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Aaaand we’re back in the room! Happy new year, all – 2012 has arrived with a bang and I’ve found myself thrown back into life with barely a moment to breathe since Christmas. From a fabulous New Year’s Eve spent with good friends eating at Otto Pizza, followed by fireworks on the Thames and dancing in the streets of London with the London Eye behind us, to making new friends and getting to meet fellow blogger and Twitter friend Dan of Dan’s Good Side in London (an evening of not-so-good eating was followed by an awesome night of dancing through the small hours of the morning in one of London’s premier gay clubs with Dan & friends – ironically I still managed to get hit on by the only straight man in the entire club), I’ve been a busy girl and it doesn’t seem to want to slow down.

Want to know what else has been going on? Read on and find out how you can be involved in my project and this cookbook review! (It’s a doozy, I promise…)

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Way back at the beginning of the Summer, I received a vaguely ominous email from a company I didn’t know asking me for my address so that they could send me a sample of their brand new drink. Normally this kind of communication would go straight into the bin but I’m a) far too trusting a person and b) they promised me that the drink would taste like pear drops.

Any of you who have grown up in the UK will know that pear drops are those beautiful little pink and yellow tear-drop shaped hard boiled candies (they’re supposed to look like pears but I’ve always thought they were more like tears… of joy), found in sweet shops all over the country (and M&S for those of you who were born in the 90s and beyond). They scream nostalgia, they break and rot your teeth, give you tongue ulcers and they’re simply the best sweets ever.

So I tentatively sent an email back to Drop Drinks and agreed to meet for a sample of their soda – one day my trusting nature is going to be the death of me.

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One of my food goals for 2011 was to bake more bread, so you can imagine how thrilled I was when Zoë François and Ebury Publishing asked me if I’d like to review a copy of her US best-selling book Five Minute Bread (in the US known as Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day), co-written with Jeff Hertzberg. Newly released in January of this year, the book claims to contain a “revolutionary new baking method: no bread machine, no kneading!” – well, for it to be the no. 1 baking book in the US it certainly seems to have caught onto something good here!

When the book arrived I eagerly tore open the packaging, read it from cover-to-cover, and then decided that there was nothing left for me to do but to pull out the flour and yeast and get baking! But why just read what I have to say about the book? Why don’t you decide for yourself? Ebury have very kindly offered to send a copy of the book to one of you guys so that you can have a go at baking from it – how generous is that? For the book review and details of the give-away read on…

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Photo courtesy of Digital Tribe.

When I was a kid I hated dim sum. My parents used to force us to go every Sunday to a Chinese restaurant that was on the top floor of the Whiteley’s shopping centre in Bayswater and the dim sum was always terrible. We would order the same things – char siu bao (steamed buns filled with roast pork), har gow (prawn dumplings), cheung fun (a rice noodle roll, usually filled with different meats), pai gwat fan (spareribs rice; we called this ‘pee goo fan’ which means ‘asshole rice’ – I know, we’re a terrible witty family) – and we’d be horrendously disappointed by them but for some reason every Sunday, without fail, we were back again. I loathed Sundays, hated having to trudge all the way out to Bayswater just to eat sub-par food (usually wearing my Sunday best) and dim sum became like a swear word in my vocabulary.

That is until I was a little older and in Hong Kong with Momma Lee. For some reason we’d travelled out there by ourselves and spent our first few days wandering around her old haunts, eating Shanghainese food and dim sum. It was like I’d never eaten food before: I simply couldn’t get enough of it. I was hungry for Shaghainese xiao long bao (soup-filled dumplings), drank gallons of guk fa cha (Chrysanthemum tea) and ate blocks and blocks of lo bak go (fried turnip cake). When I returned to London all I wanted was dim sum, and though our usual haunt had long since been closed down (thank goodness) just up the road was a fantastic restaurant whose dim sum was authentic and delicious. This was several years ago and I still rarely go anywhere else for dim sum.

So when Ping Pong invited me to a blogger dinner at their Appold Street venue I was, understandably, a little dubious. I have grown up with dim sum, have had bad dim sum and excellent dim sum, have been to Hong Kong almost every year since I was born; this is not new to me, and the idea of modern dim sum, as Ping Pong claims to be, is one I find very hard to get behind. But I’m always open to having my mind changed and I had heard about Ping Pong for a long while, so off I trotted for dinner.

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It’s January which means that summer is still a good five months away. Boo for the old tan and venturing out in t-shirts and shorts, but hurrah for continuing with comfort foods and warming meals! Not that it makes much of a difference anyway, as I’d happily nom them all down, regardless of the weather.

Yoshi Sushi has long been a favoured haunt of mine for sushi and Japanese food, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that Momma Lee & I actually tried some of their other fare. Y’see, they also do some Korean food, and, more importantly, they do an awesome Shabu-Shabu.

