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Really? I don’t think I could even list 65 individual spices off the top of my head. There are all sorts of theories about these ‘65’ dishes - that they were invented in 1965; marinated for 65 days etc, but a menu boasting about using 65 different spices is a new one on me.

Somehow reminiscing about legendary London restaurants that have now closed. Does anyone remember Mandeer, Indian vegetarian off Tottenham Ct Rd? It served brown rice and vegan options, slightly ahead of its time, was mentioned in a Neil Gaiman book and frequented by the Beatles.

Whenever I research many of London's earliest vegetarian restaurants, I invariably come across the sentence: 'Mahatma Gandhi regularly ate here.' So I'm trying to reconcile image of a man in loincloth with one who went gallivanting around town eating in all these amazing places.

I think today is a good day to share this video we were all talking about back in 2019 - Mamdani with Madhur Jaffrey. Remember Mr Cardamom's 'Nani'? youtube.com/watch?v=iQVsVN…

I discovered there's such a thing as rice curry, ie curry actually made from rice (rice grains cooked in spiced gravy). Now there are all sorts of unlikely curries like papad ('poppadom') curry and pasta curry and reasons why they exist, but this one I can't get my head around.

Eating ice cubes

What's the name of the East European cheese or dairy product that's made from milk that has gone off or has naturally soured? (As opposed to, say, paneer which is deliberately soured with lemon or vinegar). Someone posted about it once but I can't find the post.

I'm SO enjoying Vanilla Black's Substack - a story told in instalments of how London's most brilliant & innovative vegetarian restaurant came about, back in 2004 when the food scene was very different. You have to read it from the beginning, it's a hoot. vanillablack.substack.com

Can gooseberries sold as ‘dessert gooseberries’ be eaten raw, or should they also be cooked? I’m assuming they’re less tart…

I’d like to see less ultra-processed ice cream more widely available. Even some ice creams misleadingly marked as ‘100% natural’ have too many additives.

This is an excellent new cookbook of Palestinian vegetarian recipes by Sami Tamimi: sami-tamimi.com/cookbooks/bous…

Why has no-one opened a traditional Indian bakery in London? From nankhatai to mawa cake, Portuguese-influenced pav to (Indian take on) Shrewsbury biscuits, we need something a bit different here, other than French- and Japanese-influenced baked goods (delicious though they are).

This entertaining piece in The Fence Magazine reminds me of the time I was invited by a book club to discuss my own book; only 2 people turned up ("loads more" had RSVP'd apparently) and neither had read the book. the-fence.com/turn-up-for-th…

I was only vaguely aware that there was a book called The Salt Path - I thought maybe it was something to do with Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March.

I don’t (yet) have a Substack, but somehow I appear there as a food writer, and people are starting to follow me and subscribe to me? Not sure how. I haven’t posted anything… But thank you! :)

I'm late to the Nextdoor app... but now I'm hooked on the daily soap opera of missing cats, road closures, unscrupulous builders, local salsa classes and people stealing flowers from other people's gardens. It could easily be turned into a Netflix series.

While researching something else entirely, I came across this old British Library blog post on the first published recipe for Japanese curry: blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-afri…

I came across ingredients called 'tyre' and 'hard tyre' in an 1852 Anglo-Indian cookbook. I googled it, only to be told that tyres are not edible, they must not be eaten, traces of tyres may be found in fruit and veg and, of course, there's someone asking if tyres are vegan.😂