Udaipur

We reluctantly dragged ourselves away from The Lake Palace in Udaipur this morning, it's an enchanting hotel set in the centre of Lake Pichola. Little flat-bottomed boats with scalloped Mogul canopies ferry guests backwards and forwards to the town. We got a wonderfully warm welcome back and they upgraded us from a standard room to a fabulous suite with a perfect view of the Royal Palace.

We had a lovely few days and I visited the school in Varvalia that the Ballymaloe Cookery School supports and the Seva Mandir Learning Camp where they teach children who have not had the opportunity to go to school before, reading, writing and basic math.

More kids than ever want to come, 200 is the max they can take at the moment but they are really struggling to cope because donations have been down for the past couple of years for a variety of reasons not least the recession in the US and Europe.

There's also a perception now that India is becoming more prosperous that the need is less but as ever a percentage of the population is certainly prospering but billions of others particularly the tribals are still living a medieval subsistence existence.

You can't imagine how thrilled the kids are to be in school, they can hardly bear to waste a second if some one visits. Pryanka Singh the lovely young Director may pop over to see us when she comes as far as London later in the year, if she does well try to do an event to raise funds.

We drove for eight hours from Udaipur to Maheshwar through fascinating changes in landscape. From our tourist jeep we saw everything from rice and barley to opium and chillies growing in the fields, lots of handmade bricks and smoking kilns, marble works, potteries making beautiful functional water pots. Sometimes the road was a state of the art new motorway and then suddenly it runs out and we were onto an indescribable dirt track with higgedledly piggedly road works everywhere. There were goats and cattle and sheep and camels and buffalo carts piled high with fodder or firewood.

Eventually we arrived in Maheshwar, to find that millions of people had descended on the town to visit the Temple to celebrate the Festival of Lord Vishnu and Pravadi so we couldn't get to Ayhila Fort which is just beside the temple. Eventually we were rescued and arrived back to this beautiful heritage hotel which we discovered last year thanks to some friends.

We are staying in the equivalent of the Ballymaloe Gate House, a little room over the Elephant gates very basic and a complete contrast to the luxurious Lake Palace but still lovely, we move into the house tomorrow.

Now I'm sitting on the upper terrace overlooking the ghats at the edge of the Narmada river, the second most sacred river in India, underneath hundreds of people are doing puja and bathing in the river to wash their sins away. Others are floating little candles in leaf baskets to bring blessings to their friends. In the distance the monks are chanting and in the distance some chap is belting out Bollywood hits to entertain guests at one of the myriad of weddings that take place in February which apparently is an auspicious month for weddings, it's really magical.

The sky is full of stars and I'm desperately trying to work out which is which with my new app.

Time to go to dinner.....

Watching the Sunset in Punta Zicatela

A second installment from my trip to Mexico...

How can I possibly find the vocabulary to describe where I am, sitting on the terrace of a thatched palapa overlooking the Pacific ocean just north of Puerto Escondido in Mexico? There are huge craggy rocks and several types of cactus growing out of  them, and the sort of evergreen undergrowth indigenous to this coast.

It’s maybe five or six minutes from sunset, the sky has taken on a rosy glow, the sea is crashing underneath, the waves rolling onto the white sand underneath. It’s a blissfully peaceful moment, almost spiritual – the house goes quite, no one wants to speak for fear of breaking the spell.

Tim is swaying quietly in the hammock, I’m on one of the low wooden chairs, barefoot, just watching mesmerized as the golden ball of sun sinks slowly over the sea and disappears below the horizon like a giant free-range egg yolk. The little fishing boats are speeding towards the harbour. The pelicans are flying slowly home to roost by the lagoon. The colours of the sky and the clouds are changing from burnished orange to dusky pink, gold, to bluey greys and eventually almost charcoal. Suddenly, bats fly out from under the eves in their hundreds, like tiny little birds. When the glow of light leaves the sky the cicadas start to sing in the undergrowth and a little gecko (tiny lizard) clucks as it races up the wall. How can such a tiny lizard make so much noise? I don’t feel like moving.

In a natural landscape like this one can understand how ancient Mayans worshipped the sun. 

Winter Sun in Puerto Escondido, Mexico

We've had a wonderfully relaxing week here at Punta Zicatela doing virtually nothing except reading , swimming and chilling out, I've had several delicious massages and one long walk. Mind you that was a complete endurance test, I'd forgotten that Rodolfo's idea of a short walk is a 6 hour and a half hour tramp over the mountains! The scenery was of course spectacular, mango , papaya, bananas, and lots of coffee bushes, huge tree ponseittia, tall whispering bamboos and a million vanilla vines romping up any available tree.

