. I posted an advert on gumtree and received a heartfelt response from Fern, from Thailand, expressing her love for food and desire to experiment in the kitchen together. So that’s what we did. We found a house, along with a girl from Iran, and we spent long periods of time procrastinating in the warmth of our kitchen where we’d put all our creativity into making bizarre dishes and sharing stories about the food that we ate growing up. It was timeless. I knew nothing about Thai food at this point, so Fern would often go to the Thai supermarket where she’d attempt to explain what everything was. I like to call this our visit to the food museum. We galavanted around the city with the hope of finding a decent Thai restaurant and a particular Thai desert which Fern insisted I should try. Mango sticky rice, made with sticky rice, mango and coconut milk, sometimes topped with crispy y...

Congee, the mother of breakfasts  It amazes me how a dish from a completely different part of the world can bring back memories of a specific dish from your own childhood. Food is interconnected. It is not just taste and pleasure. It is emotion. Is is memory. It is the one thing that we can all in some way connect on. Unless you hate food... I was visiting my friend Fern in Chang Mai, Thailand.  It was 4.30am and Fern's dad decided that this was the best time for us to wake up and catch the sunrise at a buddhist temple on top of a mountain called  Doi Suthep . He drove us up the scribbly roads like a maniac, just in time for the sunrise. I could have vomited everywhere but I was distracted by the most vivid of sunsets. As the sun slowly came up, we spent some time in quiet reflection wondering around the monastery. We were disturbed by the sound of our tummies rumbling, plus, Fern's mum was “secretly” eating pulled pork round the side of the temple. W...