Anissa's Blog

It has been an exceptionally busy month: my residency at Leighton House, the offal and baby goat dinner, a huge dinner for thirty Italian art collectors and cookery demonstrations at the Sharjah International Book Fair. Busy but fun, especially my spectacular breakfast with the lovely ladies at the craft centre in Sharjah. A lavish spread made up of…

Well, I am nearly at the end of my residency in Leighton House. There is still one more visit to my kitchen for people to see where and how I work. It has been a great adventure and I loved being a chef in a museum. Fortunately, it wasn’t only me who did, but also…

Well, the baby lamb and stuffed tripe of a few weeks back were a trial run for last night’s dinner which I cooked for four chefs, an eminent food writer and a restaurant owner. Except that this time, the beautiful baby was a goat, all tender and pink like a baby should be with the sweetest and teeniest testicles…

I don’t know if I am the first ever chef-in-residence in a museum but I sure am glad I proposed to do it and was accepted as I am loving my time at Leighton House. There is something wonderful about feeling at home in a museum, and talking about or preparing food in such a beautiful…

Tomorrow is my second chef-in-residence session at Leighton House and it is all about spice mixtures including as ras el-hanout, a mixture of nearly 30 different spices including various chillies, dried roses, the aphrodisiac Spanish fly (for which use the marquis de Sade ended up in prison; the sad thing is I did have some given to me…