We saw women with their children around them picking coffee into baskets and the men processing and raking it out in the sun to dry, you can't imagine how much work goes into our cup of coffee and how little money they get paid for it.

The walk ended in a village called Santa Maria Tiltepec, We, at least I, tottered to the one and only pub, cum village shop cum radio station where as we arrived the man was announcing that a donkey had just been found and could be claimed at the back of the pub, The cold can of beer he handed me was one of the best things I've ever tasted !

We were quite a curiosity in the village and a girl got her pet parrot to walk up my arm and perch on my head. Afterwards we went along to a local potters house where Rodolfo collected two huge preordered terracotta comales and braziers.

They insisted on feeding all 10 of us in the courtyard of their family home,they cooked hand made tortillas which they had ground from their own corn, We ate them with beans, again home grown and a volcanic salsa made from tomatoes roasted on the comal with tiny rare chillies called tuzta. There were chickens running around so they broke a few eggs into a polystyrene tray,whisked them with a spoon and then cooked it like a flat omelette on the hot comale over a timber fire.

We ate it greedily with the tortillas and beans, simple , delicious and all from that place shared with such generosity of spirit.

The town of Puerto Escondido is crawling with tourists and surfers so we don't go down very much , I'm made a few forays to the Mercado, once with Rodolfo and once with Ana's husband Hugo, it was brilliant to have an interpreter, I'm normally at a huge disadvantage not being able to identify lots of strange ingredients or to ask what to do with them. With Hugo, I picked up courage to buy some of the scary dried fish being sold by several stalls and the indigenous woman I bought it from, explained how to eat it flaked on tostadas with tomato, coriander, lime and lots of finely chopped harbenero. We slathered guacamole on the tostadas and piled this mixture on top and it was a great hit.

On another trip I bought a molinillo for frothing hot chocolate, some tiny dried camerones, dried hibiscus flowers to make the Hamica drink and a clay comal to cook tortillas on.

Today is our last full day here so we packed a lot in, To start the day Rodolfo had arranged for us to leave before dawn to drive in convoy to see tiny turtles being released into the sea in a turtle preserve in Chila.
It was an extraordinary thing to experience, turtles come back to the place they were born to lay their eggs, each turtle lays between 80 and 150 eggs in a nest in the sand, then they cover them up and go back to the sea never to return. There is a long tradition of eating turtle eggs in the state of Oaxaca. Many species of turtles are now seriously endangered so the practice is banned to try to build up the numbers once again however there's a lucrative black market in the soft shelled turtle eggs and many people are very poor so it's a battle of wits between the poachers and the rangers.

In about 30 days the little turtles start to hatch out in the warm sand and in nature start to scuttle towards the sea. Apparently only about one in 100 survive because they are gobbled up by the sea gulls and other predators.

When we arrived at the Turtle Santuary they got us to line up about 10 ft from the waters edge, they placed a little turtle gently into each of our palms. On the count of three, we were allowed to put them down onto the sand. They instinctively started to scurry towards the sea with their tiny flapping flippers. It was so funny like a little Turtle Derby but I felt sooo privileged to witness it.

Just after we had released them a flock of pelicans hovered overhead, we were all traumatised but apparently the pelicans don't fancy them so there was a sigh of relief all round.

Keep wondering how my little fella is doing, he was quite a lively little chap !

It was bright by then so we raced off to Las Negras to join an early morning bird-watching trip in a flat bottomed boat the Manialtepec Lagoon. It was absolutely fantastic, we saw over 100 different species of birds, Michael Malone who has been running these trips for over 32 years had a set of brilliant binoculars for everyone so we had terrific sightings.

By about 10 o'clock we had reached the barrier where the lagoon meets the sea. A local family had set up a little cafe in a palapa on the sand.

They served the fresh fish and shrimps from the lagoon all absolutely freshly cooked on a huge comal over a wood fire. Closeby, a chap was chopping the top off green coconuts and serving them with a straw, delicious refreshing juice which apparently helps to wash the parasites out of your system !

After our little feast we raced back through the lagoon and back to la Punta for a swim and to watch the sunset. We managed to get some lobster so I cooked dinner, they all loved it particularly the potato salad.
Rodolfo arranged for their cook Angelina to show us how to make a special type of Tamales Amarillo de Pollo wrapped in banana leaves for our last breakfast, she used 32 guachillo and 7 coseteno chillies in the salsa, it was fantastically delicious and surprisingly not too hot.

We had a last swim, packed up and are now on our way to Mexico City where we will spend a night before coming home.

It's hot in Siem Riep!

It's hot. 34 degrees today. Were staying in a lovely timber clad hotel overlooking the river in the centre of Siem Reap, the main reason why tourists come here in their thousands is the UNESCO heritage site of Angkor Wat closeby.