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Course #1: signature soup with minced pork.

I know it’s ironic, but for one of my first posts of the new year I’m looking back on a meal from the year just gone. When we herald in the new year there’s always an influx of over-ambitious new year’s resolutions, a flurry of excitement about things we wish we could do better, stop doing, do more, etc. This year I haven’t made any resolutions because I don’t need to pin my hopes on the romantic adventure of a lifetime; I do need to exercise more, but saying ‘I will go to the gym/Bikram yoga more’ is one that’s going to get broken – it’s inevitable; and all other material things are just resolutions that I figured would fall by the wayside within hours. Instead I have only this: I will take all experiences, good or bad, and I will grow from them, because that’s something I can definitely stick with.

Food-wise, I only hope that I can continue to eat the best food I can get my hands on, and if that’s one of your “resolutions” too then you need to make a trip to visit Hunan which was one of the best, and definitely the most interesting, meals I had during 2010.

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Hello all and a big ol’ happy Christmas to each and every one of you! Nom Man & I hope you’re all having a very lovely day, filled with plenty of fun, family, pressies & tasty, tasty nom. My gift to you is that my give-away, courtesy of Tortilla and myself is still running, and you have until midnight GMT (4pm PST) on the 31st December to get your entries in! The winner will be announced on New Year’s Day, to kick start 2011! Go, go, go!

It’s been a good year with plenty going down in the Feeder Lady household. I turned 23, a very nothing age, but eh, it’s another year in the life of Feeder Lady; graduated and am now a proud holder of a degree in American & English Studies from a top UK university; started this food blog back in April & not only increased my readership from me + Momma Lee, to me + Momma Lee + a lot of lovely people all over the world, but also made some wonderful like-minded friends; Nom Man came into creation (he’ll be back soon, promise!); I got to round 8/10 for Project Food Blog; I planned my foodie trip of a lifetime (leaving in two weeks!); and more recently, finished my job and am now officially a freelance food writer. I think that means it’s been one heck of a year. In the spirit of that, then, here is the rest of what didn’t make it onto the blog. All photos can be found in a larger format on my Flickr.

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Every so often in life two great pairings come along, ones that blow your mind and change the course of life as you know it. Romeo and Juliet. Fred and Ginger. Sonny and Cher. Cheech and Chong. Starsky and Hutch. Turner and Hooch. Christmas and pizza.

Wait, what? That’s right, Christmas and pizza. When I heard that Fire & Stone had a special Christmas pizza on offer that boasted a gravy base with turkey, roast potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing and brie on it, I called up the Young & Poor team and demanded that we have our Christmas party there. Christmas pizza?! How could you not be intrigued.

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Spend ten minutes with my friends and I and you’ll fast learn that there are two things we like to do: make fun of each other and eat… usually at the same time. Sometimes we even making fun of the way we eat. And when we’re together we just can’t seem to stop laughing, drawing attention to ourselves, or saying the most inappropriate things in public (the last time we ate out together I somehow managed to blurt out the sentence, “next time I text you it’ll have something really exciting in it! Like willies! And knitting!”), and we all love to eat. It goes without saying then that we always have a fantastic time.

For a while now Sam had been saying that she’d heard about this awesome Vietnamese place in Shoreditch that she really wanted to try out, but for whatever reason we’d been putting it off. I was busy, she was busy, everybody else was busy; until finally Sam put her foot down, we were going and she was going to book it, full stop, no excuses. I’m not really sure why we’d put it off that long – I love Vietnamese food, specifically I love pho. I’ve waxed lyrical about the joyous wonders of pho before, but y’know something? It’s really hard to find good pho in London… and I know my pho: when I lived in Malaysia I had amazing pho. So I think the main reason why we kept delaying it is because Shoreditch is, as Brother put it earlier, the “arse-end of East London”. It’s just so damn far away from everything. Or at least far away from me, who lives and works in the arse-end of West London.

But Sam finally booked it, and so on a cold, snowy, blustery day in London I trekked across the city… to the best damn bowl of pho I’ve ever had in London. It was like coming home.

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The plight of the food blogger as restaurant critic is a strange one. I very rarely confess to the venue I’m reviewing that I am a food blogger (although, at times, the picture-taking does somewhat give it away), and it’s because reviews should be authentic; you should receive no more special treatment, should not put any more pressure on the staff than is already on them. That’s how I like to operate, how most critics do, I imagine, and I will never expect anything more, because I am nobody, really. Just another food blogger eating my way around town.

At the end of the road where my day job is situated there had been some buzz over the past few weeks about a new restaurant opening. The word was that it was French/Italian, they had a really good chef in, there were some problems which had delayed the opening, but it was finally going to open its doors on Tuesday night. Great, I thought, I’ll pop along after work and try it out. Opening night, even better, and then I called Momma Lee & Brother to join me.

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