Anissa's Blog

It’s time for me to start travelling again. I have much more fun on my travels than when I am holed up in my loft, however gorgeous it is. And it is not in Shoreditch that I am going to push the door of a normal looking building to find rather good looking young men…

Today is Human Rights Day but there are many countries where such a notion does not exist including Syria where I used to spend my summers as a child; and where I ran culinary tours until the revolution started. So many children like these two beautiful ones have been killed by a monstrous regime that has no…

With official results of the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections showing Islamist parties with 65% of votes, it is unlikely that Egyptian society will ever go back to its pre Gamal Abdel Nasser glamour as depicted in Egyptian black & white films where you inevitably have at least one belly dance scene in each. My belly dancer…

It is not the first time that I team up with the lovely Fuchsia Dunlop for an exotic multi-cultural feast. Last time we had combined Chinese, Gujarati and Lebanese while today it was mainly Chinese and Moroccan. Fuchsia prepared the starters, a magnificent selection of Spicy Sichuanese chicken (here’s her recipe for it), green soybeans with ‘snow vegetable’ (a Shanghainese pickle),…

Last Saturday was my final day as a chef in a museum. My residency consisted of four days working in the museum proper and one day at home when we arranged to have a group of twenty, including my great friend Arabella Boxer, visit my kitchen the way they would an artist’s studio for them to see where I…