Cambodia had 2.1 million visitors last year and over half came here! Eleven years ago there were neither traffic lights or Tarmac roads in the area, now there are a whole bunch of fancy hotels, two golf courses and lots of foreign investment. There's also an emphasis on green tourism all be it in it's infancy but the intention is there.

On Wednesday morning we started off in one of the bustling local markets, beautiful fresh produce, lots of unrecognisable greens, fish and shellfish in every shape and form, salted, dried, smoked, pickled... Women butchers perched cross-legged on raised benches chopping all sorts of unmentionable bits of freshly slaughtered meat.

The traditional clay and tin cooking utensils are quickly giving way to brightly coloured plastic from China. Thousands of people work in the market and they are all busy, busy, busy, selling, delivering, chopping, wrapping, grating coconut, juicing fruit, grinding spices... Later we drove out into the countryside to see one of the floating villages. Fascinating as ever driving through the rural areas and little villages.We stopped to buy bamboo rice from a little stall on the roadside, the rice is literally cooked with a few black beans in a piece of hollow bamboo and cooked slowly over a little fire, moist, sticky and delicious.

We took a boat right out into the lake to see the houses floating on rafts, again thousands of people live from fishing and all the associated activities, salting, drying, selling.....

Everyone was super friendly and good humoured even when our boat broke down and we had to hitch a lift back on another boat.

In the evening we had delicious Cambodian food at a restaurant called Sugar Palm.

We've an early start this morning, 5.30 am to get to Angkor Wat for Sunrise. Haven't been able to sleep, too hot, so I've been practicing my typing instead!

A letter from Luang Prabang

The airport in Luang Prabang is still tiny, although it seems not for long, they are frantically building a huge international airport closeby which will bring huge numbers of people to this enchanting little city, already over loaded with visitors. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

We were staying in a new hotel about 15 mins outside the town, it was lovely really except that it was like the Marie Celeste, not another guest in sight, everyone seemed to vanish into town and not return until late at night.

The service was like Fawlty Towers with a long series of misunderstandings partly because virtually none of the staff spoke or even understood English. They had no map of the town ,no newspapers, they didn't seem to know where things were or what tour options there were available . On the way to the airport today ,we discovered from the handling company that the hotel is in fact owned by a Thai businessman and virtually all the staff are Thai, so it wasn't our imagination, they didn't actually know anything about Luang Prabang!

On the first evening,we got a tuc tuc (our favourite mode of transport) into town. A brand new one with brightly coloured stripes arrived driven by a super cool young guy with spiky hair and sneakers with bright red laces to match the tuc tuc. He took us to the night Market, this is a collection of close to a hundred stalls that set up along the main street at night by local tribal people selling all kinds of textiles, souvenirs, and handcrafts supposedly from Laos but much of it seems to be coming in from China now. Here and there are some lovely things so Tim whisked me out of there pretty smartly with lots of muttering about enough clutter!

We had a very good dinner on the veranda of a little restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet called Tamarind, lots of Lao dishes including crisps made from river weed which we saw being harvested next morning when we took a day trip in a covered flat bottomed boat along the Mekong.

There are lots of tiny vegetable gardens on the rich alluvial soil all along the river banks, higher up above the flood mark (between 20 and 30ft) there are little thatched bamboo and timber houses on stilts with verandas over looking the river.

The local river people fish and collect river weed off the stones along the rivers edge, it is washed and sundried and then made into a kind of crisp sprinkled with sesame seeds which they use to scoop up a variety of dips one of which includes buffalo skin, they seem frightfully keen on that, I saw lots for sale in the market.

There's a backdrop of hills and mountainous forest, here and there are temples half hidden by the trees and glimpses of the Buddhist monks in their saffron robes. Some of the temples are super ornate, beautifully gilded and decorative, others are very simple, accessed only by rickety bamboo bridges.

Our boat had really comfy seats with lots of distressed cushions unlike some of the boats that have recycled car seats and we've just passed a petrol station on a large barge. Around noon there were lots of children down by the rivers edge washing their buffalo and splashing in the rock pools. Later there are young Buddhist monks climbing trees and bathing in their robes, giggling and having fun like any young lads of their age... there are great photo ops everywhere!

On Thursday I decided to take a cooking class in a little school called Tamnak Lao that Rory recommended from his trip a couple of years ago. It started at 10 am with a Market tour, we arrived back to the school after 11 am with the ingredients.There were just four of us in the class, Tim had opted out so he could really chill if such a thing is possible in 30+ degrees!

Then the two teachers demonstrated a couple of dishes which we then cooked for lunch ,one was a Lao version of our Traditional salad with roasted peanuts and minced pork, the other a sticky rice noodles with vegetables and chicken called Feu Khua.

After a leisurely lunch we had another short demo, this time five dishes from which we could choose three each to cook, I totally loved a sticky aubergine dish with pork, Khua Maak Kheua Gap Moo and a banana flower salad. We cooked in pairs, I was paired up with a very nice German chap from Munich called Gunter. Overall it was a very worthwhile day, and I should be able to reproduce several of the recipes easily.

Afterwards, I went back to the Marie Celeste for a swim , then back into town for dinner, we had a terrifically good meal at a restaurant away from the madding crowds in a hotel called Aspara overlooking the Khan-Luang Prabang river, a tributary of the Mekong. It was so good that we went back again today for lunch, last night we ate on the front porch but today we had a little table overlooking the river.

We had two absolutely delicious salads: prawn and green papaya salad with chilli and coconut dressing and dried beef salad with mint, coriander and lemongrass (I think it was buffalo). A third one with aubergine roasted cashew nuts, tomatoes, and tons of crispy garlic, was less successful.

We met the owner Ivan Scholtz from London and told him how much we loved his food and asked him for the recipe for the lentil soup... and the Massaman Curry from the night before! Guess what,  he gave them to me! It's always worth asking, the worse that can happen is they can say no! If I return to Luang I'll definitely stay there, it's a lovely chic hotel with staff who speak great English!

Noma Pops Up in Shanagarry

On Saturday night in the autumn, two young chefs, both of whom had worked at Noma for several years created a wonderful menu in the spirit of Rene Redzepi's inspirational restaurant in Copenhagen.

Yannik and Louise Bannon arrived several days early with a totally open mind on what they would cook. As soon as they arrived they donned their wellies and headed out to the farm and gardens and into the greenhouses to find what tempting produce was still about available.

Next it was over to Ballycotton to have a chat with a local fisherman to check out the likelihood of spanking fresh fish, then they were off over to Ballynamona and Shanagarry strand to forage for seashore plants and seaweeds at low tide.

When they had checked all that out they were off to forage in the woods like a pair of excited kids in Hamleys at Christmas. It's not a great year for wild mushrooms but they found a few yellow legs, lots of wood sorrel and some myrtle berries.

Here's the magic menu they created.....

Louise is the baker, she made all the sourdough breads for dinner, in little individual timber "bread tins". We served it with virgin butter freshly churned from the cream of our three Jersey cows.

Cured pollack with sea lettuce and sea oak pods.

Plating up...

Popping a fresh myrtle berry onto the top of each Malt Puff, before they were coated in chocolate.

Flinty Red in Bristol

Just had a really delicious lunch at a little neighbourhood restaurant in Bristol called Flinty Red. We'd been before earlier in the year and had not a mind-blowing lunch, a sort of ok one but I somehow felt we'd been unlucky and that it was essentially very good, so glad we gave it another go.

Today, we started with sugar cured trout with pickled lemon,a little plate of slivers of house cured organic fish and a dice of fresh tasting lemon preserve, delicious with the close textured dark sourdough bread and a tiny bowl of good extra virgin olive oil.

Next we shared another two small plates, I had a salad of buffalo mozzarella with rosemary farinata and black olives, I'm so into farinata (a sort of polenta pancake) since I discovered it at Terra Madre in Turin in October.

The torn mozzarella was tender and milky, a very delicious combination served in a non traditional way.

My friend had a perfect winter salad of Mimolette, chicory, pomegranate and coarsely chopped toasted almonds, sooo good, simple and fresh tasting.

Our middle course was a sharing plate of braised octopus with harissa, coriander and potato which I didn't love quite so much. If I'm not mistaken it was frozen and was mostly cuttlefish.

Our small main courses were also very good, I had a little roast quail, crispy skin but still deliciously pink and juicy inside on a base of chicory salad. Tim had slivers of seared onglet with mashed swede and black pepper, rare and gorgously beefy.

There is a huge revival of interest in this 'forgotten' cut of beef, it's cheap but I'm sure not for long now that so many chefs have rediscovered it.

Thank goodness the plates were small so I still room for pud, I can never resist affrogata (vanilla ice-cream with a shot of expresso) so I had to have that as well as a warm doughnut with maple syrup cream.

Flinty Reds cheeses come from La Fromagerie in London, so they are bound to be interesting and in top condition.

Today it was a mild pecorino Castagnolo and a Caprino di Riforano.

I had a glass of Manzanilla as aperitif

And a glass of a delicious bio-dynamic red wine from Haut Languedoc called Gravillas 2010.